Post by Zadkiel on Mar 14, 2016 15:10:30 GMT
A diehard myth (even repeated by a teacher during a discussion in a high school English class) is that you shouldn't throw rice at weddings, because after the party is over, birds will come and eat it. White rice, being as dehydrated as it is, will immediately begin absorbing water upon entering the moist environment of the bird's body. It will then swell up, and if there is enough of it in there, the bird's body (specifically the crop, where the food first goes to be stored) will burst, killing the poor little critter.
Don't worry, folks, there is no reason to not keep this nice tradition alive. Ornithologists say that rice is perfectly safe for birds to eat. Wild rice is a dietary staple for many birds, after all, as are other grains that expand when they absorb moisture (wheat and barley, for example).
One thing purveyors of this myth fail to take into account is that the rate at which dried grains absorb liquids is pretty slow except when it takes place at cooking temperatures. In addition, there's a biological process you may be familiar with called digestion. Long before any uncooked rice consumed by a bird could expand and cause harm, it would have already been ground up in the bird's crop and well into the process of being broken down into nutrients and waste by the acids and enzymes in its digestive tract.
It's unclear exactly how and when this misconception originated, though it was most famously promulgated by advice columnist Ann Landers in 1988.
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Don't worry, folks, there is no reason to not keep this nice tradition alive. Ornithologists say that rice is perfectly safe for birds to eat. Wild rice is a dietary staple for many birds, after all, as are other grains that expand when they absorb moisture (wheat and barley, for example).
One thing purveyors of this myth fail to take into account is that the rate at which dried grains absorb liquids is pretty slow except when it takes place at cooking temperatures. In addition, there's a biological process you may be familiar with called digestion. Long before any uncooked rice consumed by a bird could expand and cause harm, it would have already been ground up in the bird's crop and well into the process of being broken down into nutrients and waste by the acids and enzymes in its digestive tract.
It's unclear exactly how and when this misconception originated, though it was most famously promulgated by advice columnist Ann Landers in 1988.
