I've come to the following (admittedly opinionated and generalized) conclusion:

White Americans don't particularly like or understand rice.

It's taken me a long time to grasp this simple fact, because as far as I'm concerned, plain steamed rice is GREAT, especially if it's jasmine rice. Yes, all by itself. Cold, even. Cold steamed rice with _nothing_ on it for breakfast, mmmm! :-) Rice three times a day, fine. Give me rice like that every day of the week and I'll still be looking forward to it. The notion of getting tired of rice is incomprehensible to me. I'm thinking that this has soemthing to do with the fat that my Filipino grandma helped raise me. She made excellent rice, every time, and we frequently did eat it cold, (or hot), three times a day. Rice was a mainstay, or a side dish, or a snack to be nipped at with fingers in passing, or all three. Even when my appetite for all other food lags, rice is one of the foods that retains it's appeal. Chicken soup with ginger and garlic would be the other. In my mind, rice occupies a place of respect and could almost be a food group all by itself.

Most non-Asians in the U.S. don't seem to see it the same way. Rice? Starch!! Carbs! Cover it with sauces or meats or obliterate it with "chinese" stir fry or douse it with soy sauce or grease it up with butter or flavor it with something or use it to add bulk to a soup or smear a sauce of canned soup mix over it, or worse yet, gravy. (ew!!!) Cook it so that the grains are slippery and seperate (how can you pick it up with your fingers when it's cooked that way? It doesn't feel right!). Spice it up or drown it. They might consider eating bread all by itself, but are far more likely to eat plain boiled pasta without a sauce than a bowl of plain rice.

How can they taste it when they do that? It's not that I think eating it with soy sauce is bad (so long as it's not a brown lump of rice sitting in a darker brown puddle) or that eating it with stir fry or adobo is incorrect. It's just, well, what in the hell is the matter with people that they can't like it by itself and seem so desperate not to taste it?