Jeffrey Alford, Naomi Duguid

Wild Rice

Appears in
top 1000Seductions of Rice
Seductions of Rice

By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid

Published 1998

  • About

wild rice In North America, wild rice is the name given to the rice-like seed of a wild grass (Zizania aquatica) that grows wild from northern Saskatchewan into Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ontario. The Anishnaabe (Ojibway) call it manohmin.

Recently, wild rice has been successfully cultivated in California and elsewhere. Consequently, though it has been traditionally harvested from lakes and marshes by people working in canoes, a great deal of the “wild rice” now available in stores is cultivated rather than wild, and harvested mechanically, not by hand. Wild rice grown and harvested in the traditional way is the most expensive and difficult to find.