Rice with Fish and Seafood

Where there is rice, there is usually plenty of water, and therefore fish. Rice and fish together provide a pretty well-balanced diet, and that is no doubt why they are so closely linked in the mind of anyone who grew up in rice country. And the link goes deeper than the conscious mind: rice and fish provide symbols for the imagination to play with. Rice is fixed, law-abiding, dependable, like the land it grows in. Water is its opposite. Rice makes people settle and live ordered lives, but fishing sends them back to their origin as hunters. In a subsistence economy, rice is always costly, in labour and risk if not in cash; fish, with luck, are free.