Abstract By ethnographically reading Australia in a grain of rice, this article recasts Australia's entangled histories with the Asia‐Pacific and the epistemic tensions through which rice emerges as a source of sustenance and metabolic concern in everyday life. I explore rice as a method, showing how the grain gathers anthropological thought and practice in conversation with diabetes research, cereal science and regenerative biology. Tracing the trajectories of Japanese rice cultivated in New South Wales and prepared in a Korean Australian kitchen in Western Sydney, I follow the grain from paddy fields into supermarket aisles, through kitchens and bodies, and into laboratories. Rice opens new ways of thinking about eating and metabolic life under conditions of planetary uncertainty and re‐situates the Asia‐Pacific as integral to Australia's biopolitical and migratory futures. This article seeks to contribute to contemporary anthropological thought in Australia, especially in relation to the Asia‐Pacific.
Malini Sur (Fri,) studied this question.