In the 1960s — and in an odd contradiction — cultivated wild rice began to be grown in California in paddies, like regular rice, and harvested by machine. But northern, truly wild wild rice, or "manoomin" in Ojibway, grows in the shallow waters of ponds, lakes and rivers in the north-central United States and adjacent Canada. It isn't rice at all, of course, but the seed of a tall, annual aquatic grass, Zizania palustris (sometimes still called by the earlier name Zizania aquatica). The wild grain continues to be gathered by hand, often by Indians, as a commercial crop. Gathered from nature and processed in the traditional way — heated and stirred in an iron pot or washtub over a fire — wild rice is olive green to brown mixed with tan. It tastes nutty, toasted, slightly grassy and, as one writer puts it, like tea.


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