'MAMA TOLD ME how to wash rice clean," Cibo Matto sings. "She didn't tell me how to clean the lint of love." Rice and love: a time-honored association, though nowadays most people don't throw rice at weddings, since it supposedly expands in birds' bellies and makes them explode. I admit to taking a wicked pleasure in the visual association of weddings with bird carnage. Not that I've ever seen this rice = bird death correlation in action. Maybe it's a rumor spread by the birdseed industry. How can rice be the silent bird killer when rice fields are, like, bird havens? Some birds literally depend on rice fields to sustain their migration flights. Maybe it's just Uncle Ben's that's deadly. I bet any fowl would be delighted with arborio, brown, wild, basmati, or jasmine.

Rice, in its myriad forms, serves in the formidable role of staple food for (besides birds) about half the world's human population. Considering the aforesaid, and also that rice has been in cultivation for more than 7,000 years and now numbers around 100,000 varieties, there's a good deal more to say about rice than I can fit on this nonexpanding page. Happily, I have yet to come across links between rice and exploding newspapers.

Zizania aquatica is, in addition to a neat conflation of both ends of the alphabet and the name I wish for my first godchild, the Latin name of wild rice. It is not rice at all, but a marsh grass and a staple of Great Lakes region Native American tribes. Besides being beautiful (it tends to a black-blue-green color spectrum), it's very tasty in a smoky, nutty way and has an extrachewy texture that invites attention. Traditionally gathered in canoes, the reeds were bent over the side of the boat and the ripe grains knocked off, leaving some grain to reseed for the next year. California, the largest producer of Zizania aquatica in the world, has been growing it since the 1970s. In the topsy-turvy manner of contemporary agriculture, farmers have to simulate its native Midwestern conditions by wintering the seeds in water-filled bins in cold-storage facilities until it's time to sow next year's crop.

Delectable as it is, wild rice can't compare in popularity and economic importance to its namesake, rice – a nearly $200 million industry in California, one of the six rice-producing states in the United States (the others being Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas). The United States ranks third among the rice-exporting nations of the world, exporting 4.5 million metric tons last year.

It seems counterintuitive to grow rice, a crop that needs a lot of water, in drought-prone California. I still hear the public-service announcements from the 1980s – drip drip drip drought – playing in my head whenever I turn on the shower. Apparently, though, rice farming puts to use the heavy, water-retentive clay soil of the Sacramento Valley, which is not suitable for most crops but perfect for rice. I was relieved to read that the industry has improved water conservation and claims to have reduced water use by two-thirds in the last 30 years. A UC Davis Web site on California rice asserts that "net water use is similar to that of pasture, alfalfa, cotton, and several tree and vegetable crops."

Most California rice is of the middle-of-the-road, medium grain japonica variety – not too fluffy, not too sticky. Long grain rice, on the other hand, such as the aromatic basmati, is four to five times longer than it is wide and has a lower starch content, so it cooks up fluffy and the grains remain distinct. I still remember the smell coming from the apartment of my neighbor down the hall, Firouzeh, who cooked basmati for pilaf when I was a kid. Sometimes I'd just stand by her door inhaling the amazing scents. What makes it smell so good? An article on Basmati.com explains: "the aroma in Basmati arises from a cocktail of 100 compounds – hydrocarbons, alcohols, aldehydes and esters. A particular molecule of note, detected by Dr. R.G. Buttery and others, is 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline. Buttery went ahead to patent the use of this compound to flavour normal rice and other food items." I wonder if Dr. Buttery is working on a new product called I Can't Believe It's Not Basmati! Speaking of patents, India is trying to get the name basmati protected as a "geographic indicator" (like champagne), so that only rice grown in a specific region can be called basmati.

Despite the political and flavor intrigues of basmati, it was a medium-short grain hybrid that got me started on this armchair rice odyssey. A bag of black rice caught my eye at Trader Joe's: Black Japonica. It cooks up purple-black, a little sticky and fragrant, and turns the water a gorgeous deep purple. The other day I served it with broccoli in a bright yellow bowl. My heart skipped a beat just from the color impact. Because it's not processed (the grain still has the nutritious, cholesterol-fighting bran and germ, as does brown rice), it's on the chewier side and takes about 40 minutes to cook – just enough time to get the rest of dinner ready.

The USA Rice Federation says, "American-grown rice is a clean product that does not need washing ..." But that pompous tone just isn't as convincing as "Lint of Love" 's plaintive symbolism. I'm going with the song and what Mama says and spending some quality time with the rice in a bowl of water, contemplating my own love for this 7,000-year-old grain before it hits the stove and then my stomach.