The Council of Agriculture (COA) yesterday said a new type of rice noodle could support local agriculture and increase the food sufficiency rate in Taiwan.
An increasing acreage of rice paddies has been allowed to lie fallow because of an increased demand for diversified food sources, growing grain imports from abroad and a consequent fall in demand for domestically-grown rice, Council of Agriculture Deputy Minister Huang Yu-tsai (黃有才) said at the debut of the new product.
He added that the rice noodle was developed to meet the needs of the people and to increase the food sufficiency rate.
Chung Li-hua, Taipei Times
The COA estimates the product could boost annual rice consumption by about 100,000 tonnes, accounting for about 24,000 hectares of rice paddy.
The new rice noodle was developed by a grain products research and development institute, under the aegis of the council’s Agriculture and Food Agency. The product has now been fully developed and is awaiting technology transfer and mass production.
The agency said the rice noodles are made by mixing 30 to 50 percent of rice flour with wheat flour, giving the noodles the nutrition of both rice and wheat, and making the digestion and absorption of nutrients much easier.
“The noodles made from mixing rice flour with wheat flour taste better and are easier to digest, and offer more balanced nutrition,” agency director Li Tsang-lang (李蒼郎) said, adding that the digestion and absorption rate of rice is about 98 percent, so that eating rice noodles causes less burden to the stomach and intestines.
Moreover, the new product should also have a lesser environmental impact.
“The cooking time of the rice noodles can be shortened, saving gas and reducing carbon emissions; and importation of the ingredients is reduced because the rice is grown in Taiwan,” Li said.
The agency said the new rice noodles can be cooked in about half the time of traditional noodles. Also, because rice flour is finer than wheat flour, the natural white color of the noodles should add a visual element to their appeal, it said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching