couscous. i've eaten rice all my life: short grained, long grained, white, brown, glutenous, sticky, wild, basmati, etc. i've concluded that rice is kind of boring. the best rice products are made from rice flour and glutenous beaten rice, baked, grilled, fried, or otherwise generally made more exciting.
wheat, on the other hand, is a pretty wonderful thing. rice is just like, here's some starch so you don't die. wheat has body. wheat has actual amino content. wheat is a full organism seed. wheat can be ground, sprouted, sectioned, hulled, made into a million different types of doughy stuff without additional binder, etc.
anatomically, rice is just a simple sugar that sticks to itself when it's wet. wheat is a plant that provides not only glucose, but also bits of proteins, mineral content and so on. pound for pound, rice has a lot more specific energy, but if you look at the history of regions whose staple was mainly rice and those whose staple was mainly wheat, the regions with wheat had a much easier time of agriculture. using rice as a staple requires growing a second protein rich crop. this usually meant mung/soy beans. if either crop does not yield, the result is malnutrition. using wheat as a staple crop meant allowed agriculture to be a game of balancing the wheat variants in a crop rather than growing two crops with completely different cultivation requirements.
then again, growing soy beans triggered the cultivation of the incredible thing that is MSG
i guess it's a wash.
