What a friend taught me over a bowl of rice in Amsterdam, and what my agriculturally mechanised Essex childhood had already taken away. In the early 2000s I shared a kitchen in Amsterdam with my soul sister Alodia, who had come to the Netherlands from the Philippines, and who changed the way I understood food without even trying. She did it, mostly, by the way she handled rice. I noticed it first as a small thing. When she cooked, she was really careful with the rice. She mea