Festival of Food
From individual creative toil, the passage to trade for global consumption requires many hands. In Asian countries, rice is primarily produced by smallholders and harvesting is still carried out manually by many farmers themselves. Harvesting is followed by threshing, often by hand. Milling, distribution and trade follow. Similarly, writers and illustrators work to create content in their own houses, followed by editing, publication, distribution and consumption, like the processes of threshing, milling, distribution and trade. It’s a hard grind but necessary and, ultimately, worthwhile and rewarding.


Bee–bim Bop
By Linda Sue Park
Illustrated by Ho Baek Lee
2005

Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months
By Sendak, Maurice
1962

Cora Cooks Pancit
By Dorina K. Lazo Gilmore
Illustrated by Kristi Valiant
2009

Do Mice Eat Rice?
By Wight, Al
Illustrated by Clarke, Roger
2005

Dumpling Soup
By Rattigan, Jama Kim
Illustrated by Hsu-Flanders, Lillian
Boston

Everybody Brings Noodles
By Norah Dooley
Illustrated by Peter J. Thornton
2002

Everybody Cooks Rice
By Dooley, Norah
Illustrated by Thornton, Peter J.
1991

Hiromi’s Hands
By Lynne Barasch
2007

How My Parents Learned to Eat
By Friedman, Ina R
Illustrated by Say, Allen
1984

Mama Provi and the Pot of Rice
By Rosa-Casanova, Sylvia
Illustrated by Roth, Robert
1997

Milk Rice – Stories for Children
By Hussein, Ameena
2008

The Cazuela that the Farm Maiden Stirred
By Vamos, Samantha R.
Illustrated by López, Rafael
2011

We Eat Rice
By Hong, Min
Illustrated by Grace Lin
2000