Down the Rabbit Hole

Google Scholar has always had this quote on its website. It resonates with me because my scientific work builds upon the products developed by scientists before me. This is why I still marvel at the impact of Miracle Rice (IR8)  in preventing widespread hunger in Asia, and wonder if the work I previously did in improving rice quality made a dent in rice breeding pipelines . My contributions in developing the gastronomic systems research framework, such as the Robinsons Mall auctions  (Quezon City, Philippines) and the expert elicitation workshops (Kolkata and Bhubaneswar, India), helped shape the consumer research angle currently being pursued by IRRI, particularly for gauging the market acceptability of rice varieties that can potentially curb the risk of developing diabetes . My work in applying machine learning tools  to classify rice into quality types  is five years ahead of its time; I now see more people using   big data approaches  to answer incre...

I first encountered natural language processing (NLP) in data science class , with a classmate's project opening my eyes to the possibilities of using the method. Before that class, I had worked on determining descriptors for rice varieties by finding the most frequently associated adjectives and finding which rice descriptors were co-occurring with viand names. I even published a paper on rice descriptors. Anyway, during class, I decided to embark on a massive (in my opinion when I was starting it) side project to sharpen my skills in NLP. I didn't realise how deep the NLP hole was until I started working on it. Sourcing the documents I remembered that IRRI lists its staff's publications online. It was just a matter of accessing the information and putting them in an Excel spreadsheet by copying and pasting... Wrong! There are over 6000 articles in the list of publications. There was no way I was going to be able to manually copy the information from the websi...

One of the projects I spent a lot of time on in my final year at the International Rice Research Institute (as a scientist) was contributing to seven chapters in a book of grain quality methods. After many months in the making, the book has finally been released.  Writing the different chapters was like reflecting on the past years that I've been in the laboratory (I started off as a researcher; then I became a scholar, a post-doctoral fellow, and then a scientist). The chapters I contributed to described protocols in characterising rice grain quality using the usual protocols and non-routine methodologies. In some of the chapters, I wrote content that provided context to possible applications and data interpretation coming from the results of assays I haven't performed yet (e.g., inductively coupled plasma - optical emission spectrometry and near infrared spectroscopy). People come and go; the lab is in constant flux. The group I started out with has largely moved ...

After the rice value-addition seminar, the FFTC-KU organisers brought the participants to one of the biggest rice processing companies in Thailand: the Khao Charoen Pokphand Co. Ltd. It sells Thai rice both domestically and internationally under the Royal Umbrella brand. We were met by the Vice President of the company; he introduced us to the company and walked us through the facility to show rice is processed there. Thai rice, particularly Hommali, is the company's major product. It has been voted best rice in the world several times, showing how important quality is for Thailand. For someone from a rice importing country, I begin to realise how different the perspectives between producers and consumers are.  The VP told us that the company has multiple plants. We were in the Nakornluang facility in Ayutthaya (about 90 minutes from Bangkok). Aside from rice, the company also had vegetable, poultry, piggery, and dairy factories which can supply consumers with pre-cut m...

One afternoon, I received an email from the DG's Office requesting me to sub for Matthew at a conference at the Ateneo de Manila University ... I had to talk about sustainability in development. Wow, this appears to be my first speaking assignment as part of the Sustainable Impact Platform . I gladly accepted because one of the things I want to do is to encourage students to take up the sciences... and because I used to teach at the ADMU. On the day itself, I was told that the attendees were mostly in senior and junior high school and in college. My session's audience was supposed to be a mix of students interested in humanitarian and environmental topics. I thought that that was cool. After all, I taught Biotechnology for non-Biology majors. My topic was entitled "Ensuring sustainability through rice research for development in the Philippines". I opted to feature IRRI's work in collaboration and with funding from the Philippines' Department of Agri...

Dr Bienvenido Juliano used to lead the lab where I work in when it was still called the Cereal Chemistry Lab. I didn't have the honour to be mentored by Dr Juliano, who was a National Scientist and was in the first elite group of scientists who set the direction for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Though he was no longer in IRRI (he had left before I started in the Grain Quality and Nutrition Centre ), he continued to be an influential scientist in the field of cereal chemistry . He used to ask formidable questions in seminars tackling rice chemistry issues; his challenges normally drawn from 32 years of research in IRRI. Listening to him talk made me realise how little I know in the field... humbling occasions, definitely. He was the  rice grain quality expert in the Philippines. Anybody else claiming that title has yet to match his level of knowledge and experience... or is bordering on quixotic. And now, Dr Juliano is gone. He passed away this week...

I have been at the Grain Quality Lab for 13 years (September 1, 2004–August 31, 2017) if my math serves me well.  This was the first group picture that the original team had. Vito and Melissa have gone back to Australia. Tina has returned to teaching at UPLB. Tita Dory and Tita Ruby have both retired. Kuya Johnny also isn't connected with IRRI anymore. Kuya Teody has been assigned to work in the Grain Quality and Nutrition Services Lab (GQNSL) in the third floor. Tita Leslie is in PhilRice, I think. Tita Puring passed away years ago. So the only people left in the Grain Quality Lab in Hemmi Building's first floor annex from that original group are me, Ana , and Kuya Jun . Of course, with the passing of time came the arrivals and the departures of staff and scholars, making the lab a dynamic place to be in. I was supposed to leave in May 2014  when my postdoctoral fellowship ended. However, I was able to somehow do two things at the same time:  teaching at...

Chef Claude Tayag  wanted to talk about rice in one of the episodes of his show Chasing Flavors , aired on Lifestyle TV. It's a show that gives a platform for people to talk about local ingredients and the diversity of Philippine cuisine. Unfortunately, Claude himself couldn't be at IRRI in person because he was at ANC for an interview. Instead, his production crew dropped by to do the interview. With me was Leoniza, who handles media relations at IRRI. The on-cam interview was conducted at the Plant Growth Facility, IRRI's newest building. In the lab where I was interviewed, rice samples were being sorted in the background. 

The Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) held its third quarter seminar series earlier today, and I was one of the speakers invited to attend,  per Tita Nollie's recommendation  ( thank you! ). I was asked to talk about cooking specialty rice and kakanins .  Since Tita Nollie intended to give an overview of the  Heirloom Rice Project , I opted to talk about a paper I co-wrote this year entitled "Developing a Framework of Gastronomic Systems Research to Unravel Drivers of Food Choice" ( https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgfs.2017.06.001 ), focusing on the rice delicacies.   Also, upon Tita Nollie's suggestion, I featured the desserts in IRRI's 2016 calendar. These desserts were made by three chefs we've befriended during our journey into the nuances of heirloom rice flavours: Sharwin Tee , Jessie Sincioco , and Margarita Fores . The challenge was that the calendar layout made getting decent photos of the food difficult. So, I had to get screen grabs o...

A trip abroad, whether a work trip or a personal vacation, is something that I always document. For this India adventure for our project, I also took a few hundred photos. Here, I share some of the outtakes from my photo roll... those photos that won't end up in trip reports. Many of them are group shots in the airports and in the planes, and candids during the expert elicitation workshops .  Yeah, some people believe YOLO and tend to post photos in social media as they happen; I, however, tend to post them after the trip in my blog... as I process what I happened during our whirlwind of a field trip into something that I could help me in writing technical papers and trip reports. Hello, Bhubaneswar! We got out of the airport and onto the taxi queue as the downpour tapered off. Breakfast at the Mayfair Lagoon just before the Hanuman langur made an entrance. Last-minute preparations before the expert elicitation workshops in Bhubaneswar. The whole team flyi...

Why were we in India in the first place?  Matty, Jhoanne, and I flew in from the Philippines to join Arindam and Suva in the first of our activities under the Drivers of Food Choice project in East India. The article below is a piece I wrote on paper (it's been a while since I wrote a first draft by hand) while we were in a plane from Kolkata to New Delhi. By the time we landed in New Delhi, the piece had gone around the whole team for their revisions and was ready for submission to the editors back in IRRI headquarters.  Below is the piece as it got published in IRRI's news section  a few days ago.  --- Enhancing nutrition through gastronomic research Expert elicitation workshop in Kolkata New Delhi, INDIA—“To find effective interventions that can improve nutritional security for poor families in eastern India, researchers must first better understand what drives their food choices,” says Dr Matty Demont, senior economist at the International...

On rare occasions, I get a request from Management to "cater" snacks for the Board of Trustees. This was one of those occasions... But there's a caveat: I wasn't supposed to prepare the typical, academic rice tasting session. The DDG-R, Jackie, wanted me to approach this as food service rather than an experiment. So inspired by Madrid Fusion Manila 2017 , I prepared vision boards to inspire me about the pegs. What the colour motif would be; what would be the presentation style; what would be the rice varieties to be featured... Good thing I got Ana, Tita Nollie, and Ate Lucy to help out in mise-en-place. It was so much fun seeing my idea come to life in a span of two hours. The table was so different from the other set-ups I've done before that this latest one was actually Instagrammable! I was surprised! Will we do this again soon? We'll find out.

Back in the day, the world was in very real danger of famine. The population was increasing at a rate at which food production couldn't keep up. In the 1960s, agricultural scientists made several breakthroughs that enabled farmers to increase crop production: high-yielding varieties, dwarf wheat and rice varieties, improved farm management, and inputs (like fertilizers), among others. At that time, scientists had no paradigms to follow. They were blazing the trail. IR8 was the landmark variety of that time. It is a high-yielding variety that spread like wildfire across the rice-producing parts of the world. It became known as "Miracle Rice" because it alleviated the food security problem at the time. It may not be the one-shot solution to end hunger and poverty (a position that critics use) but it was released at the right places at the right time. Fifty years into the future, IRRI celebrates the golden anniversary of the rice variety that shaped the rice-consu...

On October 23–26, I was stationed at Robinsons Supermarket at Forum Robinsons (in Mandaluyong) as a member of an experimental auction team (with a sensory evaluation component in it). This activity, a component of a brainchild hatched by Matty and me last year (when I was still a postdoc fellow) finally started becoming a reality in the Philippines! We had first tested the idea purely through sensory evaluation activities during Madrid Fusìon Manila . What made the latest activity doubly exciting was that this was our first experiment in an urban shopping mall (our sincerest and most heartfelt thanks to Robinsons Malls for partnering with us on this) and our first test of a novel variation of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak auction (devised by Matty)... and one more thing, this was the first time that I acted as animator in an experimental auction!  Members of the team who made this experimental auction possible was Anna de Guia, a MSc student in UPLB whose research topic was a...