When I first started cooking rice, I washed it because I'd seen my parents and grandparents do so. But one day I thought about it and came to the conclusion that it was silly, and probably a habit passed down from decades ago before modern food mills and factories.

I decided that it there's no way that rice bought in a supermarket today could be dirty. We don't wash flour, sugar or salt, and we don't get sick. So I stopped washing rice.

I did that for a couple of years until someone saw me doing it and pointed out that the reason to wash rice was to rid it of its starchy coating.

I went back to washing my rice.