Certainly in Europe and the West we tend to think of bread as the staple food in our diet, as many proverbs and sayings, such as "bread is the staff of life" attest. Yet for the majority of the world's population the most important staple food is not wheat but rice, which is the seed of a different type of grass. The earliest evidence we have of rice being cultivated dates back to eight thousand years ago, when rice grains of that period were discovered in a village in China. By around six thousand years ago, the cultivation of both long-grain and short-grain rice had become well-established in China, and had just got going in India.
The word "rice" itself, however, is derived from the Aramaic ourouzza and came to us by way of Greek and Arabic. In fact, it was the Arabs who introduced rice to their Spanish territories in the 7th century, but it didn't spread to the rest of Europe until much later when, in the 15th century, Spaniards began to cultivate their own short-grain variety at Pisa in Italy.