Hundreds of people walked through the space between the Oculus and 3 World Trade Center, some pausing to glance up from their phones or conversations long enough to notice a recent addition: Two undulating wooden structures, one large and one small, containing what looked like stalks of grass.
“I walk past this almost every day,” said Gillian Pardi, 25, a dog walker. “I noticed it a few weeks ago and I keep seeing the little sprouts getting taller and taller.”
But these are not mere sprouts or stalks of grass. They are rice plants.
The temporary rice paddy installation is the creation of Danielle Chang, the Taiwanese-American founder of LuckyRice, a lifestyle brand, and the nonprofit Lucky Chow, both of which promote Asian culture through a culinary lens.
Signs around the planters explain that rice provides more than one-fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans; that there are more than 120,000 varieties of rice grown globally; and that rice was used instead of mortar during part of the building of the Great Wall of China.