If you want to understand Panama, one of the easiest places to start is with a bowl of rice. Rice might not sound particularly exciting, especially compared with Panama's beaches, jungles, mountains, islands and wildlife, but spend enough time here and you quickly realize that rice is one of the foundations of everyday Panamanian food. It is not simply a side dish that happens to appear with lunch. For many Panamanians, a meal without rice can almost feel incomplete.
Walk into a typical Panamanian restaurant and look at the menu and you will see rice everywhere. Chicken with rice, beef with rice, pork with rice, fish with rice, beans and rice, rice with vegetables and countless combinations that vary from one household and region to another. At a small fonda, where you can often get a filling plate of food for relatively little money, rice is usually one of the main components. It is the dependable part of the meal that fills you up and goes perfectly with the sauces, beans, meats and stews served alongside it.
Rice is much more than a side dish
In many countries, rice is treated as something that accompanies the main attraction. In Panama, the relationship is a little different. Rice is often part of the main event.
One of the most familiar examples is arroz con pollo, a comforting dish of rice cooked with chicken and vegetables and seasoned to give the rice plenty of flavor. Every family seems to have its own version, and the dish can appear at ordinary family meals as well as celebrations.
Then there is rice and beans, another combination that is deeply connected with Caribbean and Afro Caribbean cooking. On Panama's Caribbean coast, coconut milk and rice are particularly important. Arroz con coco, rice cooked with coconut, is an excellent example of how Panama's different culinary influences come together. The country's food has been shaped by Indigenous traditions, Spanish influence, African heritage, Caribbean culture and immigration from around the world, and rice has managed to fit into all of them.
Why rice became so important
Rice works extremely well in Panama for practical reasons. It is relatively inexpensive, stores well, is easy to cook in large quantities and can be combined with almost anything. For generations, that has made it an incredibly useful staple for families.
Panama also has an agricultural tradition of growing rice, although domestic production does not supply everything the country consumes. Rice production is concentrated in several agricultural regions, particularly in areas where the climate and available land are suitable for cultivation. The crop is harvested both by smaller producers and larger agricultural operations.
Rice has also become connected with the economics of everyday life. When Panamanians talk about the price of groceries, rice is one of those basic products that people notice. It is a staple that gets purchased regularly, rather than something bought once in a while as a luxury.
That makes rice surprisingly important when you are trying to understand the cost of living in Panama.
The enormous variety of Panamanian rice
One of the fun things about eating in Panama is discovering how many different ways rice can appear on your plate.
There is plain white rice, which is probably the most familiar version and is often served alongside meat, fish, beans or vegetables. There is arroz con pollo, rice cooked together with chicken and seasoning. There are versions containing pork, vegetables or seafood. There is rice cooked with coconut in Caribbean communities, and there are countless family recipes that never make it onto a restaurant menu.
Then there are the dishes where rice becomes something completely different.
Panamanian arroz frito, or fried rice, reflects the enormous influence of Chinese immigration on Panama. Chinese Panamanians have been an important part of the country's history for generations, and Chinese restaurants are found throughout the country. Fried rice has consequently become completely familiar to Panamanian diners.
It is not unusual to see someone happily eating a plate of fried rice alongside other dishes and then having rice again later that day in a completely different form.
Rice at the fonda
If you really want to understand the importance of rice in Panama, skip the expensive restaurant and visit a local fonda.
A fonda is one of the best places to see ordinary Panamanian food. You will often see trays of prepared food behind a counter, with customers choosing their meat, vegetables, beans and rice. The food is generally straightforward, filling and designed for people who actually live and work in the area rather than tourists looking for a culinary experience.
And rice is usually right there.
A typical plate might contain a generous serving of rice, beans, chicken or beef, salad and perhaps fried plantain. The portions are generally designed to provide a proper meal, not a tiny artistic arrangement of food.
For someone travelling around Panama on a budget, fondas can also be a fantastic way to eat well without spending much money.
Rice and Panama's Caribbean influence
The importance of rice becomes particularly interesting when you travel toward Panama's Caribbean coast.
Places such as Bocas del Toro have strong Caribbean cultural influences, and coconut plays a much larger role in local cooking. Rice cooked with coconut is one of the dishes that shows how dramatically Panamanian food can change from one part of the country to another.
The ingredients may be simple, but the result can taste completely different from ordinary white rice.
This is one of the reasons travelling around Panama is so interesting for food lovers. Panama is geographically small compared with many countries, but its cuisine changes considerably between the capital, the central provinces, the highlands and the Caribbean and Pacific coasts.
Rice is part of celebrations too
Rice is not restricted to everyday lunches.
Large family gatherings, birthdays, holidays and other celebrations often involve large quantities of food, and rice is an obvious choice because it can be prepared in big batches. A huge pot of rice can feed an entire family or a crowd of guests without requiring complicated preparation.
This is another reason rice has such staying power. It works equally well for one person eating lunch on a Tuesday and for fifty people sitting down together at a family celebration.
What travellers should know
If you are travelling around Panama, don't expect every meal to look like a plate of rice, beans and meat. Panama has excellent seafood, soups, ceviche, plantains, tamales, Caribbean dishes, international restaurants and plenty of modern cuisine.
But rice will keep appearing.
You might eat it with fish on the Pacific coast, with chicken in the mountains, with Caribbean coconut flavors in Bocas del Toro, or as fried rice in a Chinese Panamanian restaurant in Panama City.
Eventually you stop noticing it.
And that is probably the best indication of how important it is.
Rice is not necessarily the food that tourists come to Panama dreaming about. Nobody usually books a flight because they desperately want to experience a spectacular bowl of white rice. But once you spend time here, you begin to understand that some of the most important foods in a country are not necessarily the glamorous ones.
Rice is inexpensive, versatile, filling and deeply integrated into everyday life. It connects the home kitchen with the local fonda, the Caribbean coast with the interior and ordinary weekday meals with enormous family celebrations.
In Panama, rice isn't the star of the plate. It's the reliable friend that is almost always there. And after a while, you realize just how much Panamanian food depends on it.