Rice is good for years — unless it’s brown. Uncooked white rice will stay fresh and edible for anywhere between 10 and 30 years (depending on how it is stored). But uncooked brown rice has a shelf life of just three to six months because the bran coating will oxidize. Wild rice isn’t rice. Wild rice is a distant relative to all of the other rice commonly eaten today, most of which are in the Oryza sativa family. Instead, wild rice is part of the Zizania genus. It’s a grain harvested from marsh grasses grown in North America and China.