Word Usage – Understanding ‘With’ in ‘Rice with Chicken and Broccoli’

No they are different. Rice is what you eat, paddy is where it grows.

Is your friend a native speaker of English? I suspect she might be mapping words from another language onto English. (Rarely is there ever a perfect fit.)

In East Asia, for example, rice is the most important staple, and in most areas some kind of rice or rice product is eaten with almost every meal. It is so central that the Chinese character 飯 indicating cooked rice can also mean food or meal in general, in Japanese as well as Chinese use. In Korean 밥먹자! (bab meokja!) translates literally as "let's eat the cooked rice!" but ordinarily just means "let's have something to eat!" or "let's dig in!"—even if you are having goulash or tacos.

The point is that historically, if you asked someone what she was going to have for dinner, she would never have answered "rice"— that would have been taken for granted. I have older Korean relatives who to this day will chuckle if I tell them I had rice— well, obviously. When they ask me what I had for dinner, they want to know what meat, stew, and 반찬 (banchan, side dishes) I had. This seems to correspond to the distinction your friend is making between the staple/core of the meal and its accompaniment.

None of this applies in English, however; in standard usage, the distinction your friend makes does not exist. Rice is simply one type of food. Declaring that food only refers to foods other than rice is unsupported either by common usage or by dictionaries. I do not know if her use is common, but anecdotally speaking, none of the people I know who might refer generically to food or a meal or a dish as 飯 or 밥 in another language ever use rice in that way in English.

Bread is the nearest Western equivalent. We still have many expressions involving bread in English, like breaking bread (sharing a meal) with someone, something being your bread and butter (essential or basic), or knowing which side your bread is buttered on (recognizing a benefactor or source of advantage). Still, I do not think bread ever attained the cultural centrality in the English-speaking world that rice did in southern and eastern Asia, and I have never come across anyone who would try to declare that bread was in a special class of edibles. Bread is food, just like everything else you eat.