Fuchsia Dunlop

Rice threshing in Fujian

A study in the US is suggesting that replacing white rice with brown rice could cut the risk of diabetes – findings that might provoke some serious interest in China, given the country’s rocketing rates of the disease.

I have to admit that, although I wouldn’t serve brown rice with Chinese food at a dinner party, I often eat it as part of simple meals at home. I love the taste and texture of brown rice, for a start, and I also like parboiling the rice, and having the silky boiling liquid (米汤）as a soup, perhaps with the addition of a few spring onion slices. And egg-fried brown rice has a lot of character.

Do any of you blog readers think that Chinese people might gradually give up their insistence on white rice, and eat brown rice as a staple, just as many westerners now eat wholemeal in preference to white bread?

Sliced potatoes with pickled greens - to be eaten with rice

According to this piece by Lauren Keane in the Washington Post, the Chinese government is hoping that the potato will help to provide greater food security as the country’s population peaks. Earlier this year, the article says, the government signed an agreement with the International Potato Center to jointly launch a potato research centre in Beijing.

Of course, persuading the Chinese to eat more potatoes will not be easy. Most Chinese people I’ve talked to about the importance of potatoes in, for example, the British diet, are incredulous - you mean, English people are willing to eat potatoes as 主食, a staple starch food?!!!*&@%^&*!!

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A delicious tangle of octopi!

I was just looking through one of my notebooks, and found a rather endearing story. It was in Ningbo, at the end of a fabulous dinner that had involved, among other things, divine little octopi (served whole), crunchy jellyfish, salted raw crab, white shrimps and red-braised pork with sea moss, and the chef was telling us all about a culinary conference he’d attended in a nearby city. ‘You know, everyone at the conference agreed [he sighed as he said this] that Western science was very advanced and developed, but that Western food didn’t amount to much. Whereas China might not have such advanced science, but the Chinese had really moved their brains 动了脑筋 when it came to food.’

It’s not the first time I’ve heard Chinese people blaming gastronomy for their country’s decline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries*, but I loved the way he expressed it!

*In my ‘Shark’s Fin’ book I think I mentioned the Xi’an taxi driver who picked me up from the Banpo Neolithic village, and who moaned on the way back into town about the fact that the Chinese had invented steaming in the Stone Age, but had only applied it to cooking, leaving it to the British, many centuries later, to invent the steam engine.

A geng

It’s funny how the UK’s weird and inconclusive general election result has brought out the food metaphors! The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, spoke of a future coalition government as a sausage, in which the meat should be Conservative. And the BBC’s political reporter said on the radio at lunchtime that any government proposed by our current prime minister, Gordon Brown, would be a difficult cake to mix, because it would have to involve too many ingredients!

It reminded me of that age-old Chinese metaphor for the juggling of rival political interests: the seasoning of a stew (or, to be precise, a geng 羹, which is a kind of soup that is thick with cut ingredients – as opposed to a tang 汤, which is a lighter, more soupy type of soup). As David Knechtges says in a fascinating essay on this*: ‘In the Chinese classics, the proper seasoning of food is a common analogy for good government… The comparison of the perfectly blended stew with the art of good government is a commonplace both in ancient and later literature.’ Continue reading…

Chinese merchants and investors are planning to snap up much of the acclaimed 2009 vintage of Bordeaux wines, according to this piece in the Guardian. The article says Chateau Mouton Rothschild and Lafite-Rothschild have been called “tipple of choice for your thrusting Chinese industrialist”:

Top wines have become a prestigious gift among business people in China; a bottle of famous claret is now an essential part of entertaining government officials, Chinese merchants said. Among the middle classes, Bordeaux is also seen as a sophisticated and healthy alternative to Chinese wines, which can contain up to 40% alcohol.

The piece quotes a Hong Kong investor, Sam Yip, as saying ”Everyone in China is thinking Lafite,” he said. “It is seen in the same light as Louis Vuitton, Prada and Gucci.” I can’t say I’ve ever been offered a glass of Lafite at a Chinese banquet, but I can see that it would sit rather nicely on the kind of table described to me by one Chinese chef, at a feast an entrepreneur threw for local government officials (read into that exactly what you will), alongside the abalone, shark’s fin, bird’s nest and humphead wrasse. That particular banquet, as described to me, cost the equivalent of about £8000 for one round table – so I’m sure a few grand on a bottle of wine would have been acceptable. Perhaps they were drinking Lafite anyway – the chef I spoke to only knew about the menu and the cost of the food.

Any of you got any tales of the bling factor at Chinese banquets? Or of expensive Bordeaux wines in China?

There’s an interesting, and at times hilarious, thread on Chinese cooking tradition on Chowhound – lwong’s dryly witty comment had me laughing out loud:

‘We see that the posters here on the “Home Cooking” Forum are a very tough bunch. Especially when 1400 years for the technique of “stir fry cooking in a wok” is not considered a sufficient time to have passed the “long test of time” in terms being considered a classic cooking technique, nor the introduction of the New World foods, which would only be in the neighborhood of a mere 700 years.’

It reminded me of the fact that many of the professional Chinese cooking manuals I have encountered in my work begin their introductions with an account of the discovery of fire, the moment when human beings ceased being savages who 茹毛饮血 (literally ‘ate feathers and drank blood, i.e. ate birds and animals raw), and embarked on the path of civilisation by cooking their food. It also reminded me of the late Chinese premier Zhou Enlai who, when asked for his assessment of the 1789 French Revolution, supposedly replied that it was ‘too early to say’. Continue reading…

You can read about my recent eating adventures in Singapore in today’s Financial Times.

In the print edition, there’s also a little list of Chinese New Year traditions by me, but I can’t seem to find it online.

And, did you see the news that Ferran Adria says El Bulli is actually to close permanently, after 2012?

According to reports in various newspapers (such as the Guardian in the UK), legal experts in China are proposing that a new law to prevent the abuse of animals should include a ban on the consumption of cats and dogs. As anyone who lives in China knows, eating these animals is rather unusual, and generally limited to a few regions. Moreover, eating dog meat, though it dates back to ancient times, is a seasonal delicacy, suitable only for very cold weather because of its heating qualities. Looking at Western discussions of Chinese food, however, you’d never know that it was a minority pursuit. Westerners, as I argued in this op-ed piece in the New York Times a couple of years ago, have been obsessed with Chinese dog-eating since the time of Marco Polo. It’s something they just love to get outraged about. Continue reading…

You can hear me talking about eating shark’s fin (or not) on the BBC today (or read the piece here).

While I was writing it, I came across a page I tore out of the South China Morning Post in October last year. It includes a letter from Dr Choo-hoo Giam, a member of the animals committee of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. What is particularly interesting about the letter is that Dr Giam points out the extent to which it is not only the Chinese and their notorious shark’s fin soup that are to blame for the devastation of worldwide shark stocks. The main points Dr Giam makes are as follows: Continue reading…

I’m sure many readers of this blog will be familiar with Michael Pollan and his work – especially the eminently sensible, and absolutely timely polemic In Defence of Food. For those of you who aren’t, his basic thesis is that the growth of nutritional science has made most of use confused about what to eat, and that the answer to all our worries is simply to ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants’. By ‘food’, he means real food made from recognisable ingredients, not the weird, high-tech ‘foodlike substances’ on sale in your local supermarket. He also suggests that our grandmothers knew much more about how to eat well than we did, because their brains were not addled by contradictory and often misleading nutritional advice, and because they took a similarly commonsense approach to feeding their families. I was reminded of all this by his latest piece in the New York Times. Continue reading…