Illustration on left by Sebastian Wilkinson

Funnily enough, I was a member of the Chinese delegation.

With A Dai in Cavoretto

I was there to accompany A Dai, the co-owner of the Dragon Well Manor restaurant in Hangzhou (龙井草堂). On Saturday we gave a joint presentation explaining the work of his restaurant, which specialises in what the Chinese call ‘natural, original, primordial’ (原生态) ingredients (what Westerners might call organic, artisanal food) and strives to preserve traditional cooking and food-production skills.

Diverse delegates

Over the course of the conference, we also met many wonderful people, including Vietnamese rice farmers, organic honey-makers from Jiangsu, NGO workers from D.R.Congo, Guinea-Bissau and South Korea, the fantastic and inspiring Australian chef Kylie Kwong and the Tibetan cheese-makers.

We also tasted what seemed like 5000 different kinds of salami and cheese, stocked up on fabulous chocolates at Guido Gobino, ate ludicrous amounts of meat and pasta, craved and fantastised about simple vegetarian food, and basked in glorious autumn sun. On our last day together, we drove into the Piedmontese countryside with Monica, a Slow Food volunteer. The autumn landscape

Autumn vineyards

was an exquisite patchwork of vineyards, purple, red, yellow and green. For lunch, we visited a restaurant run by friends of Monica’s, where we had the finest meal of the trip, a feast of raw veal, taglioni with white truffles, agnolini, bollito misto, cardoons and peppers, and robiola and castelmagna cheeses. Later, we visited her aunt and uncle for coffee, and played 1930s waltzes on their wind-up gramophone.

A few memories of the trip:

The view over Turin from our lovely old hostel in the hills of Cavoretto, with snow-capped mountains in the distance.

The Congolese delegates looking at my badge and saying: ‘But you don’t look Chinese.’

White truffles

The scent of white truffles.

Helping a confused Tibetan monk to find his bus home.

A Dai and Monica discussing football for an hour in the car, despite having no common language. (A Dai knows all the teams, the players, the football chants.)

Tasting and comparing honeys from Uganda, Japan, Italy and many other countries.

Running into football legend Giovanni Trapattoni in the rural restaurant – which, as you can imagine, made A Dai’s trip!

The pictures show Xiao Wei wrapping zongzi (top), Xiao Hua making tangyuan (right), and one of the guests trying his hand at wrapping jiaozi (below left).

There was a Q&A with the director and Patrick Holden of the UK Soil Association after the screening. One of the topics that came up was the particular US focus of the film. Robert Kenner said they’d decided to concentrate on the US, but could have gone anywhere, including to mass meat-processing centres in Romania. And he also mentioned that China was heading in the same direction as the US.

Does anyone out there know much about factory farming in China? Many of my Chinese friends are very worried about speed-rearing, and about hormones in meat, and prefer to buy what we would call free-range and organic foods where possible, but it is hard to find trustworthy sources unless you know the farmers yourself. Certainly I’ve met farmers who don’t eat their own pesticide-laced vegetables themselves, but keep a separate patch for produce grown for the family table.

At the wine and food congress

I was in Singapore, for the first time, in October, as a panellist at the International Congress of Chinese Cuisine and Wine (ICCCW). I’ll be writing more about the trip later, but I just wanted to mention a small but thought-provoking incident. A young Singaporean Chinese woman came up to me during one of the conference dinners and complimented me on my use of chopsticks, saying that she was unable to use them so proficiently herself. ‘My parents never taught me how to eat with chopsticks,’ she said, ‘because they didn’t feel it was important these days. Actually this is common among my generation. Now some of the local clan associations are so concerned about this that they are running classes for the younger generation in how to use chopsticks, as well as language classes in various Chinese dialects.’

Hu Yaobang

I was reminded of some famous, or infamous comments made by the open-minded General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, in 1984 – he was quoted in an official magazine as saying: ‘We should stop unhealthy eating practices, encourage dividing up of food, put out a few knives, forks, buy a few plates, eating Chinese food in the Western style. In this way we can avoid contagious diseases.’

Somehow both these comments seem to me to reflect the great tragedy of China’s disconnection with its traditional culture over the past two hundred years. Chopsticks, after all, are not just some trivial, peripheral cultural ornament – they have been used in China for millennia, and they are part of a grand eating tradition in which the sharing of food that has been cut into small pieces is central. Of course you can divide Chinese food into small, individual portions and eat it with knives and forks if you want (and there are historical precedents for the former – look at old images of Han Dynasty banquets, with individual set meals, for example). But is eating with chopsticks really backward and unhygienic?

For me, there is something so elegant, minimalistic and beautiful about chopsticks. They give one a more direct and tactile contact with the food, somehow. I also like their gentleness, especially when they are made of wood or bamboo – just compare them with the barbarian violence implicit in our cold metal knives! And I’ve never forgotten how, when I was camping with some friends in a field near Songpan in northern Sichuan, our guide simply cut and peeled twigs from nearby trees to make chopsticks for dinner!

Is this how we should be eating Chinese food?

As to the hygiene, well, is using chopsticks in shared dishes really so dangerous? (are there any hygiene experts out reading this blog who might be able to weigh in on this debate?) Anecdotally, I have never been more frequently ill in China than at home in England, and I went on using chopsticks throughout the SARS epidemic. And I can’t see that it should be any more dangerous than kissing, which Westerners do all the time in greeting and which most Chinese people seem to find rather repulsive (for hygiene reasons, too?).

And if you really want to be safe, you can use gong kuai 公筷, or ‘public chopsticks’, as some people tried to do during the SARS crisis, and which I noticed my Hong Kong Chinese friends doing when I was there in October. There’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I’m finally back in London after a crazy month’s travelling: first to Sydney for its International Food Festival, then to Singapore for a food and wine conference, then to Hong Kong and, at the end, Barcelona!

The Sydney food festival was a gathering of chefs and food-writers from all over Australia, Asia, and further afield, including Tetsuya Wakuda, Peter Gordon, David Thomson, Kylie Kwong, Neil Perry and Alvin Leung. The photograph on the left, taken at the opening night of the World Chef’s Showcase, was taken by Marco del Grande of the Sydney Morning Herald.

I was in Sydney to give a couple of presentations at the festival, one on my own (Sichuanese home cooking and a slide show of Chinese food images), and then one with the brilliant Chengdu chef Yu Bo, who you can read about in the ‘rubber factor’ chapter of my Shark’s Fin book. Yu Bo and his wife Dai Shuang wowed the audience, as I knew they would, with a display of their incredible Sichuanese delicacies. You can see a video of Dai Shuang making tiny hedgehog buns here – each quill is cut with nail scissors, and each hedgehog has about 137 quills!

I was amused to find myself speaking almost as much Mandarin in Sydney as I did English – partly with Yu Bo and Dai Shuang, and partly because the city seemed to be full of Chinese people, driving taxis, working in shops and hotels and restaurants. Of course the Chinese and broader Asian influence has a profound influence on the local food culture. I’ll be writing something about this, so do watch this space…

Great fun to be here, anyway. I manage to catch a Bach cello concert at lunchtime in the Zaha Hadid pavilion, and have just got back to the hotel after seeing Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed at the Palace Theatre – amazing!

In October, I’ll also be appearing at the Sydney International Food Festival in Australia.  I’ll be doing a demonstration of Sichuanese homestyle dishes myself, and a presentation with my friend Yu Bo, who is one of the most talented chefs I’ve met in more than a decade of eating in China. (He is featured in the ‘Rubber Factor’ chapter of my book ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’. )