Ah, Bangkok.  This city elicits such strong reactions from visitors that most of the time it is best to ignore what others say and go there with an open mind.  When I visited Bangkok for the first time in 2006 I was in love with the city.  Coming from a chilly Chinese provincial city the cosmopolitan delights and humid tropical climate of Bangkok, 曼谷 in Chinese, were balm to my dry soul.  At the time, I had only heard people’s negative thoughts on the city, so I came pretty much expecting such a trip.  Really though, all those negative-Nancys were plain wrong.  Bangkok is awesome.

Now, that first trip was in October, when the overloaded Thai tourist season had yet to get into full gear, on my trip last month I arrived in the middle of the Great White Northern invasion.  The long bus ride from my plane to the Bangkok terminal went past rows and rows of airplanes all from countries that are thoroughly nontropical: Swedish Airways, Finnish Airways, American, Japan Air, Swiss Air, Air France, etc etc.  The Bangkok international airport, which had been open for merely one week when I had arrived in 2006, was packed to the gills with these pale visitors, all waiting in line for the tropical bliss that Thailand is so well known for.

I was only in Bangkok for a night, not really enough time to do the city justice.  However, since I had done all the must-see touristy spots on my last trip I was free to just wander and eat whatever came my way.  I did have three goals for my time in the city, 1) visit iberry 2) ride the canal boats and 3) eat a lot of amazing street food.  I was able to do the first two well, though my ignorance of the Thai language and Thai cuisine kept me from experiencing Bangkok’s fascinating food scene beyond the basic dishes we all know.  Tragic, I know.  After living in China for so long, a country where my language skills can get me through most situations, it was painful being in a country where I could not communicate in the local language.  I could see myself being lumped together with all the other tourists that come to Thailand, and I hated it.

Getting back to what I wanted to do in the city, ice cream was first and foremost in my mind.  For those of you not in the know iberry is a Bangkok based ice cream and sorbet company.  I had heard the greatest praise for their unique creations from all corners of the food-centric internet.  Ramblingspoon, Eating Asia, and Gourmet magazine have all scooped on accolades for this place.  Being a devout fan of all things ice cream related and tired of the expensive so-so offerings here in China it was a total pleasure to check out this spot.

I tried their sorbet in Bangkok and later their ice cream in the southern Thai city of Trang.  The sorbets were delicious, albeit not world changing.  The flavors were enticing and definitely not your everyday American offerings, where sorbet has always been given back seat to ice cream.  With flavors like pomelo, gooseberry, mangosteen, banana, guava, and tamarind it can be a challenge deciding what to order.  I opted for three kinds of sorbet: something called Blue Havana, a passion fruit sorbet, and a scoop of salted plum sorbet.  The first two were fantastic but the salted plum was just too salty for my tastes.  But how could I resist something as exotic as salted plum?  Though I will say that mixing the passion fruit and salted plum together was a cool combination.  I only wish Shanghai had a branch so I could methodically try every flavor they make.

The sorbet offerings at a downtown Bangkok iberry (the ice cream was another section that was just as big)

Traveling via Bangkok’s canals was just something I had enjoyed doing last time I was in the city and wanted to try again.  Something about boats as a means of public transportation have always intrigued me.  Bangkok is the only city that I know of that has very popular cheap public transportation on its canals and rivers (Hong Kong has the Star Ferry, which I guess could count even though it goes across a harbor, and as far as I remember Venice’s gondolas were largely used by tourists not local Venetians).  Bangkok is a very wet city (just try watching the streets turn into canals during the monsoon season) and in the past it had been host to an extensive canal system, which has since been almost completely paved over and turned into roads.  On a small number of the few remaining canals and on the large Chao Praya river that bisects the city cheap public boats still carry a mixed collection of local Bangkokers (is that the right word?), foreign European tourists and orange robed monks, who incidentally have their own section on the boat in the Chao Praya ferries.

The canals are a great way to get around if they’re near you and your destination (they’re often not) and even the act of waiting on the docks by the smelly opaque waters of the canals can be enjoyable, what with the little shops and abundant tropical foliage that can be found there.  All in all the canals are a nice way to forget that you are walking around a congested urban metropolis.

An orchid at a canal ferry dock

Updated 3/13: Embarassing grammatical mistakes fixed.

I don’t highlight my culinary adventures enough on this blog, a shame really.  Mostly I cook at home, which for me is like a glass of wine and a bout of meditation (i.e., relaxing).  And while I love to cook this isn’t a food blog, my meals are for me and me alone.  Though there are a couple things I need to get off my chest.  First, I love my roommate.  I am truly blessed by living with an amazing Japanese woman who loves to cook.  She has opened my eyes and mouth to many amazing Japanese dishes that I had never tried before and I am constantly learning new cooking techniques.  She is from the city of Sendai, which is north of Tokyo.  Her idea of comfort food has been a nice counterpoint to the American/Italian food I often make and the Chinese food all around us; sushi making parties and savory Japanese beef stews have become common at my home.  And get this, she loves flower arranging and makes sure that every room in the house has a fresh bouquet at all times.  She is, in my mind, one of the best roomates ever.  She is also a big fan of trying Chinese food recipes, like me, and sometimes will splurge on something really indulgents that she lets me devour.  Two weeks ago it was salted caramel popcorn covered in chocolate (amazing) and avocados (expensive), and last week she purchased two hairy crabs and steamed them up for us.

Hairy crab, aka the mitten crab, aka 大闸蟹 (big sluice crab), aka 上海毛蟹 (Shanghai hairy crab).  What is that, you ask?  Hairy crabs are the top culinary item from Shanghai.  Shanghai may be famous for it’s soup dumplings, wide array of seafood and subtly flavored cuisine, but as far as culinary items actually from this region, hairy crabs are number one.  Unlike the lobster found in New England these crabs spend most of their time in freshwater and in China are largely limited to one area of lakes and estuaries around Shanghai.  The most famous of these lakes is Yangcheng lake (阳澄湖), where the annual crab harvest (September-November) is celebrated with great enthusiasm here in Shanghai.

Being such a delicacy the crabs can fetch outrageous prices in restaurants, and nearly every one of the city’s restaurant seems to have some crab special during the fall.  I am not a rich man, so the thousands of crab advertisments around the city have been nothing but a slap in the face for me.  Being the holy grail of Shanghai cuisine and one of my all time favorite crustaceans (it’s hard to admit it, but sometimes I wonder if I in fact like crab more than New England lobster).  As usual my roommate made my day and bought two to steam ‘em up for a nice dinner.

They are called hairy crabs because of the lumps of hair growing on their claws.  These look like smudges of dark brown oil paint on a painter’s palette, or maybe the thick noxious algae that grows on the bottom of boats.  Even though the claws are covered in something that can’t really be called hair the legs are, in fact, pretty hairy, so I guess we’re okay.  Eating these expensive highly sought after delicacies is a pain in the ass.  While using scissors, knives, forks, my teeth, and hands to pry the tiny little bits of meat from the creature I couldn’t help but think how easy it is to eat a lobster.  My roommate was all about eating the crab’s grotesque inner organs, it’s an Asian thing.  Me, not so much.  One bite of the thick waxy orange goop and I was running to the kitchen for something to take the nasty flavor out of my mouth.  Luckily the meat was actually amazing in all respects.  Taking my roommate’s cue, I used a dipping sauce of about equal parts soy sauce and Chinese black vinegar (something I will definitely be using with lobster back in New England).  Once you pry the meat from the creature (make sure not to get any crab “hair” with it) eating it is a pleasure.  Sweet with a texture that is world’s away from overcooked lobster tail, it was divine.  However, I already loved crab before trying the famous hairy crab and I’m still not really sure what the big difference is.  It was delicious though.

Another culinary thing I’ve been up to lately is eating too many Beard Papa’s.  The company really makes only one product (they do other stuff but no one cares): a pate choux pastry puff filled all the way with a luscious thick creme anglaise (other lesser flavors also available).  It was love at first sight, much like me and Krispy Kreme (which, coincidentally, just opened their first Shanghai store).  Beard Papas is a Japanese company that I first came in contact with in Beijing back in 2004 as a slacker high school exchange student, you can smell the butter goodness a mile away.  I hear they exist in America as well but I have only seen them in Shanghai and Beijing, which is a shame really.  Back in 2004 the name made us fans of the place even before we tried the product – it’s quite a memorable name with a Japanese-style cutesy logo of a bearded fisherman.  When you do finally get to the front of the line and nab a Beard Papa’s and bite into its crackly puffy exterior and enter the reservoir of sweet custard that fills its innards – it’s almost too much.  It’s like a creme brule to-go, except you are hard pressed to buy just one, or two or three….  I’ve found through exhausting experimentation that if you fill up on the first couple that you bought the extra one can go into the freezer for a late night snack.  Let it thaw for a few minutes and eat with knife and fork, delicious.

Cold steamed pumpkin with jujube

Cold cucumber with hoisin sauce

Stir fried celery with lotus bulb

Hot and spicy deep fried potato slivers

Red braised pork belly

“Dry” hot pot of chicken with wild mountain mushrooms

Numbing and hot shrimp

It was a good meal.  A friend of mine had ordered the red braised pork belly (红烧肉) due to some genetic issue he has with eating protein, he kept saying that since the dish is mostly fat he would be okay.  I wasn’t sure about that line of reasoning or whether or not the dinner needed a dish so completely and utterly rich and over the top.  Good Chinese food, as usual, proved me wrong.  This was by far the best red braised pork belly I’ve ever had.  It would have been welcome by both the American barbecuing elite and Mao Zedong, conversly it would have made any cardiologist pale with fear.  This dish, the last one to come after we had already plowed through the rest, was in a pot stuck in the top of a large cermaic flower vase and looked utterly impressive at the table.  The dish was about a half dozen massive hunks of pig fat streaked with the most amazing tender meat at the bottom all covered in a dark red sauce more confouding than even the most elaboprate Oaxacan mole.  Each hunk was about the size of your average paper cup, i.e. unnervingly large.  They had been cooked for so long that with the smallest amount of pressure from your chopsticks the whole thing gushed molten fat like a sponge sitting in a bucket, the meat flaked off at the slightest movement and held flavors that left you at first ooohing and then in silent appreciation.  It was the definition of luscious.  My small bowl was literally covered in half an inch of fat after eating two hunks.  A perfect dish for Thanksgiving.

The Friday after Thanksgiving I had been invited by a friend to an American Thanksgiving.  The friend in question was not someone I knew liked to cook so I was expecting something more like an open bar with some cheese and crackers.  In fact it turned out to be the best Thanksgiving I’ve ever had outside of my mother’s dining room.  The meal was held at another friend’s new apartment.  He had just moved into a grand place over looking Xujiahui (徐家汇), which can easily be compared to Times Square in New York and is the city’s premier shopping destination with about a dozen different China-sized malls in the neighborhood.  At night it is a flashy capitalistic orgy and from my friends living room we looked over it all.  Without a doubt the best apartment view in Shanghai I’ve seen yet.

When I arrived I found three of my friends, all dudes, working feverishly in the kitchen.  It became clear that this meal would be much much more than just an open bar.  I of course tried to lend a hand, but the kitchen was small and men’s kitchen egos are large (especially when cooking prized family recipes), so I stayed in the dining room with the women uncorking wine bottles and talking about why Thanksgiving is so important to Americans.  Around eight or nine o’clock the dinner was ready and the guests, buzzed on wine, sat to eat.  And oh what a dinner it was!

One 13 pound turkey, perfectly roasted and served with homemade gravy (I made the gravy)

Roasted cauliflower and roasted broccoli

Roasted garlic mashed potatoes

Creamed spinach with buttery crumb topping

Vegetarian stuffing

Crusty French baguette and eight bottles of fine red wine (mostly from Argentina and Spain)

Pumpkin pie

Every single dish came out beautifully and in appropriately American sized portions (they’re were only 8 of us, though we could have fed many more).  The only tragedy of the night was a magnum of champagne put in the freezer to cool that had exploded while we ate, not that we needed more wine on top of all that red.  The turkey was juicy and had crispy skin (this was achieved without a meat thermometer) and everything else was done well and done with lots of butter (two interchangeable comments).  It was the first Thanksgiving for two Chinese women and one Catalonian woman at the table and they all loved it immensely, which made us Americans proud.  We each said what we were thankful for, per tradition, and repeatedly clinked our wine glasses together in good cheer.  It was all in all a perfect Thanksgiving meal among friends.

One of the most interesting table discussions was about the fruit vender who had supplied the turkey and other hard-to-find American food items.  Apparently there is a fruit stand in the neighborhood that, while looking no different from the fruit stands one is used to in China, is actually a foreign gourmet’s treasure trove.  The middle aged Chinese women who runs it knows which way the wind blows and keeps the stand stocked in items that the foreigners in the neighborhood seek out, and if she doesn’t have it she knows a guy who knows a guy who can deliver it.  I have not been, but from what I heard that night you can not only buy 13 pound turkeys, but also mozzarella di bufala, fresh thyme and rosemary, capers, sundried tomatoes, and much more.  The hilarious thing is that she doesn’t speak any English yet still has an encyclopedic knowledge of Western foods.  She has a bulging heavily bookmarked book on American cuisine that serves as her bible and textbook and from which she studiously reads daily.  So while she can’t talk about the weather she knows exactly what arugula and gouda cheese are and how you can serve them.  I look forward to having the pleasure of meeting this woman.

Rapeseed in early Spring, Hunan

Food is reason enough to live in China.  I can eat dynamite soup dumplings right in my neighborhood and then get a chocolate filled croissant for dessert.  What a world!  Less wonderful is what the inescapable effect of China’s economic development, massive population, and never ending migration of young people to cities (the largest migration in human history!) is having on the environment and food systems on which we depend on here.  If you have read books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma or seen the recent documentary Food Inc., then you know that America’s food systems are killing us and the earth we live on, while also endangering workers’ lives and making agriculture a mundane and economically in-viable enterprise.  There’s no question that we have our problems back in the States.

More worrying is the fact that China, a country about 4 times the size of ours, is willingly emulating our disastrous practices.  You see it in the faces of Chinese kids begging their parents to take them to a packed KFC for some fried chicken, you can see it in the rural towns populated with only grandparents and babies where vegetables are grown using chemical pesticides and fertilizers on ancient fields that cover every available space (the young adults are all off working in factories and cities on the coast), you can even see it in the supermarkets of Shanghai, which are filled with expensive processed foods, endless shelves of soda and fruits imported from far away countries.  Now, America still has a monopoly on having the unhealthiest, fattest, most environmentally degrading food systems on the planet, but the pace of change in China seems to be causing a whole lot of problems over here, many which may never be rectified.

Speaking of the utter destruction of the environment from which we will never recover, you simply MUST check out the amazing photography of Lu Guang.  Lu has been documenting the effects of the rape of mother nature happening everyday in China, while keeping a keen eye on how environmental destruction affects people’s lives.  Lu also won this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography from the Asia Society in New York and has been getting a bit of press because of this (hello New York Times!).  Dear reader, take a minute and look at these pictures and feel horrible for the rest of your day, especially if you live in China.  By the way, the water of both the Yellow and Yangtze rivers is now too polluted to even be used for agricultural irrigation, but I just got a plastic Hello Kitty toy in my box of cereal today, so no worries!  Bostonians are welcome to go drink a cup of the Charles river while they ponder such environmental issues.

Now lets take a 180 and talk about something that doesn’t want to make you vomit and worry about your unborn child’s future: organic gardening.  I recently read an article on the China Study Group about a host of new organic community supported agriculture programs in China, though the article mostly focuses on one based in a village outside the city of Chengdu (I gotta thank Danwei for the heads up on this).  There seven families in Anyang village are growing vegetables organically (though they are unregistered, apparently it’s hard to get that in China) and they then market these vegetables to urban residents.  This project was started by the efforts of a Chinese NGO, as the article says:

This project was first initiated by the Chengdu Urban Rivers Association – an NGO spun off of the Chengdu government’s 10 year project to clean up the rivers in 2003. CURA discovered that 60% of the remaining pollution was coming from agro-chemicals, so it embarked on a project to promote organic farming in the villages upstream from Chengdu, starting with Anlong village in Pi County as a pilot site. In 2005 CURA met with the villagers and began to work out a project, starting with 20 volunteer households. Originally they didn’t focus on marketing or certification, since these households farmed mainly for use, relying on migrant labor and business for cash income. But several households decided to use their organic-ness as a selling point for marketing their produce, and after a couple years of experimentation, worked out an arrangement that cosmopolitan NGO supporters likened to the North American “CSA” system, but seems to me more like European experiments with “social agriculture,” in that the farmers….are trying to make their relations with consumers more than one-dimensional buyer-seller relations by developing friendships with consumers and periodically organizing open-house events in the village, where the farmers teach the city-slickers how to farm.

While organic community supported agriculture is great, it is a very small part of China’s vast food systems, most of the country eats food that is produced in ways that are not environmentally friendly and that are often not safe or clean.  One thing is for sure though, China does not waste food, or anything for that matter, the way we do in America.  One common example is the way restaurants in China dispose of food scraps and leftovers.  In restaurants all over the country the leftovers and scraps are put into big plastic barrels that are picked up at the end of the day by some poor soul who takes the barrels to farms where the scraps are fed to pigs, at least that’s the explanation I had always heard.  So I was surprised and disgusted to find on ChinaSmack that this is not always the case.

In a story called, “Discarded Food Waste Slop Recycled into Cooking Oil,” a set of completely vomit-worthy photographs shows how some people in the city of Wuhan, in Hubei province, have been dumping food slop into big tanks where they skim off the used oil and lightly filter it for use in cooking.  Don’t worry though, the people doing it say, “Slop oil is safe to eat.”  I’m all for recycling and reusing materials, but this is just disgusting.  There are many cases of food production in China that are less than clean, I’ve personally seen some of them, though for me this one takes the cake.

I guess, even though it wasn’t planned, this post ended up a little one-sided.  While there are good strategies being developed when it comes to food and the environment in China, and though these days you will find a healthy paunch on a chunk of China’s population that makes photographs taken a hundred years ago of China’s working poor look alien, even with all of that the future doesn’t look good.  The expensive gourmet hamburgers and imported Belgian beer I can find in today’s Shanghai feel less like an example of humankind’s path to a better future, but rather more like a shining example of opulence and prosperity that we may never see again, a Pax Romana for our age.

According to a gathering of agronomists and development experts in Rome this month we need to increase food production by 50% over the next 20 years just to make sure people don’t start starving to death and in 4o years we will have to feed 9.1 billion people, a 70% increase in food production (via the NYTimes).  When I look out at the mountains of Hunan and see that every possible inch is being used for agriculture or when after asking my students in Huaihua if they think that the polluted river running through their home city (like rivers in 90% of Chinese cities) will be clean enough for their children to swim in or their children’s children and all I get is a dead silence, I get worried.  The bad thing is its not even China we have to worry about the most, this is after all a country whose population will start to decline after 2050 (if policies stay where they are), but rather all the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.  The famed Green Revolution that brought super-sized rice and wheat to the world has done a lot to end world hunger and allow for the economic growth we’ve seen over the last 60 odd years, but it will only do so much.  Lets not even ponder the myriad human rights, medical and military issues that a starving planet can bring up.  I can’t help but feel that I’m going to see a lot of sad things in my lifetime.

Monsieur, qu’est-ce que tu veux manger?

I despise the term foodie.  You may have heard it before, it’s that of-the-moment word used to describe everyone from four star chefs and food bloggers (even those explaining how to make stir-fried tofu) to people that like to cook at home and watch Top Chef.  Back in the ’90s we didn’t seem to have such an insipid term, of course we didn’t have as much of a love of everything food related then, either.  At the house of my childhood, with it’s wonderfully overflowing bookcases of classic cookbooks (think: The Joy of Cooking, The Moosewood Cookbook, The Silver Palette Cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, etc.), the word gourmet was the only term I ever learned for those people that truly love to cook and eat.  And, lets be honest, gourmet never seemed to be the proper term for a thirteen year old boy trying (and failing) to make puff pastry by hand in July.  The word still fits me like an oversize suit tailored for a French aristocrat, perhaps one made for the the likes of Curnonsky.

Before I get to the Chinese language bit I must confess my absolute love of restaurant reviews, which is how I got started writing this post in the first place.  There was a time, about the time of that puff pastry debacle, when I loved to eat out.  There’s a spectacle to eating out at a nice restaurant, much like going to see a great play on opening night.  There’s an excitement to it, people look good, the table is clean and bright, everyone is nice to you, and you don’t really know how everything will turn out until the end of the show.  I just loved it.  I’m still reminded of those days when I read this blog.

Since my days as a teenager dining snob and wannabe French chef (I was way too messy to even be trying to achieve such a status), my thoughts have changed.  College taught me, in no uncertain terms, how expensive it can be to dine out when your parents aren’t paying and I also discovered that when you come home after months spent far away you really don’t want a break from your mother’s cooking, you want it night after night.  Living in a dorm, then in off-campus housing, and finally in Chinese apartments my idea of what makes for a good home cooked meal also changed from my younger days, now all I want is something flavorful and easy that uses cheap ingredients in smart ways.  Even though these days I really don’t eat out much, unless it’s a special meal, I still love to read restaurant reviews.  I love to read about food, it’s anendlessly enjoyable pastime.   Unfortunately, this habit has often put in in contact with the dreaded f-word I just mentioned.

With the rise of the internet I am no longer limited to the New York Times dining section when I look for reviews to read.  I can read and even listen (podcasts!) to restaurant reviews all the time now, and I do.  My Google Reader list of food blogs and the like is over 30 deep right now and will no doubt only grow.  For the record (and in my opinion), the best restaurant reviews are: the New Yorker’s Tables for Two (you can pop them like candy), Jonathan Gold’s spoken reviews on the Good Eats podcast (he does great written reviews for the LA Weekly as well), and anything coming out of the New York Times.  A quick note about the Times.  While Frank Bruni, the eponymous example of what a restaurant critic should be, may be no longer writing reviews (check out this great dinner conversation with him on Eater) I know that the paper will continue its tradition of great food writing.  By the way, this is only the top of my list, but I didn’t write this post to recommend places to read restaurant reviews so let’s move on.

The other day, while I was wasting time at work by reading reviews of restaurants that I will never get to visit, I came upon the term foodie in a review.  As I said earlier, I really dislike this term (this book bothers me to no end) and as it turns out I’m not alone in my feelings.  Sitting at my desk I began to think about the other offerings there are in the English language for a person that loves to cook and eat: gourmand, gastronome, gourmet, epicurean, epicure, cook, etc.  But then it hit me that I don’t live in an English speaking country.  I had never bothered to figure out what terms Chinese people use to describe folks like me and the gourmands and chefs I look up to.  So I quickly opened up my Chinese dictionary and clicked over to some online dictionaries to see what I could dig up that would do the job without sounding so damn cutesy.  As is often the case with Chinese food related vocabulary, the offerings were far more extensive than what you would find in any European language, even French.

The words I discovered basically fall into two categories: people who have discerning taste in food and gluttons.  The words for glutton being far more interesting linguistically.  One of the things that I find fascinating about the Chinese language is the way its words can be very practical and formulaic but can also be highly poetic and grounded in stories from China’s history.  An example of the former category includes words such as the first on this list, 美食家, which as a math equation would read: beautiful + food + expert.  That’s easy enough to understand.  On the other end of the spectrum are words that are highly poetic, metaphorical and/or related to China’s past.  One word I recently learned in this vein stands for solar eclipse, 日食, which comes out as “eating the sun.”  While all this diversity can make one feel that learning the language is an insurmountable task, lets not even talk about the characters, it also means that there will always be a new and interesting part of the language for you to learn no matter how long you live.  And that’s comforting knowledge my friends.  So here it is, how to say gourmand in Chinese:

美食者 & 美食家

měishízhě & měishíjiā
Lit. One who like delicious food, one who is an expert of delicious food
> Gourmand, gourmet, food critic.

讲究饮食者 &  讲究吃的人

jiǎngjiuyǐnshízhě & jiǎngjiuchīderén
Lit. One who is particular about food, drink and diet, one who is particular about what they eat
> Gourmet, gastronome

好食者

hǎoshízhě
Lit. One who likes good food
> Gourmet, gourmand

饕餮

tāotiè
Lit. A ferocious mythical creature with a huge appetite
> A person who loves to eat, a glutton, a voracious eater, a fierce and cruel person

This creature is so interesting I have to add to its definition.  The Taotie is one of the ancient 四凶 (Four Friends) all of whom are mythical Chinese creatures and whose history dates back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties.  The other three creatures represent chaos, ignorance, and deviousness.  In those days geometric designs of Taotie’s face were used in molds for the famous Ding bronze vessels made at the time (the picture at the beginning of this post is a depiction of Taotie on an ancient Chinese bronze ding).  Taotie is said to have had the features of many animals including: sheep, ox, deer, tigers, and wolves, and his voice was suppossed to sound like that of an infant child.  Some say that Taotie’s image is in reference to Chi You, the war deity who fought the mythical Yellow Emperor, because Chi You would behead people for being greedy (sometimes Taotie is described as having a head and no body) and therefore the Taotie motif would serve as a warning.  Taotie’s meaning is not well understood today, though whatever these creatures stand for they still make ancient China out to be a mystical land that would make even Middle Earth look boring.

贪食者

tānshízhě
Lit. One who is greedy with food
> A glutton

嘴馋 &  馋嘴

zuǐchán & chánzuǐ
Lit. Greedy mouth, piggish mouth
> To be gluttonous, to be fond of good food
(Interesting that this verb is a palindrome, an odd rarity in Chinese)

馋鬼

chánguǐ
Lit. Greedy devil
> A glutton

馋猫

chánmāo
Lit. Greedy cat
> A glutton

狼獾

lánghuān
Lit. Wolf badger
> A glutton

Frank Bruni dressed as a 饕餮?

China is a fruit lovers paradise.  On almost every city block in every Chinese city you are bound to find a few of the same shops: a noodle place, hair salon, newspaper stand, and a fruit shop.  Though China largely lacks the European pleasures of small specialized cheese shops, decent bakeries, or wine shops the country makes up for it with its own Chinese style specialized food shops.  There’s the Chinese medicine shops lined with rows and rows of small wooden drawers filled with exotic dried herbs, the tofu shop, the noodle shop, in Hong Kong there are shops that sell only dried seafood specialties like shark fin, and maybe the greatest of them all the fruit shop.  You can literally tell what time of year it is by looking at what is on sale at the fruit shops and in the wet markets.  While America has great fruit when you shop at a farmers market most people buy their fruit at supermarkets where the fruit has most likely been shipped from some far off country where they breed the flavorless fruit to survive the long journey and weeks spent on a shelf.  China has that same sad fruit but they definitely appreciate the better stuff and the fact that every block in my Shanghai neighborhood has its own large fruit shop testifies to the Chinese people’s appreciation of good fruit.  No fruit sums this up more so than the water honey peach (水蜜桃), the world’s greatest peach.

I have long known about this famous peach that comes to market in July and August but being a New England boy peaches are not always my first choice when it comes to fruit.  My past year in Hunan the fruits I regularly are were mostly watermelons, other assorted melons (especially the amazing 哈密瓜), mangosteens (illegal in America), bananas, wax berries (杨梅), apples, dragonfruit, lychees, and most importantly the great (and cheap) mandarin oranges grown all over western Hunan.  But that was Hunan.  Shanghai in the summer is the land of peaches.  The rural areas of Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province to the west of the city are where the world’s best peaches are grown.

To be honest I didn’t know this until today when when I was reading the New York Times Dining section’s blog and stumbled upon a link to a Wall Street Journal article about these amazing peaches.  All over eastern Asia fruit is highly prized for its taste and medical benefits, and the prices reflect this attitude.  My year of teaching in Hunan often meant that my throat suffered and my Chinese coworkers always told me to eat pears, since they are good for the throat.  During the dark days of Mao’s reign to buy a watermelon in China one needed a doctor’s prescription.

So after reading the article I immediately went out into Shanghai’s heat and humidity and walked half a block to the nearest fruit shop.  They had four different varieties of water honey peaches, differentiated by where they were grown.  The largest and most beautiful were from Yangshan, each individually wrapped in a thin protective sheaf of Styrofoam.  The price tag was 16.8 rmb/jin ($5/kilogram), far more than the other peaches.  I only wanted to buy one amazing peach so the price tag didn’t faze me.  My big peach cost $1.60.  Small price to pay for a peach that cannot be bought outside of eastern China (they ripen too quickly and are too thin skinned to survive the journey to America).

I rushed it back to my apartment where I got a knife and my camera and started eating.  Cutting into the flesh you see that it starts from blood red at the pit and moves out into almost translucent white flesh.  It was unlike any peach I’ve had before.  At first I thought that it was too subtly flavored to be considered the world’s greatest peach but then as I chewed the fruit opened itself to me with the most amazing flavor and fragerance.  Eating this peach elicited a strong sensory memory for me: it is like walking into a florists cooler as the multi-toned fragerances of the roses surround you and bring you to a happier place.  It also reminded me of walking into a humid greenhouse in the middle of winter and smelling the tropical flowers in all their earthly beauty or even the rose perfume shop my family and I visited in Giza Egypt.  I’ve been slowly savoring my peach as I’ve been writing this and there is now no doubt in my mind that the water honey peach is the world’s greatest.  I’m already making plans to buy some and make a batch of peach sorbet with the ice cream maker I lugged from America.  Is there anything better sounding for August in Shanghai?

How much does it cost?  I don’t know but more than I would ever pay, that’s for sure.  The sad creature is a stinging reminder that the Chinese often enjoy eating the rare and expensive just because they are that, rare and expensive.  The southern Chinese have reputation for this, one I’m afraid is well deserved (I even ate a viper’s gall bladder once, not to mention muntjac and stone frog).

Is this a sign that Huaihua is becoming a developed city?  I think so.   When you have customers in a landlocked province willing to buy sea turtles for dinner there must some well-heeled people living in the neighborhood.   One of those weird culinary signs that life is changing here.  This can also be seen in the city’s first McDonalds being built and the new French wine bar that just opened.

Dinner?

While living in America can sometimes make me a bit of hypochondriac, traveling outside of the country I am bizarrely less worried about getting sick.  My time in China has been a good example of me laughing in the face of illness.  I, of course, wash my hands here in China, but there is never any soap to use (if there is it has been watered down for weeks and can no longer be called soap).  People cough, sneeze and spit in all directions without any thought of using a tissue, but I don’t let that worry me.  Anti-Malaria medicine hasn’t been in my mouth since 2002 when I went to Belize and Guatemala and discovered I hate Anti-Malaria medicine.  To be fair Malaria is not really a problem in most parts of China but can sometimes be found in Xishuangbanna and Laos, where I just came from.  When my American hometown ended its Beijing exchange program early in 2003 because of the SARS crisis I thought they were being a bit too careful.

My casual nature overseas is even more apparent in the way I eat.  America is a bureaucracy that loves to regulate and centralize its food systems.  Restaurants are frequently inspected, forced to buy expensive equipment to deal with stuff like grease and the possibility of fire, and are in general expensive propositions for the owners.  These safeguards make us feel safe but they also limit the choices of what and where we can eat.  People far too often go to chain restaurants with a lame variety of dishes that are unhealthy for them and the enviroment.  So many restaurants fail to make a sustainable business and many are forced to close down just months after opening.  Not only that but the financial costs of opening a restaurant limit who can do so and therefore keep great cooks from ever sharing their cuisines with the greater community. Can you tell I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s fantastic book The Ominivores Dilemma?

Food is and will always be one of the reasons I love Asia.  Anyone who has a bit of money, some cooking skills and a strong spirit can open a restaurant or cart selling whatever they want to.  The sheer variety and number of restaurants in China makes every time I go out to eat lunch an adventure (and a cheap one at that).

Stomach aches, diarrhea, vomiting and other ills are a natural byproduct of such a open and diverse food system, but it’s not as common as you would think (I have never had to use the Immodium AD I brought with me to China).  I am of the opinion that the Chinese and Asian food systems are in many ways better than the American version.  This thinking on my part is not limited to restaurants but also encompasses the produce markets, butchers, tofu makers, noodle makers, and local distilleries that are found all over the place including within a 15 minute walk from my apartment. The vegetables, fruit and meat that I eat and cook with in Hunan are for the most part locally produced, processed, and sold.  When I go to my local wet market to buy tofu or some spinach – a completely different experience from the way we buy food in the States – I know where my money is going and who is doing the work.  When you buy a bag of organic baby spinach in Boston that was grown in Arizona using machines and Mexican labor you have very little idea of where it came from or how your money is being divided.  This is why I love markets, whether its a farmers market in Burlington Vermont or my local wet market in Huaihua.

This thinking of mine was dealt a heavy blow when I read that the H5N1 Bird Flu, which had been absent (or maybe just unreported) in China since February 2007 came back with vengeance during the first month of this year.  Of the first four killed this year (the number of fatalities has since grown to eight) one was a 16 year old boy in Huaihua, Hunan.  Just to make this very clear, Huaihua is where I live and teach.  It is a city of 2-3 million people (maybe more) who are largely not rich, it is also only 10 years old and growing at a frantic Chinese pace.  Needless to say the city is full of chickens, no doubt some of them sick with the flu.  Huaihua is also a railway hub and gets thousands and thousands of vistors passing through every month.  During the Chinese New Year these numbers swelled, as with every other part of China.

This boy was from Guizhou province (a mere hour away by car or train from Huaihua) and came to Huaihua because of the better medical care, in fact I would bet money that he went to the city’s best military hospital where they don’t allow foreigners to enter the premises.  He was one of only 4 people 8 people to have had died from the H5N1 Bird Flu in this new year in China, though there are upwards of 30 people infected by it.  Man, I mean, of all the Chinese cities in the world he had to die in mine?!

Reading the story I was reminded of my frequent trips to my local wet market.  The poultry section in particular where they kill the chickens, ducks and geese.  The cement floor is wet and slimy from fish scales, blood or unknown origin and feathers, lots and lots of feathers.  I once got a Chicken feather stuck in my nose.  When you buy a chicken (or duck or goose) they pull it out from a crowded pen made of an oversized basket turned upside down and walk it to the killing area.  Here they deftly slit the neck of the bird and collect the blood in a little plastic bag as it runs out so that you, the consumer, can use it in your cooking.  Then the bird is scalded in a pot over a little coal fired stove that looks like a British tax man that was given the tar and feathers treatment during the American Revolution.  Then the bird is plucked and tied up by its feet so you can hang it from your bicycle on your ride home.  Everything and everyone seems to be covered in bird.

Bird Flu cannot be transmitted from human to human only from a sick bird to a human.  You cannot get the disease by eating cooked chicken in a restaurant, only from the living bird itself.  So while I think I’ll continue eating Kungpao chicken I don’t think I should hang around the chicken killing area of my local market anymore.

This news as odd timing for me because I’ve been planning for months to buy and slaughter a chicken on my own.  I love cooking and feel that they way we eat is one of the best ways to help the environment and connect with nature.  In America it is not easy to slaughter a chicken on your own, especially in the suburbs.  So it seemed to make sense to try it out here in China where such a ritual is practiced everyday by millions of people.  I kept thinking about all the knowledge I would gain and how such an exercise would force me to use every part of the animal.  My dream was so well thought out I even studied how to slaughter a chicken and decided on a name for the bird: Dinner.

Now the news is just getting worse and after a autumn spent reading about tainted Chinese milk I’m not sure I can just continue ignoring the problems with food here in China.  Most disheartening is that I am now scared to cook with poultry and even just thinking about going to the market gives me pause.

Then a couple days ago I read this article in which Lo Wing Lok, a Hong Kong government adviser on infectious diseases, said:

“There’s no doubt of an outbreak of bird flu in China, though the government hasn’t admitted it.  Inefficient communication between the Hong Kong and mainland authorities is an ongoing problem. Hong Kong has not been well-informed by the mainland.”

Wow.  So now I keep wondering where this new food crisis will go and what it means for the people of China and me.  What a great way to start the new year!

Every now and then I buy some Chinese wine.  It it easy to find, cheap and makes for a great gift.  I spend between 25 and 40 rmb ($2 – $3.25), which no doubt partially explains the bad quality of the wine I drink.  When I used to live in Kunming my roommate and I often happily drank Yunnan dry red wine, a nice dry table wine.  Most days now I stay far away from the stuff.  You never know if the wine will be good or if it will fall flat (finding a good wine is often due to luck since the price tag has little to do with how good the wine is).

So it was with some surprise that I read this article in the New York Times Magazine about the future of the Chinese wine industry.

In May, Berry Brothers & Rudd, England’s oldest independent wine merchant, dropped an oenological bombshell. In its “Future of Wine Report,” it predicted that in 50 years, China would be the world’s leading wine producer. What’s more, noting China’s favorable soil, low labor costs and soaring domestic demand for wine, the authors concluded that China has “all the essential ingredients to make fine wine to rival the best of Bordeaux.”

I guess to drink some good Chinese wine all one needs is a bit of patience, like all great wines.

The dinner quickly reached a level of craziness that I do not normally get to experience here in China.  The culprit: wine.  Usually beer and baijiu (an evil 100 proof sorghum liquor) are what Chinese men want to drink.  However our obviously well-off host bought wine, around 15 bottles worth, because he told me teachers can’t take baijiu.  While that is true for the most part and though I have a deep rooted fear and hatred of baijiu I’m not sure wine was a better choice.  In America and Europe we sip wine, getting our glasses filled halfway infrequently during a meal.  In China men like to drink wine the way American college students take shots of tequila during Spring Break.  Our glasses were never more than a gulp’s worth full and were constantly being refilled by the two waitresses that watched us closely the whole night.  We drank these tiny glasses of wine every couple minutes for hours.  I was surrounded by men with bright Rudolf’s nose red faces.

The conversation was all over the place and people were getting embarrassed by what the host was saying to me (we sat next to each other, seating was done by seniority).  I was told that I should find a Chinese girl and marry her, later someone shouted that I should find a Chinese girl and rape her.  The two female waitresses watched and listened stone faced.  People complained about China’s government, about the lack of democracy, and about the one child policy.  The host was particularly annoyed at this law, though he has two children, one of whom is living and working in the UK.  I gave a toast to the unity of China, this was in relation to Taiwan.  Play to people’s tastes, that’s what I say, especially when surrounded by drunk powerful Chinese men.

At some point a bowl of baijiu with a weird little dark green sack floating in it was placed in front of me.  No one knew how to say it in English, besides my friend who had been translating for me was wasted.  Today I learned that the weird little sack was in fact a viper’s gall bladder, fresh and raw from the viper we had just eaten.  Here is what they look like:

Then the waitress, who was in a fit of giggles the whole night, used a couple tooth picks to pierce the gall bladder and spill out its contents into the strong liquor.  The organ’s insides had an evil dark green shade, think the evil witch of the west.  I watched as the silty insides slowly permeated the whole bowl.  Everyone watched me stand up and shout out some deep throated manly toast before I downed the whole bowl, gall bladder and all.  Immediately a waitress gave me a big mug of green tea.  No one else had a big mug of tea and I think I caught a flash of pity on the waitress’ face as she walked away from me.  All in all I couldn’t be happier that I was lucky enough to drink a snake’s gall bladder, it was a kind gesture on the host’s part and one I won’t soon forget.

-A tamer version of my viper gall bladder cocktail

UPDATE:  You can buy your own snake wine here.