Nanjing people of all income groups eat well and often. There is no question of grabbing a hasty snack at your desk, even on fieldwork a good restaurant has to be found at 11.30 prompt, and the lunch break is up to 2 hours long. The Institute canteen serves a tasty 3 courses for 10 Yuan (a pound), which is where we eat every day. Families both home cook and frequent restaurants, canteens, dumpling bars and street cooks. The riceman cometh: some evenings, a guy on a bike announces his barrel of steamed rice for sale by knocking together a couple of coconut shells. The Chinese seem to consume gallons of high calorie oils from the humble rapeseed to the regal groundnut, plus tons of carbs in the form of rice, sweet potato, potato, and wheat in balls and dumplings, and yet they are nearly all thin.
Using chopsticks must be one reason; it slows you down. For some it may be too slow. We saw an adolescent boy today at lunch as we ate our bowl of noodles (chopstick level of difficulty 3 out of 4; soya bean in sauce is 4 ), eating rice with a spoon – a very unusual sight – and, yes, he was overweight. Chinese people eat far more varied protein sources and from most parts of the animal or vegetable, (garlic tops anyone?) but, whether animal or vegetable, they have to be fresh and often live. This may mean catching your own fish even at the local supermarket: no one would dream of buying a dead one. Small trucks and e-bikes bring in the food from the local farms to Nanjing’s daily markets: the supermarkets (mainly patronized by the young and time-poor) buy from there too and repackage. In short, consumers are much closer to food production than the industrialised food chains of the UK with our cold storage and transport systems, our processing and packaging, all held in a state of suspended animation until your intestinal tract gets them.
Turning off the East Beijing Rd on Monday night around 6pm, we unexpectedly found Mr Gao lying in wait who kindly invited us “you can come?” to his home for dinner and to meet his granddaughter Selina, (her English name) a keen English speaker aged 13. Up 4 flights to a bigger flat than ours, fifties style with a damask covered piano, there was his wife and daughter ready to serve us classic Nanjing food. John was seated pride of place under the ceiling fan at the head of the table, and we ate our way through the best meal we’ve had, carefully watched by our host and encouraged if we flagged; it is polite to overfeed your guests. Menu: crab and pork steamed balls (baozi); the live, tied up crab having been dispatched earlier in Mrs Gao’s kitchen; cubed cucumber and garlic in dressing; egg and tomato chopped omelette; fried onions and meat dumplings; pigeon soup with yam and ginger. A feast, and merrily followed by a group sing song with Mrs Gao at the piano playing “Auld Lang Syne” (plus actions) and “There’s no Place Like Home”. What a privilege. At home, we have taken to eating Peking Duck every Sunday, and also like tea flavoured boiled eggs, fried garlic tops, and a street-made cross between a pancake and omelette with various fillings (jian bing). Slightly more troublesome to the western palate are duck blood soup and chicken feet.
Of course the winds of change have been blowing for some years. Back in 2002 Shanghai: no bread, cheese, cakes, biscuits, processed cereal, and hardly any milk. Fast forward to 2014 Nanjing: chains include Bread Talk, Paris Baguette, KFC, and McDonalds. Cleverly, the last two were allowed to open here provided they modified their recipes to be more local to their region. Carrefour and Auchan sell cheese. There are 10 cake, biscuit and bread stores within a mile of us, and a new ice cream/milk shake bar opposite is very popular with Nanjing Secondary School pupils on their way home. Tins of biscuits and packaged sweets cover fill a whole aisle in Suguo. In addition, food Safety issues are big in China and trust can be lacking. How correct are the labels, what additives are included, how much fertilizer/pesticide is used on farms, how milky is the milk? (You may remember the case of baby deaths caused by melanin added to dried baby milk around 10 years ago). The demand for fancy and organic food is driven mainly by the expanding middle classes. To satisfy the growing market for milk, partly driven by the government to prevent rickets, “expat cows” are bred in Australia, transported to China, kept on certified farms and milked, before returning to Australia to breed anew. The government seems happy to look forward to a future of increasing imports of food as the population rises and diets change. Maybe just as well. Despite the new recruitment campaign to get young graduates into farming most farmers are old and work on small, unprofitable farms. But it would be a tragedy, especially for the young and slim Chinese, if, as one suspects will happen, western consumerism swamps the food culture as well as everything else.