Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (21 page)

In China natural methods are used to preserve foods, which are then used to enhance, not replace, a natural food diet. Some traditional processing methods can increase the nutrient value of foods. For example, many of the fermented pastes used in Chinese cooking have been found to contain vitamin B12, a nutrient many people lack. Additionally, these products help to achieve the balance of flavours I have already explained. Bamboo shoots, a source of silica, are preserved in salt water in the north of China, and is available all year round.

But the basis of the Chinese diet is freshly picked, freshly prepared foods. In China most people are still close to their food source. I was reminded of this every time we visited the home of the cheery Guo Gui Lan. By covering the distance of a medium-sized London commute (less than an hour’s drive) we entered another world, a world the Chinese call
nong cun
(peasant village) where extended families live off their neatly arranged smallholdings, and signs painted on redbrick walls encourage the population to ‘grow crops not children’.

Guo Gui Lan’s piercing black eyes danced out of her weather-beaten face and she smiled continually, setting wrinkles into her paper-thin skin. Like many Chinese people I met, she seemed oblivious to the temperature and always wore the same tweed jacket that only just met around her stout torso. While appearing unaffected by Beijing’s new prosperity, Guo Gui Lan knew how to take advantage of it. As well as running a roadside restaurant for people en route to the well-known Black Dragon Pool further up the road, Guo Gui Lan rented out rooms in the spacious peasant-style courtyard house which she shared with her diffident husband, whose name we never did learn, her son and daughter-in-law and a collection of motley dogs, some chickens and a pig.

Guo Gui Lan would always make it clear what she would prefer us to order from her seemingly extensive menu. On one occasion when she had convinced us that we really wanted fish, I wandered out towards the brick-built loo and found her dabbling around with a net in what looked like a drain just between the restaurant and the road. I wasn’t too worried, as I knew that wherever the drain went, it wasn’t connected to the loo – which was just a hole in the ground. But I was sufficiently curious to peer down the hole on my way back and saw that the water looked clean and fast flowing. I never did work out if the fish had swum up into it from the reservoir or if it had been put there earlier in the day, but it arrived flapping vigorously; no self-respecting Chinese chef would choose a fish that had been sitting around over one that had just been caught and dispatched. Later, lightly seasoned with ginger and spring onion, it simply melted in the mouth; everyone said it was delicious, and I said nothing.

The highlights of meals at Guo Gui Lan’s were always the vegetables. I loved to see what
ye cai
(‘wild vegetables’) were in season that month, and whether she would stir-fry them or serve then cold, lightly dressed with garlic and vinegar and a touch of sesame oil. Once she proudly showed us some chillies she had just harvested, asking if we liked them. ‘Oh yes!’ we cried enthusiastically, unaware that they were to be the main, if not the only ingredient of the finished dish. It was a dish that was surprisingly edible as the chillies, lightly stewed and tempered with sugar and vinegar, were pungent and flavoursome rather than ‘blow your head off ’ hot.

The chillies that Guo Gui Lan did not manage to push on to unsuspecting visitors would be hung up to dry in the sun for use throughout the winter. At different times of year all manner of other delicacies would be laid out in the sunshine: strips of radish, greens, fungus, aubergines, soya beans and even bright orange persimmon. Drying is a natural process that accords with the Five-Element cycle:
fire
is used to dry plants (
wood
) which are then revived by
water
. Dried foods, like the fermented and salted ingredients mentioned earlier, play an important role in enhancing Chinese cuisine, and often add interesting textures to dishes. Many great Western recipes are also dependent on dried ingredients such as herbs, olives, capers and sun-dried tomatoes, and these are worthy members of your store cupboard.

Drying foods appears not to compromise
qi
significantly, as my maggots were quick to recognize. Consumption of fresh food by animals, or humans for that matter, is also representative of the
fire
stage in the Five-Elements cycle: the digestive system burns food which is eventually excreted and returned to the earth.

Traditional preserving methods all use nature’s resources; modern processing and preserving practices do not. Extremes of temperature adulterate foods to the extent that the activity of the Five-Elements cycle is halted altogether. Take the processing of oil, which has recently been the subject of much publicity. Food scientists were thrilled to discover that by heating it to very high temperatures and hydrogenating, or partially hydrogenating it, they could prolong its shelf life almost indefinitely, thus producing all sorts of delicious treats. The problem is that hydrogenating oils changes their structure so that they are damaging, if not dangerous, to health.
⁹
To the Chinese mind it is completely obvious that heating oil to the temperatures needed to hydrogenate it would destroy its
qi
and make it inaccessible to the body. The first naturally pressed oils, which command a premium price and are now being heralded as total panaceas, are the same products that Chinese peasants have been producing for generations.

Qi
is everywhere in the natural world

The moment we take a food from its natural environment we interfere with nature’s
qi
flow. In an ideal world we would eat all our food on the day it is picked, since the further a foodstuff is removed from its source the weaker its supply of
qi
. There is
qi
in soil (
earth
) that has been nurtured by traditional farming methods. In China crops are rotated and the nation’s major crop, the soya bean, transfers nitrogen back into the soil, ensuring that the earth remains fertile.

Have you ever noticed how carrots or potatoes last much longer if you store them without washing them? The connection with the soil helps to maintain their
qi
. Modern nutritionists acknowledge that the vitamin content of most vegetables decreases with storage and decry the loss of many minerals that used to find their way into the diet through the soil on vegetables. My grandfather always said,‘You need to eat a peck of dirt before you die. ’

Malnutrition in the midst of plenty

We spurn nutritious food such as offal, seaweed and some fungus without trying to make them palatable because they aren’t attractive to the eye. We eat all manner of adulterated foodstuffs instead – foods that provide plenty of calories and adequate amounts of proteins, carbohydrates and fats, but few, if any, of the micronutrients that modern nutritionists are beginning to recognize as necessary in order to make our bodies function well. While we have been able to trick our senses into believing that these manufactured and artificial foodstuffs are an acceptable substitute for the real thing in the short term, the Western world is now suffering from malnutrition in the midst of plenty.
¹⁰

Take the ‘healthy’ breakfast cereals that my maggots were so unimpressed with. Cereal-makers create a slurry of grains, put them into an extruder and then force them out of a little hole at high pressure. In
Fighting the Food Giants
, Paul Stitt tells us how the extrusion process destroys most of the nutrients in the grains. Yet packaged and processed foods, even those low in nutrients, seem to offer a security that many people find difficult to walk away from. Food manufacturers take advantage of our lack of connection with the source of our food by offering us calorie counts and nutritional breakdowns – but these are just smokescreens. While low-fat versions of your favourite treats may contain fewer calories, to call this a ‘health benefit’ is a misnomer.

In traditional societies pickled meats and vegetables, jams and chutneys contained salt and sugar in order to add variety to a diet that might otherwise have been very limited. Unfortunately, though, the human body has a natural affinity for these flavours through their relationship with the spleen/stomach (
salty
is associated with the
earth
element and
sweet
is the flavour that enters it), and the spleen/stomach’s association with the mouth. Since the advent of mass production this predilection has become disastrous.

The word is out of course, and manufacturers are now having a field day finding new ways to make their processed products ‘healthier’. Modern nutritionists have made great strides in recent years in identifying the roles of essential fatty acids, anti-oxidants and many previously unacknowledgedmicronutrients. Evermore nutritional claims are finding their way onto colourful cartons and shiny wrappers which once boasted only about protein, calcium and vitamin content. All this noise diverts consumers from the fact that these newly discovered health-giving substances are all first derived and best consumed from natural foods, which is what the Chinese principles of the
qi
and the Five Elements/ Five Flavours have always made clear.

If you can trust nature to provide you with the nourishment that your body needs, and learn to make less obviously palatable foods into tasty dishes, your body will be much healthier. If you have to eat processed or prepared food, take it for what it is – a food substitute, not real food and certainly not a meal.

Real food

Eating in China is all about real food. Nature has endowed us with the whole spectrum of food types and the ability to make these more digestible and palatable. The Five Elements that make up the natural world from a Taoist viewpoint can all be represented by different types of vegetables and fruits:
wood
foods are green, especially those which grow upwards and have branches, so persevere with that broccoli when the kids are young; and try asparagus spears too. Brightly coloured fire fruits and vegetables often grow round bunches of seeds: spicy chillies and red peppers, pumpkin and butternut squash, but sometimes have a central stone, as with cherries, mangoes, peaches and plums. The
earth
vegetables, sweet potatoes, carrots, swede, celeriac and potatoes, grow in the ground and are more subdued in colour; while
earth
fruits, apples and pears, are dense and tightly packed.
Metal’s
fruits and vegetables hide their properties, so need to be peeled before eating: these include citrus fruits and bananas, ginger, radishes, garlic and onions. Easily overlooked,
water
foods include sea vegetables and those grown in damp conditions, including watercress, mushrooms and other fungi.

The question of meat

You will have noticed that the above list makes no mention of meat. We could categorize flesh foods according to the Five-Element concept, too – animals that eat plants (
wood
), those that eat fruits, those that live in the
water
– but you will notice that they are all one step removed. Meat, in its own way, provides mankind with the ultimate ‘convenience food’. Plants absorb the sun’s energy through their leaves and construct energy through photosynthesis. Animals eat those plants. As omnivores, we can obtain our nutrients directly through eating many different plants, or indirectly, ‘second hand’, through the flesh of a small number of animal species.

Chinese Buddhists believe that the
qi
we get from eating plants is superior to the
qi
we obtain from the flesh of dead animals: the former is known as
primary qi
, the latter is considered
secondary
.

Chinese people do eat meat, and you will see that it has its place in the Five-Flavours chart, with seafoods and some organ meats having particular value as they offer natural sources of the
salty
and
bitter
flavours. But throughout this book I have stressed how a good Chinese diet includes meat in moderation. The Chinese character for a house or home is
jia
, which derives from a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It was only after I had spent some time in the country that this apparent insult to the native population made sense. ‘Pigs’, Guo Gui Lan explained, ‘eat all the waste that cannot be disposed of elsewhere and when their time is up, we eat all of them. ’ I decided not to think too hard about what she meant exactly by ‘all the waste’ or even ‘all of them’ and focused instead on the environmental advantages of this age-old system. Like all smallholders Guo Gui Lan would kill only one pig a year, which meant that meat was used very sparingly in her recipes. If I took visitors to her who I knew would feel unsatisfied without their daily dose of animal protein, I would put in a request in advance and she would manage to find an old chicken to throw in the pot. Guo Gui Lan’s annual pig would not last long in the West, where we rely heavily on meat as a centrepiece to meals, but pork in particular, because of its ecological and economic advantages, has an accepted place in the overall diet in China. When Chinese people say
rou
(meat), they are always referring to pork. Other meats that feature even less commonly in the everyday diet are referred to by species:
ji rou
(chicken),
niu rou
(beef),
ya rou
(duck), and they are all believed to make a contribution to good health if eaten as what Chinese food therapy describes as a ‘tonic’, or a particularly nourishing food. Tonics are usually taken when the body is exhausted or recovering from illness. Small amounts of mutton or duck might be stewed with onion or star anise to boost deficient
yang
, or beef might be eaten to nourish the
qi
and blood.