Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (3 page)

As I made progress in the language my teacher began to reward me by finishing the lesson with a menu or a recipe to translate. Then I found a book with the riveting title
Chinese Vegetables
. It had some rather bad line drawings with names in English that were often wrong and in the full form Chinese characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with pinyin (alphabetical pronunciation) for the Cantonese dialect, which meant nothing to me because it is used only in the south of China. My Chinese teacher,Wang Laoshi, was patient and supportive. She led me through the pages, discussing the many uses of the different vegetables and writing in the Mandarin pinyin pronunciation of the names. After class I would walk home through the vegetable market proudly armed with my new knowledge. In the evening we would feast on delicacies: sliced red radish with green peas and minced ginger, silken squash with egg and pork slivers,
you mai cai
(rather like cos lettuce) with fish and black bean, or homemade pancakes stuffed with beansprouts, egg and Chinese chives. With every new discovery and every successful dish I felt my relationship with food undergo a subtle change, a change for the better. I became the controller, not the controlled, and these changes were a source of great pleasure to me. My obsession with food had tranformed from a fixation to a passion and I was slimmer, fitter and more at ease with my body than ever before.

Three years and a baby daughter Honor later, my hard work was rewarded when a colleague of Wang Laoshi put me forward for my dream job: presenter of Chinese Central Television’s Chinese cooking programme. ‘We need someone who knows a little about Chinese food, can read sufficient Chinese to translate recipes from Chinese to English and speaks enough of the language to chat and joke with the chef on the set. ’ I was open-mouthed as I heard Wang Laoshi tell her that I would fit the bill perfectly.

My learning curve was probably steepest during the CCTV years, but the knowledge it armed me with was well worth the pain of extraction. My producer, Hao Min, had ideas about how Chinese cooking should be taught to the home-cook that were right in line with mine. We would start with an ingredient and then show the audience how to use it. More often than not the main ingredient was a vegetable. ‘Please talk for five minutes about celery,’ Hao Min said, expectantly, on my first day. I was horrified, but so touched by her faith in me that I didn’t tell her that I had anticipated a script running across the wall in front of me neatly out of sight of the cameras. It was a bit like a party game. I said a little prayer of thanks for my years spouting PR, to Wang Laoshi, to my vegetable book and to my ability to remember obscure bits of information, particularly when related to food. Holding out the rather limp Chinese variety of celery (
qin cai
) in a gesture that later caused hilarity among my family and friends, I pointed out that it has a much better flavour but a shorter shelf-life than the stiffer, crunchier thick stalks known in China as
xi
qin
or American celery. Quite truthfully, I explained that I had rediscovered celery in the interesting combinations of my favourite Chinese dishes.

The transition from TV presenter to teacher in my own cooking school two years later was a natural one. I loved learning from Hao Min and the chefs but wanted a greater degree of control over the content of my presentation and a closer interaction with my audience. By then I had come to believe that there was a lot more than recipes to be learned from Chinese food culture, and I knew how many Westerners in Beijing were curious to learn more about Chinese food; so I set about putting together a suitable course to teach them. The establishment of the Chinese Cooking School was a not insignificant project that involved much hilarity in the kitchen and fun in the marketplace, but also hours of recipe-testing and many a late night at the computer.

During the four years that I spent teaching Westerners to cook Chinese food I became increasingly aware of both the vast differences between the Eastern and Western food cultures and the potential for bridging this gap. I was privileged to be able to discuss food and diet with such a large number of interested individuals from all over the world. My students came with varying expectations: some wanted little more than to enjoy a Chinese meal in the company of friends; others hoped to learn to decipher restaurant menus; but a significant minority shared my desire to gain a deeper understanding of the way that Chinese people shop, cook and eat. Whether or not they actually intended to wield a chopper and stir a wok themselves, they all wanted to eat more Chinese food. Those who discovered that a good Chinese diet can be enjoyed on a daily basis without any reservations, or the tedium of calorie-counting that has become the norm in some cultures, went away satisfied in more ways than one.

I was fortunate to live in China in the 1990s, when the food culture was still largely untouched by Western influence. Sadly, this is not still the case, as multi-nationals fight to win the palates and strip the pockets of the world’s largest market. Changing lifestyles and the power of marketing have begun to influence eating patterns in some parts of urban China and resulting obesity and diet-related health issues are now being acknowledged. History has shown, however, that Chinese culture is so strong that, in the long term, it is able to withstand invasion, and those who have conquered China usually come round to the Chinese way of doing things. My belief is that China’s food culture is so strongly ingrained that it will ultimately remain largely as it has been for thousands of years; my hope is that as eating habits and patterns of consumption become increasingly globalized its benefits will be recognized and it will influence the rest of the world.

While the fifteen secrets I reveal in this book are those of traditional Chinese food culture, and though along the way I introduce the Chinese way of shopping, preparing food and cooking as well as many new and unusual ingredients, it is not necessary to eat a totally Chinese diet in order to benefit from the knowledge I have to share. Since we returned to live in the UK in 2005, I have had neither regular access to specialized ingredients nor the luxury of Xiao Ding’s expert guidance. With four children and a small menagerie of animals, I sometimes struggle to find time outside my domestic and chauffeuring duties to make and serve nutritious meals. But what I brought with me from China and what I present here is not just about new recipes, although I have included some for you to enjoy. It is about crossing a cultural boundary to discover a different way of thinking about food and diet. If you can make this transition you will find that your desire to eat well and your understanding of how to prepare good food will propel you through even the most hectic periods of your life with new energy and vigour.

During my time in China I developed a new and exciting relationship both with food and with my own body. I acquired an understanding of the cuisine and a host of skills that allowed me to produce satisfying and nutritious meals for my family and pass my knowledge on to hundreds of students. But that was not all. Food is just one aspect of the rich and varied Chinese culture.
Zhong guo
(China) literally means Middle Kingdom: the largest population in the world has survived political and geographical upheavals by pursuing balance in all areas of life and avoiding extremes.

Over the years my studies moved on to the fascinating area of Chinese food therapy, a branch of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), based on the Taoist theories of the Five Elements and the opposing forces of
yin
and
yang
, which dominate Chinese thought and are explained in the Chinese Classic the
Yi Jing
or ‘Book of Change’. Using these theories as their basis, Chinese doctors have observed human beings and recorded, refined and consolidated their findings for more than 3,000 years.

As I delved deeper into Chinese philosophy and came to understand the ‘middle way’, I began to realize that a good diet is not a panacea but just one important part of a way of life that keeps mind and body fit by respecting the natural order of things. The parting words of Professor Song, my
qi
gong
teacher, have stayed with me, and it is in the spirit of these words that I present these Fifteen Secrets:

Take what you have learned, practise it, adapt it as necessary, and make it work for you. Then, when you are ready, take the time to teach someone else.

one
Stop counting calories

‘When you eat you should not worry. ’

SUN SI MIAO (581. 682 AD)

One of the first things Tim told me about life in China was how he had spent the first year of his time there bemused by a girl who asked him every afternoon whether or not he had eaten yet, even though he had told her in the first week that he never ate lunch. Eventually he realized that the phrase ‘
Ni
chi fan le ma?
’ (‘Have you eaten yet?’) is just a way that people greet each other in China.

This simple sentence, with its mixture of concern and interest, says a lot. Eating is important in China; food is not a matter for concern and worry but a source of great pleasure. Chinese people get pleasure out of every aspect of food, from planning or anticipating a meal, through preparing or choosing various dishes, to eating and enjoying them and considering the meal in retrospect.

Chinese people talk about y
ingyang
, the nutritional value of food all the time. There is a word for calories,
re liang
, but it is a scientific term ( literally meaning ‘measure of heat’) and scarely understood by lay people. When I was weaning my son, Sam, Xiao Ding was quick to suggest that I feed him on puréed carrots rather than potatoes because they had more
yinyang
. Fascinated, I quizzed her carefully and found that, though she had never heard of calories, or vitamins and minerals for that matter, and because she grew up during the Cultural Revolution and had no formal education, she had firm ideas about which foods were good to eat and in what combinations.

During that brief conversation over a bowl of puréed potato, I learned the first secret of Chinese food culture: think about food as something that will nourish you, not as a source of unwanted calories. In my mind, before I went to China, food was something that made you fat, unless you were very careful. Those who openly enjoyed eating seemed to have resigned themselves to a future of elasticated waistbands and an early death. The only alternative was constant vigilance. At only five foot two and a comfortable size ten, I was often dubbed ‘lucky’ by my larger friends. But there was no luck about it. As a first-year student, heady with the freedom of university life, I had eaten and drunk with the best of them. After six months of canteen food, sausage rolls, chocolate bars on the run and crisps in the pub, I had gained nearly a stone in weight – not disastrous but certainly very noticeable on my small frame, especially when some supposedly concerned friends marched me into Woolworth’s and put me on the scales. It had taken six weeks working in a campsite in the south of France and a strict regime of fruit and salad to get back to my former size. The heat, coupled with the physical labour of daily tent-cleaning, not to mention the need to wear a bikini around all those handsome French youths, helped me in my resolve.

From that summer on, periods of pregnancy aside, I started to watch my weight carefully. I would lie in bed at night and where I had once recited the Lord’s Prayer, I would run through the calories I had consumed that day. As I was looking to maintain weight rather than lose it, and I have a tendency to remember such useless information as how many calories there are in a digestive biscuit, this was a simple exercise to perform. Breakfast was usually branflakes with skim milk and wholemeal toast with a scraping of something; lunch was never more than a sandwich or a salad. By keeping my daytime intake to around 800 calories I could allow myself a reasonable evening meal, perhaps a pasta or chicken dish, even a curry, and a couple of glasses of wine. If I ever topped my 2,000 calorie-a-day limit I would compensate the following day. By sticking to these rules I was acceptably thin. Okay, I drank endless cups of tea and coffee to keep hunger at bay and I was often quite ratty by early evening; I also suffered a range of minor ailments like headaches after eating, bloating, poor digestion and varicose veins, and I was constantly exhausted – but the doctor said that it was all pretty normal. Sadly, he was probably right. Many people in the West have a compromised relationship with food and many more suffer from a host of nagging discomforts; and the general feeling is that these problems are a bit like bad weather, something we have to live with, and be thankful for the sunny days.

I once met a former anorexic who religiously ate a Kit-Kat for lunch on the basis that it contained only 120 calories and therefore fitted neatly into her self-imposed allowance of 1,000 calories a day; but she would never dream of eating a portion of potatoes, rice or pasta with a similar calorific intake because they were ‘fattening foods’. Another time I sat through an extremely expensive six-course meal in a London restaurant with a girl who showed me how she had acquired the art of messing around with her food to make the waitress think that she had eaten some of it. The aim of the exercise, she confided, was to save her calorie allowance for the chocolate mousse,
petit fours
and truffles. Our Western obsession with calorie-counting has created a whole raft of new issues: anorexia, bulimia and other forms of malnutrition. Millions of pounds are spent on special dietary formulas, hours are wasted on slimming classes; in hospitals, surgeons are wiring jaws and stitching stomachs.