Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (5 page)

So what about the ‘thin gene’ theory? Deborah, like May and Paula, was ethnically Chinese and all three were from similar socio-economic backgrounds. Yet while two of my friends loved to eat, and ate a lot, the third avoided the subject whenever possible. Yet it was Deborah who had the weight problem. She was not in control of her eating; she was overweight and unhappy.

Three case histories do not make a statistic, but studies have shown that adolescent obesity increases significantly among second and third generation immigrants to the United States.
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Time spent in my children’s international school confirmed my suspicions. Among the ABC children, who almost outnumbered the others, obesity and other related problems, such as bad skin and allergies, were rife; and these children were often fussy eaters or on self-imposed diets. Yet the hordes of track suit-clad local Chinese youngsters who thronged the streets in the early morning and evening looked slim, fit and bursting with health. And they did not pick at their food or choose low-calorie options. My oldest son, Max, spent a year in Number 55 Middle School, a local public Chinese school, when he was thirteen years old. I gave him 3
RMB
(about 25p) a day, which bought him, like his classmates, a bowl of rice and accompanying dishes. On his first day he ate tomato and egg, pork with carrot and bamboo shoots, and stir-fried
xiao
bai cai
(‘little white cabbage’, which is actually green), with chilli. He never came home hungry.

My years of living and eating in China and everything I learned and taught has led me to conclude that the first and fundamental difference between the way people eat in China and in the West is one of attitude. Instead of seeing food as an enemy and focusing on what not to eat, often depriving the body of nutrients, the Chinese focus on making food taste good and meeting the body’s needs. It does not occur to Chinese people to approach food with trepidation, or to worry that their favourite ‘treats’ will lead to unwanted pounds and inches. The Chinese eat more calories but not ‘empty calories’ full of fat and sugar and devoid of all nutrients, which make up a high percentage of the Western intake.

Never a day passes by in China when you do not hear the phrase ‘Have you eaten yet?’ Focus on the fact that more than a billion people in China, and millions more in Asia, eat regularly, eat a lot, and never worry about counting calories – and put your hang-ups aside.

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Think of vegetables as dishes

‘As long as one has the art, then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvellous delicacy. ’

YUAN MEI (1716. 1798), NOTES ON HIS COOK

In the very early morning and in the evening, when Chinese people flock to the colourful food markets that suddenly appear on every corner, they pass each other in the street with the greeting ‘
Ni mai cai qu?
’ (‘Are you going to buy vegetables?’).

It was one of my Chinese teachers in Beijing, Hong Yun, a slender young graduate from Bei Da University, who enlightened me about
cai
and
cai
. She was explaining how Chinese people greet each other. The quaint phrase ‘
ni hao
’ ( literally, ‘you good’) means hello, but the Chinese use a variety of phrases depending on the time of day or the situation. ‘Have you eaten yet?’, as we have seen, is the usual acknowledgement around lunch-time. A man passing a neighbour on the way to work usually greets him with,‘Are you going to work?’, to which the reply is, ‘Going to work,’ spoken in a grunting sort of way, with a ‘humph’ at the end. In the late afternoon a similar exchange: ‘Are you going home?’ is answered by ‘Going home, humph. ’ Many Chinese people start the day with a trip to the
zao shi
or early morning market, when they say to each other ‘
Ni mai cai qu?
’ (‘Are you going to buy vegetables?’).

The Chinese character
cai
(vegetable) also means a dish of food. Understand this and you will have unearthed the second, and possibly the most important, secret of the Chinese diet. When I first noticed the two uses of the word
cai
I assumed that I had made a mistake. Chinese is tonal, which means that when a word is pronounced with a flat tone, or with an upward inflection, or an up-and-down inflection, or a downward one, it has completely different meanings even though it sounds very similar to the untrained ear. The confusion between the spoken word, the tones, and the underlying Chinese characters is the biggest challenge for the student of Chinese, and even sometimes the Chinese themselves.

The
cai
that means vegetables is pronounced with the same downwards inflection as that which means a dish of food. Some Chinese words are pronounced the same but written differently, but
cai
is written in exactly the same way, whether it is used to describe a vegetable in the generic sense or a dish of cooked food. Most Chinese characters are split into two parts, the first part, known as the radical, often gives a clue to the meaning of the word, while the remainder of the character might hint at the pronunciation.
Cai
has the grass radical, signifying that it is something that grows, while the lower part of the written character is indicative of the
ai
(pronounced ‘I’) sound.

Living among the Chinese and witnessing the tricycles overflowing with greenery, and the locals returning from the market every morning with their loaded bags soon makes it clear that this double meaning is no coincidence. And sampling Chinese vegetable dishes confirms the fact that vegetables can be a meal in their own right, with small amounts of protein foods used to add interest.

This is not to say that the Chinese do not eat meat: on the contrary, meat tends to be prized and valued, and there is no part of animal, fish or fowl that a Chinese chef cannot turn into a feast. The everyday diet, however, is based for the most part around vegetable dishes.

Frequent visitors to Chinese restaurants or readers who have travelled in Asia may find this difficult to believe. Restaurants make their name and higher margins on meat and fish dishes and, because the same animal species are available across the globe whereas vegetable varieties vary greatly, the restaurant tradition has evolved this way. Most famous Chinese dishes are protein-based because these are the recipes that are usually recorded and passed on. Added to this, meat has a longer shelf life than most plant varieties, and is not seasonal. In ordinary Chinese homes, however, vegetables form the main dishes. Worthy of the same treatment as meat and fish, they are carefully prepared with slicing or dicing, interesting seasonings and accurate cooking times and they are never served as a hasty afterthought, chopped roughly or boiled to death.

If you were a child of the sixties as I was, you might well have been brought up on vegetables cooked in a pan of salted water, boiled until soft, if not reduced to a total pulp. Prepared in this way vegetables never stand a chance of playing anything other than a poor supporting role. Recently the West has rediscovered vegetables. In the UK, the ‘five a day’ campaign has taken hold and of course vegetables feature heavily in weight-loss plans,whether cabbage soup, low GI and GL, or just good old calorie restriction. One reaction to the problems that have resulted from an increasingly limited diet in the West is for a number of gurus to recommend ‘super’ or ‘bonus’ foods. Next time you pick up one of the excellent books on nutrition now on offer, take a look to see if it has a list of foods with protective properties or exceptional nutritional value. They always make me smile, since nearly all the foods they recommend are daily fare in China.

Vegetables, as we now know, are the ‘good guys’, packed full of the vitamins,minerals and active constituents that were previously overlooked in the macronutrient approach of Western experts which emphasized protein, carbohydrate and fat and played lip service to vitamins. A portion of frozen peas, a glass of orange juice, a handful of vacuum-packed salad leaves all help us notch up that ‘five a day‘ total. Food manufacturers have relabelled all their products to draw attention to the number of vegetable portions they contain and are busy launching new nutrient-packed vegetable substitutes too. We are making a tremendous effort to get vegetables back on the stage; but in China they have always been in the limelight.

In China the ‘bonus foods’ of the new ‘healthy’ Western diet are not taken as supplements, or served as token seasonings or side dishes. Onions are stir-fried with lamb, not lamb with onions; celery is served with strips of beef, not beef with celery. Green chillies are shredded and mixed with coriander and cucumber in the aptly named
laohu cai
(‘tiger dish’); sometimes chillies are just stir-fried with more chillies. Ginger and garlic are thrown into recipes by the fistful; there are 101 recipes for cabbage and aubergine.

The difference between the quantities of vegetables bought, used in cooking and eaten in China and the West is difficult to visualize. The first time I saw root ginger stacked up on a hessian mat at the side of the street I assumed it was Jerusalem artichoke: I had never seen more than a couple of pieces in Western supermarkets and here it was piled waist high. Soy beans and mung beans were another source of amazement: a small market would sell a two-foot mountain in one day, more, I reckoned, than the weekly turnover of my local supermarket in the UK.

When the stallholders in the Chinese markets noticed a ‘foreigner’ they would excitedly hold out tomatoes, lettuce, potatoes, carrots and, on a good day, broccoli. Dismissive of these imports, but more influenced than I realized by nights at the Golden Panda back home, initially I would search for baby corn (not sold in northern China), water chestnuts and bamboo shoots (both seasonal and unrecognizable anyway in their unpeeled state); but gradually I simply learned to choose what looked good and fresh.

How to transform the
cai
in the market into the deliciously presented
cai
on Chinese tables was not something I learned overnight. On the contrary, I spent many an hour pondering this problem – when I should have been doing my Chinese homework.

Culinary barriers are always difficult to penetrate. I knew that to discover the secrets of the Chinese diet I needed to learn to cook. This is a difficult concept to communicate, especially to someone to whom the art is obvious. My first efforts to tap Xiao Ding’s store of knowledge were disastrous. One day I braved the market and bought some ingredients that I considered ‘Chinese’: beansprouts, mange-tout and some very watery pink-looking prawns. She was not impressed. Dismissive of the prawns, she simply took the beansprouts and fried them with Sichuan peppercorns, minced ginger and spring onion, and some fresh red chilli, and then tossed in some chopped coriander. A splash of vinegar on the beansprouts keeps them crisp. Soy sauce, she explained, should be avoided as it makes them brown and soggy: a pinch of salt is used instead. No cook worth his salt – or even his soy sauce –would want to detract from the beansprout’s greatest attribute, its crispness. After she had washed and dried the wok she chucked in the mange-tout and fried it with a generous handful of garlic and a good pinch of salt. I could not believe that such a delicious dish was so simple to prepare.

I soon discovered that Xiao Ding could make a dish out of any leaf, shoot, root or tuber that I chose to bring home, but that she generally liked to take one ingredient at a time and choose a method and seasoning that cooked it to perfection. Sometimes two ingredients that complement or contrast each other are put into the same dish, but they are usually cooked separately and mixed at the last moment. Thin shreds of meat or tender morsels of fried egg are often used in dishes where vegetables take the leading role. The strips are made tender by coating them with cornflour and treating them with a drop of cooking wine. Or beaten eggs are added to hot oil in the wok, then stirred with chopsticks to break them into pieces as they puff up.

A new look at familiar vegetables

Working with Xiao Ding and eating in local Beijing restaurants completely transformed my attitude towards even the most mundane of vegetables.

Take cabbage, which was the bane of my school dinners as a child, but which is something of a national obsession in China. At one time, in northern China, the large Beijing cabbage, known as
da bai cai
(‘big cabbage’), which is usually sold abroad as ‘Chinese leaves’, was practically the only leafy vegetable available. Fortunately this humble vegetable is bursting with vitamins and the anti-oxidants which are now being shown to fight the damaging effects of free radicals, so it was able to provide even the poorest country-dwellers with a substantial supply of nutrients.