Food and Water

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Last month the head of China’s EPA resigned after people in Harbin, a city in the north, discovered 1000 tons of Benzene had been released into the river that supplies their drinking water. The official blamed it on local officials who fail to enforce industrial safety standards in their headlong rush toward economic development. Take that to mean someone got paid a lot to let an industrial polluter fatten his bottom line. It happens all the time.
As millions of people were left to drink bottled water, it made me think about my water situation. It’s actually pretty good. The water that comes out of the tap smells okay, though no one I know drinks it. Instead, we have water delivered. Most homes I see have office-style water coolers inside. For $2 or less, a guy will drop off a full 19-litre bottle and pick up the empty. All it takes is a simple phone call and a dispatcher will call the dude on the bike. I see these guys every day, hauling up to seven full bottles (280lbs!) on a bicycle. The other day Amy saw guys working from a truck. They’d hoist a bottle on their shoulder and RUN to the next address. After a while, the truck would return to pick them up and do it all over again. In addition to biking mine over, my guys haul it up to the fifth floor. The other day it took all of ten minutes.

Garbage service is another matter and an even better deal. I’ve begun separating my trash into boxes of plastic, paper, glass/metal and food waste. I started this after I took a box of trash out to the street and a guy waved me over, put my box on a scale and paid me all of 10 cents. Not much, but consider when you were last paid for your cardboard and Styrofoam? I’m hoping by separating the recyclables I can really make bank. We’ll see.

Laundry is easy. I have a washing machine with several buttons on it, though I need only press two to make it go. The thing knots stuff up pretty good, but hanging laundry out the front window, as is customary, makes most of the wrinkles go away. And if I time it right, the cleaning lady takes care of that little hassle for her $1.25 an hour.

I’ve been cooking more these days. It’s fun to see what kind of new things I can find in the store and what all the mystery packages hold. Kinda like food Christmas. There are a lot of pickled and preserved roots and shoots. Problem is, I can’t read ingredients and almost everything contains “wei jin” local speak for MSG. People love the stuff. We have to tell waiters in restaurants specifically to keep it out of the food and that only works part of the time. It’s in everything in America, too, but here they sell it in the supermarket by the bag full. Pounds of gleaming white crystals. Waiters don’t understand why we refuse it as it makes everything taste so much better! Sean tells me that MSG was brought to China right after the Japanese invasion in early WWII as a way of slowly poisoning everyone. It doesn’t seem to affect the birth rate, but all the same, I try to avoid it when I can. “Boo yao wei jin” was one of the first phrases I learned.

I’ve also been avoiding meat. Sean is a vege and I’ve been trying to convert. Sometimes it is hard. Bite into a pastry and occasionally I’ll get a mouth full of pork floss. Imagine a ham hock at a country fair, spun like cotton candy. The stuff is everywhere. Chinese love pork and just today I rode by a restaurant with dried pig faces hanging on the wall outside. A simple walk through the pet emporium the other day told me all I needed to know about Chinese animal husbandry. Huskies are cute but apparently don’t sell well, I saw a couple beauties listless in their cages. A kitten was playing tag with a rabbit. Walls are lined with caged birds issuing a deafening collective squawk. Industrial agriculture is pretty hard on sentient beings, human and otherwise, so I don’t mind refusing the myriad animal parts on the menu. I do draw the line at broth. Every noodle shop uses a meat broth and okay, I can compromise. Friends told me they hosted two vegetarians from Canada who apparently lack any imagination. They spent two weeks popping cans of Pringles. Going vege isn’t that hard.

Bread fans can forget getting a good slice over here. It’s all white flour and air. I found a fair baguette in Shanghai, but that’s pretty far to go. I heard I can have good bread delivered from the big city, but I can’t overcome my laziness. Hey, I’m in the land of no bread. There are plenty of alternatives. One is potatoes. Although few Chinese kitchens have ovens, mine included, I am eating lots of baked potatoes. There’s a legion of fellows with wheeled carts, pushing around fuel drums filled with charcoal and baking yams and sweet potatoes. Prices though, vary. I’ve been taken a few times and today finally successfully negotiated the price down from 5 yuan to 4. I still paid too much but these vendors have a great way of giving me the evil eye for suggesting their fare is ‘tai gui le” too expensive. But a baked potato makes a great hand warmer and when home, filled with butter and salt, makes an even better evening appetizer.

Being a vege saves on food bills. It amazes me how cheap vegetables are. I can get three dinners worth of stir fry for under $3. Good stuff, too, like red peppers and snow peas, not to mention some weird vegetables I’ve never even seen before, like a dark green whorl of kale or watermelon-sized winter melon. That comes by the slice. Tofu comes in at least a dozen shapes and sizes and even a few flavors. And mushroom lovers rejoice. The market has close to a dozen different varieties of mushrooms from long skinny stemmy things to firm bulbous mycilli, shitakes and shelf fungi. All for 60 cents a pound. I’ve been making a lot of mushroom soup.

There’s quite a lot of tea over here, too. Ha! Joke. The stuff is everywhere. Nearly every block has some kind of tea shop with round glass canisters featuring different grades of green tea, each leaf individually curled like a fiddlehead. Hangzhou is famous for it. No connoisseur myself, I buy the low end, about a buck a can. But there are other teas, too, like crysanthemum flower tea and ginger tea and ginseng. There’s one mix packet that has a brown nut in it that left to soak bloats into a wavy gelatinous mass. Yum! Not. Still, the Chinese all carry these tea jars, plastic cylinders with screens that fit inside so the tea can infuse but stay behind for refilling. Very handy. I got a couple myself.

The place does lack for spice variety. It was hard just finding cinnamon the other day though there are western stores that for a price can get me just about anything, especially good chocolate. The other day I found a place that sells the Belgian brand d’Or that I used to buy all the time in Paris. Granted it costs twice what I paid in France, but some things are worth it. Besides, with all this msg around, who needs anything else? All this food talk has me hungry. Time for some of those fresh roasted peanuts.

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Comments

[Sara]

tea jars!!
hey john- i'm loving reading your excerpts. so much of what you talk about reminds me of my time in china. speaking of that, my glass tea jar with the screen and lid broke and i'm distraught. can't find one ANYWHERE, not even internet. if you happen to run across a glass tea jar with a screen in one of the markets, could you PLEASE pick me one up. i still have plenty of RMB to bribe you with :) keep on having fun! hope to get out there before october! Sara