Monday, May 12, 2008
Sùshízhě 素食者
Vegetarian.
We are 3 weeks into visitor season, and currently have our friends Joe, Irene and Audrey staying with us. (Side note about them - their initials JIA spells the pinyin for "family" in Chinese 家. I think that is cute.) Irene is a sùshízhě, which can be a problem in China. It also bring up several points about China and their meat. Not to mention their vegetarian past.
Shanghai is a good place to be vegetarian. Yesterday we went to the Taiwanese run Jujube Tree for lunch. We ordered tofu-pinenut-spinach wraps, potato starch noodles with sesame sauce, ginger "chicken", lettuce wraps, tofu pancake with chili and wonton soup. Everything was fantastic; a meat eater couldn't miss the meat. Especially in the "chicken" we got. It was a tofu product, but had exactly the right texture of chicken breast without the stringiness.
Chinese are good at faking meat. Quite in the same way as they are good at faking Louis Vuitton bags, if you want to make the comparison. With a long history of Buddhist vegetarians and times when meat was not plentiful, the vegetarian menu includes sweet and sour "pork" to Beijing "duck" that would have anyone fooled. Not to mention these fakes come sans bones. Can't say that for the real deal.
The new generation of Chinese are not vegetarian. The generation of the cultural revolution remembers what it was like to not have enough. Today, after the standard of living has risen to an acceptable level, that results in meat at every meal for their children and grandchildren. Similar story for other developing nations, second world countries that discover McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut. The big difference here: China has 1.3 billion meat-eaters.
The environmental cost of this "development" is enormous. Cows are not raised in Shanghai, and all meat is shipped in from up north. Transportation is not even the biggest offender, the process of raising the animals creates up to 7x more pollutants than transportation. The cost of meat is going up (and that generation of Chinese meat-eaters are up in arms). Hopefully that will help to curb their taste for the unsustainable choices of beef and pork.
And if a few more of them would go to Jujube Tree and try out the Hunan "beef", we might make sùshízhě out of some of them afterall. At least for one lunch. :-)
We are 3 weeks into visitor season, and currently have our friends Joe, Irene and Audrey staying with us. (Side note about them - their initials JIA spells the pinyin for "family" in Chinese 家. I think that is cute.) Irene is a sùshízhě, which can be a problem in China. It also bring up several points about China and their meat. Not to mention their vegetarian past.
Shanghai is a good place to be vegetarian. Yesterday we went to the Taiwanese run Jujube Tree for lunch. We ordered tofu-pinenut-spinach wraps, potato starch noodles with sesame sauce, ginger "chicken", lettuce wraps, tofu pancake with chili and wonton soup. Everything was fantastic; a meat eater couldn't miss the meat. Especially in the "chicken" we got. It was a tofu product, but had exactly the right texture of chicken breast without the stringiness.
Chinese are good at faking meat. Quite in the same way as they are good at faking Louis Vuitton bags, if you want to make the comparison. With a long history of Buddhist vegetarians and times when meat was not plentiful, the vegetarian menu includes sweet and sour "pork" to Beijing "duck" that would have anyone fooled. Not to mention these fakes come sans bones. Can't say that for the real deal.
The new generation of Chinese are not vegetarian. The generation of the cultural revolution remembers what it was like to not have enough. Today, after the standard of living has risen to an acceptable level, that results in meat at every meal for their children and grandchildren. Similar story for other developing nations, second world countries that discover McDonalds, KFC and Pizza Hut. The big difference here: China has 1.3 billion meat-eaters.
The environmental cost of this "development" is enormous. Cows are not raised in Shanghai, and all meat is shipped in from up north. Transportation is not even the biggest offender, the process of raising the animals creates up to 7x more pollutants than transportation. The cost of meat is going up (and that generation of Chinese meat-eaters are up in arms). Hopefully that will help to curb their taste for the unsustainable choices of beef and pork.
And if a few more of them would go to Jujube Tree and try out the Hunan "beef", we might make sùshízhě out of some of them afterall. At least for one lunch. :-)
# posted by Laurel @ 10:23 AM 
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