Chinese food is my life. At least, it’s the part of my life that’s left the best taste in my mouth. I cut my teeth on Chinatown chop suey, made MSG my teen drug of choice, and got the hots over Sichuan hot pot. I grew up to pursue my “won ton lust” on a year-long search for the world’s best Chinese restaurant.
Yet even after drowning in quivering tofu, and downing banquets of Mongolian whole lamb (complete with knife in the skull), I’ve too soon and too often found myself with a craving for more. Back in America, the rap that this cuisine will leave you hungry even has a name: “Chinese restaurant hunger syndrome.” After my Chinese food opus was published, I was often told: “I enjoyed your book but wanted to read another one forty-five minutes later.”
But are these post-meal pangs a universal reality or just another urban legend and condescending bit of Western conceit? Starved for an answer, I figured moving to Hong Kong was my chance to unravel the mystery. Surely, in this food-obsessed society, there had to be a wealth of data on the subject.
Or so I thought. None of the Chinese restaurateurs, dieticians, researchers — or rank-and-file eaters — I spoke with had heard of this counterintuitive claim. Typical of the responses was that of Kinsen Kam, owner of Hong Kong’s legendary Yung Kee Restaurant, who sent word through his secretary that he “had not heard about it and had no opinions about it.”
Among those who did react, local friends and dining companions made me feel like I had insulted them by somehow suggesting that the Chinese diet didn’t do the job. Worse still, they thought I was making up the whole idea. In the Chinese experience, hunger is always about not eating.
Yet it turns out there is considerable nutritional science to back up Western perceptions. And there’s no lack of theories, both cultural and caloric, clinging to the controversy like a sweet-sour sauce with too much cornstarch. All of them sound good on their own, but sometimes the rationales clash.
Some, like punning TV chef Martin Yan, posit that “It all boils down to the rice.” It’s the accompanying white stuff, they argue, that fills up Chinese when Westerners never take down enough of it.
So far, so good. Until you talk with the nutritionists, who are quick to take the starch out of this theory. According to them, the rapid intake of carbohydrates like bread or rice ought to spur this post-meal hunger, not diminish it. Starchy foods increase blood sugar, so the pancreas pumps out too much insulin, which leads to a rush of unneeded adrenaline.
“Your body recognizes a high amount of sugar, and it thinks — uh-oh, here comes a lot of food. Problem is, there isn’t a lot,” explains Rick Hall, an Arizona professor and chief nutrition guide for the website About.com. He says this research — which involves the glycemic index (GI) — is “relatively new.”
All such theories pale in the face of “gastric emptying” — a term which would be enough to put anyone off their food. According to nutritionists, this refers to the amount of time that food takes to leave the stomach and pass to the intestinal extremities. Fat — whether animal or vegetable — is the major factor in slowing the digestive flow. A fattier meal can stick around in the stomach for up to 3.5 hours.
Which makes it cut and dried that French tournedos — marbled steak with pure-egg Bearnaise sauce — will sit in your tummy longer than a dozen helpings of Tientsin cabbage laced with minute strips of ham. Still, according to the now-infamous 1997 survey of the U.S. Center for Science in the Public Interest, a restaurant portion of Kung Pao Chicken (the Sichuanese dish of diced chicken, peanuts, chilies and vegetables) was found to contain 38 grams of fat — more artery-blockers than in two quarter-pound hamburgers. Westernized Orange Crispy Beef proved as fattening as two large orders of fries.
But hold on to your napkins. For if fat is the culprit, then the Chinese diet adapted to Western tastes, with its emphasis on deep-frying, egg rolls and more ample slices of meat, should have silenced the legend a long time ago.
Perhaps the “syndrome” is but a matter of cultural adaptation — literally at the gut level. After all, even the terms “hungry” and “full” are highly experiential and subjective. Perhaps no amount of Shanghainese buns can match the Pavlovian message of fullness transmitted by meatloaf or a sour-creamed baked potato.
By observation, if not clinical trials, the Chinese in China do seem to consume their food more frequently and with more urgency. Dare they admit to a more frequent feeling of emptiness? One University of Cincinnati expert on the more endemic hunger caused by Chinese agricultural deficits reported that a Taiwanese associate refused to join him at a Western restaurant because he claimed that he would be hungry again in an hour!
Since every journey of food through the body is mitigated by individual taste, health and digestive tracts, that leaves room for just enough gnawing doubt to match rumbling Western stomachs. So what should I do the next time I want more? Reach for those cartons of leftover spare ribs and hope for prolonged “gastro-intestinal transit time.”
For months, I had been besieged with phone calls, mailings and pamphlets from the Ajinomoto Corp., trying to put out the word about how healthfully harmless and utterly essential to Asian cooking was their prime cash cow, the powdered food enhancer MSG (monosodium glutamate). So, when in Japan, I decided to consult Kiyomitsu Kitajo, one of a handful of kelp merchants left in Osaka’s traditional market area of Tenma-bashi.
“There used to be 15 to 20 of us on this street,” he recalls, as this was close to the Okawa River where ships from the northern island of Hokkaido for centuries unloaded their bounty of fine seaweeds as well as fish, often traded for rice from Japan’s more southern islands. Today, though “many young people no longer appreciate the delicate taste and women have to work outside the home,” he still does a good trade in grades of kombu, giant dried leaves of kelp resembling tobacco, kept in plastic lining and long narrow boxes in an upstairs warehouse. He explains, “Kombu is still the key ingredient for dashi, our broth, that is the basis for all Japanese cuisine.”
The clear elixir that is dashi, light green and subtly fishy, is used to make many soups, as well as to serve as a base for steaming and boiling. This great broth, made from combining kelp and flakes of dried bonito (a small tuna), should always be “neutral, bringing out the flavor of other foods, but so beautiful it can be drunk just like tea.”
For Kitajo, as well as all Japanese, the term for the some-what indescribable flavor of that broth has long been “umami.” The better the kelp, and its combination with bonito, the richer the umami. But for the folks at Ajinomoto, umami is more than just a curiosity. According to its research, kombu provides glutamate and bonito adds inosinate — the two naturally occurring amino acids of MSG that help impart a special bite, tanginess or satisfaction to everything from beef bones and mushrooms to tomatoes and Parmesan cheese. Through relentless promotion (including sponsorship of international food conferences and a Society for Research on Umami Taste), Ajinomoto pushes the idea that umami is “the fifth taste of human being,” right up there with salty, sweet, bitter and sour. (They also point out that MSG is a naturally occurring substance, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily manufacture theirs from kelp — the richest source.)
As Western chefs have attempted to play with the concept, umami has become, in the words of one website, “something nearly mystical, indefinable.” But for Kitajo, and his customers in Osaka, the meaning of umami is as clear as a proper bowl of broth. And nowhere is that more apparent than at one of Osaka’s traditional restaurants for oden — a Japanese bollito misto — where a variety of foodstuffs are served from frequently replenished and boiling vats of dashi.
Close to Kitajo’s warehouse, one regular purchaser of kombu, Tetsuo Nakagami, runs the woodsy corner bar called Oden Tenma-michi. Every day at 10 a.m., he prepares fresh broth in a 60-liter pot — adding touches of salt, soy sauce, rice wine and sake to the seaweed base — though he doesn’t open for business until 5.30 p.m. Everything from mushrooms and potatoes to octopus and yams are then soaked in the light-green broth to absorb its special taste before they are cooked.
“Each day’s umami is different, like a human face,” says Nakagami, 55, a former salaryman who has made oden his life’s devotion, and is now passing down the tradition to his long-haired rocker son Shuhei.
But that isn’t necessarily good news for the folks at Ajinomoto. The fastidious bar owner says that using MSG would merely make his daily broths taste alike. Kitajo-san calls the white powder another “shortcut used by chain restaurants.” He says that he’s got an allergy to the stuff, and besides, he’d never use it — not so long as his storehouse is packed with dark, wavy weeds of pure umami.
At Lei Yue Mun, the fish practically jump onto your plate. This warren of wharves on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbour’s northern end has become one covered arcade of seafood restaurants fronted by open tanks — a veritable aquarium that includes some of the world’s most exotic, and expensive, breeds. There are spotted groupers as big as baby whales costing as much as HK$18,000 (US$2,308), alongside 90-centimeter-long hump-head wrasse, white as paper and covered with wild turquoise markings.
For tourists brought by the busload, a banquet centered around some just-picked seafood is one of those must-do experiences. But most of the big spenders are locals, since a whole fish is for Chinese a handy cultural marker, signifying both high status and good luck. But these Hong Kongers may also be the biggest risk-takers, in need of all the luck they can get.
Where others see something to be steamed with scallions and ginger, Yvonne Sadovy envisions the possibility of diarrhea and vomiting, a numbing of the extremities, a reversal in hot and cold sensations, muscle weakness and fatigue and, in a number of rare cases, even death.
These are the symptoms of ciguatera, a form of food poisoning that results from eating reef fish contaminated with ciguatoxins. Dr. Sadovy points out that the most appealing and grand-looking specimens can be the worst: the red coral trout, selected for its propitious color, and the larger groupers, which have had a longer period to ingest toxin-bearing micro-organisms.
When the British-born Sadovy moved to Hong Kong in 1993, she presumed the live seafood in restaurant tanks was safe. Alerted to the problem by newspaper stories, the professor was astounded to discover that “due to a legal loophole, live fish weren’t even classified as a food.” As a result, Hong Kong’s favorite edible is subject to less rigorous health inspections than low-ticket chickens and pigs. Not only that, but the origin of the fish is often shrouded in mystery — since fish transport vessels keep vague records as they take weeks to comb the Pacific from Malaysia to the Marshall Islands.
Hong Kong accounts for as much as 60 percent of the Asia-Pacific region’s trade in live reef fish, and the territory’s ever-expanding appetite for live fish has meant that ships are casting their nets farther and wider to satisfy demand — now as far as so-called “hot spots” for ciguatoxic fish in the Western Pacific. Some claim that reefs damaged by cyanide fishing (a method of stunning the fish) are more susceptible, but there is little doubt that the presence of ciguatoxins in the food chain is due to the fact that fleets are fishing more often in previously untested areas.
This new global harvest has brought with it public health dangers that authorities across Asia have been slow to act on. Why upset a lucrative trade? “The Hong Kong government has issued warning posters to prove they are serious about ciguatera, but do you find a single one posted here?” asks Sadovy. “The only time I ever saw it, on Lamma Island, the warning at the bottom had been cut off. It was just a chart of pretty fish.”
There is nothing pretty about ciguatera, an illness almost entirely undocumented before the 1990s, which strikes 25,000 people a year globally. In 1998, nearly 400 people in Hong Kong were poisoned en masse by tainted shiploads from Fiji. Since then, the number of reported cases of suet kar do, as it is translated into Cantonese, has decreased. But Dr. Sadovy doesn’t place much store in the statistics. “We really can’t be sure about the figures, as many mild cases may go unreported.”
Another reason for the decline in reported cases may be the gradual acceptance among Chinese diners of cheaper cultured reef fish, which are less susceptible to ciguatoxins. Nearly 45 percent of Hong Kong’s live fish are farmed in Taiwan, China and other countries, up from 30 percent just a few years back, when the Nature Conservancy ran so-called blind tests in three Chinese cities to convince more consumers to appreciate cultured breeds.
Of two identically sized fish from the same species and caught in the same reef, only one may be ciguatoxic. Even two diners can have different reactions to the toxin, depending on their health, how much alcohol they have consumed and how much of the more dangerous fish guts and brain they have eaten. But any warming in the seas, from El Niño or carbon overload, will make ciguatoxins more plentiful. The weather phenomenon causes waters to heat up, which can make ciguatoxins grow faster.
While the government has instituted a few random tests, the head of the Hong Kong Chamber of Seafood Merchants admits, “The test isn’t a solution, because results take three or four days. By then, the fish is eaten, the rest of the stock has been sold off. It just isn’t possible to put a label on something that’s alive and swimming.”
Especially when diners put a premium on getting it straight into a steamer.
Even if I can’t read the menu, there’s no mistaking the specialty at Kunming’s Old Xuanwei Ham Restaurant. A giant ham mounted on the roof, realistic in plaster if slightly gray, is visible from blocks away. It’s enough forbidden flesh to make a wandering Jew salivate. In this one town at least, the country that eats chicken feet is sprinting to show off its beautiful legs. “Fire leg,” in fact, is the literal translation of huo tui, Chinese for ham.
The cured pig from the foothills of Xuanwei, 200 kilometers northeast of Yunnan’s provincial capital, has for centuries been considered the best in China. But, experts estimate, two-thirds of those who claim to make the real Xuanwei ham produce the stuff in other counties that lack Xuanwei’s 900-meter-plus altitude, clean mountain water and other conditions that improve the winter-long curing process. “Hundreds of tons of Xuanwei ham are sold in Kunming each year,” estimates Li Jielian, proprietor of a competing ham restaurant. “But not even one ton comes from Xuanwei.”
Now, following its entry into the World Trade Organization, the government is trying to steal European techniques to insure brand quality. Its “Products of Genuine Name Origin” plan, as announced by the State Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision, is really the brainchild of France — which has been eager to show the Chinese how regional names of age-old products like Camembert and Cognac can be used for prestige and higher prices. French officials convinced the Chinese to pass regulations in 1999 to protect their own authentic products (and not so incidentally get the Chinese to stop using French trademarks like “XO” on the labels of local imitations). So far, more than 100 food and liquor products have been submitted for the distinction, but only Shaoxing wine, Maotai liquor and Xuanwei ham have made the cut.
Still, Xuanwei ham has a long way to go before it can take its place alongside the likes of Parma, Serrano and Black Forest. Officials complain of everything from shortcuts in production to inaccuracy in labeling and downright forgery. And modern marketing techniques have yet to make their way to this remote corner of China.
“Competition in the ham market is very violent,” says Li. He says local “ham bosses” routinely buy cheaper hams from neighboring counties and pawn them off as the real Xuanwei variety.
When regional producers convened in Xuanwei for the first-ever “ham symposium,” discussion among agricultural experts was followed by a “ham and arts festival,” which included a contest for the largest hog (the winner weighed in at 500 kilos), and a pig chase with the winner getting a free dinner (presumably of ham). Government officials delivered speeches in which they pledged new breeding research and government funding to aid the industry, including the state-owned Xuanwei Ham Group — which has seen its market dominance carved up by competitors.
What this ancient ham industry needs most, though, is protection from the counterfeiting that is rife throughout modern China. In March, the government newspaper China Daily trumpeted the “fight against the counterfeits to maintain the fame of Xuanwei ham.” The newspaper assured that “strict inspections” would make certain the prized pork was “manufactured elegantly” so it remained “sweet, crisp and fragrant.” The main problem is educating consumers who don’t bother to read labels carefully and have “no sense about this at all,” says Feng Liming, who works with the French agricultural office to implement the name-origin program. Producers are even worse, he says, with “no consciousness of the law.”
As the ham has become better known, the competition has gotten more vicious. “It is now a very popular treat and nobody wants to give away their secret methods,” says Xue, a salesman for the Shengda (“Rising Up”) brand. He claims that his company is the only one that fattens its pigs in the “traditional way,” with corn, potatoes and vegetables instead of processed feed. And only his company, he insists, hand-massages a “special salt” into the legs before they are hung for curing over two winters. Competitors may offer lower prices, he scoffs, but they use chemicals to rush the process along and boost flavor artificially.
While it is supposed to be boiled before it’s eaten (locals snack on microwaved slices), Xuanwei ham can be compared with fine raw Spanish varieties, though the deep red meat is somewhat saltier and chewier. Lean center cuts are packaged in satin-lined gift boxes. But canned hams are the more common and cheaper choice. In an advertisement for the staple’s versatility, the Old Xuanwei’s menu features steamed ham slices with green peppers and bland slices of fresh carp; ham tossed into translucent noodles along with hot peppers and vast quantities of fresh cilantro; shredded ham as a garnish atop fresh bean curd slabs; and ham wrapped around deep-fried lotus roots. Equally memorable is the Chinese version of a classic autumnal combination: sweetened hunks of fresh pumpkin sitting on a bed of chopped ham.
Diners can also choose from nearly 100 items to create a 30-plate, $100 “all-ham banquet.” Experienced patrons know that different-sized legs have different tastes — a 10–12-kilo leg will be lean, a 14–16-kilo leg fattier — and they order their slices accordingly. The restaurant’s chefs, who hail from “four lakes and five rivers” — slang for everywhere, according to the woman owner — put out the kind of rib-sticking dishes that would be satisfying just about anywhere. Ham hocks impart a subtle smokiness to softened navy beans in a milky stew that a Texan might call “pot liquor.” I’d call it down-home Southern fare, as in southwestern China.
But this stuff is older than Westfield or Armour. Companies say that ham production in Xuanwei dates back at least as far as 1727, though Wang Tianxi of the Yunnan Agriculture Department’s Office of Animal Husbandry suspects it might be even older. In 1913, Pu Zaiting, a leading ham producer, purchased the first equipment from Germany for tinning; two years later he won a Silver Prize for his ham at the Panama Exposition — a first such international recognition for a food from China. But the ham probably received its greatest honor from Sun Yatsen, whose oft-quoted saying, “Drink and eat with virtue,” was inspired by Xuanwei ham.
Recent producers, however, haven’t behaved so virtuously. Yang Zhiming of the Yunnan Agricultural Office says the main impetus for the new regulations is to keep the 50 or more purveyors of Xuanwei ham, who generate combined annual sales of $6 million in Yunnan alone, from frittering away the profits by “fighting and defaming each other” in advertising campaigns.
One gift box of the unfortunately named Rongsheng Ham Liability Company claims its ham is a product of “dominant position in this space of nature” and is a “senior invigorator of old peoples” that can “reduce blood prosure.” Fortunately, the pungent flavor of the real Xuanwei ham doesn’t get lost in translation.
In food, as in politics, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan are always trying to be more Chinese than thou. And where the Taiwanese try to outdo even Beijing’s original Forbidden City with the priceless collection of stolen antiquities in their so-called Palace Museum, they can also boast of the only library devoted to Chinese cuisine. Still, it’s hard to believe that centuries of Chinese banquets have wound up in a hushed and windowless basement bunker of a Taipei office tower.
When it comes to reading up on a hundred ways to make kung pao chicken, or how to carve “squirrel” fish, the Foundation for Chinese Dietary Culture has the first and last word. The foundation, which started in 1989, collects materials on tea and wine, rice culture, home entertaining, restaurant management, food tonics and food processing, and claims to cover “etiquette, aesthetics, philosophy and astronomy.”
The only collection to date centered on Chinese forms of gluttony has amassed 15,000 books from numerous countries and epochs, as well as magazines, audio-visual materials and up to 1,000 menus. They include 13 from former Taiwanese President Chiang Kai-shek’s state banquets. One dehumidified case, kept at 13 degrees Celsius, is stuffed with a treasure trove of tracts from as far back as the late Ming dynasty. Held together by scotch tape, with anti-termite paper stuck between the rice pages, most are works on the medicinal uses and properties of various dishes.
“There had to be a place devoted to something of such importance to our heritage,” says George Wong, foundation creator and head of the Mercuries Group, a holding company for department stores, shoe stores and a beef-noodle franchise. Though he doesn’t cook at all, Wong came up with the library’s concept when he came upon several dusty, 19th-century Chinese-language treatises on cuisine mixed in with mostly Japanese books in a Tokyo bookstore. He wondered why such an important aspect of his homeland’s patrimony lay “scattered and useless.”
Among the 68 magazines to which the foundation subscribes are China Drinks, China Condiment, Dietotherapy and Herbal Medicine Diet, and Purple Sands and Tea Lore. Every two years, the foundation stages a symposium featuring international food academics. Topics covered have included “The Mysteries of the Chinese Diet,” “Life Cycles of the Independent Restaurant” and the always riveting “Evolutionary Changes in Utensils.”
The foundation includes contributions from the West. One rare volume entitled How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, published in the U.S. in 1945, contains an introductory endorsement by Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck. But the recipes are rudimentary to say the least, including “Meat Sauce Meets Lobster Stirs” or “Sweet Onion Stir Meat Shreds.”
Says foundation head May Chang, who combines degrees in library science and restaurant management, “When you understand a story behind a certain dish or food, you enjoy it and appreciate it more.” Researching articles for the library’s quarterly, she found a Taiwanese noodle vendor famous for his so-called “mouse” noodles. But the name came from his quick movements, not the inclusion of any rodent meat.
Scavenging for new material around the region, she followed a tip from her boss to explore the many books sold off hurriedly by ethnic Chinese fleeing the Vietnam War and persecution in its aftermath. Stumbling on a pile not even deemed worthy of being put on a Saigon Chinatown’s bookstore shelves, she returned to Taipei with 13 volumes related to medicinal herbs, some dating to the mid-17th century. Her greatest find to date, a Ming-dynasty treatise on vegetarian cooking, also came from Vietnam, though, pointedly, China itself is never mentioned as a potential source — the thousand-pound gorilla in the reading room.
Every day in the basement of the Mercuries Building, Chang is surrounded by the flavors and aromas of meals as yet uncooked. Willy Chiang, a cook at the Taipei Westin Hotel, says he won a culinary competition by creating a handmade bamboo container for a dish based on a photograph he found here. Taiwan’s popular television chef, Fu Pei Mei, donated to the foundation dozens of her own recipe books as well as rare pre-revolution magazines on Chinese food. After filing more than 4,000 television shows and even more recipes, she scours the collection for new ideas.
“But we like to keep things quiet here, no advertising,” says Chang, playing down any competition with the mainland. Like most Chinese restaurants, the world’s only Chinese food library is content to be known by word of mouth. There’s only one difference. The books here are for reading on the premises only. No Chinese take-out.