While we’re waiting a week to get our visa extension (yes, we are now the proud holders of Chinese bank accounts), I want to talk a bit about food. I’m working on a big one about the migrants, but it’s too much, might have to chop it up in bits.
So – food in China. First of all, I love Chinese food. There seems to be an infinite amount of different cuisines and even the Chinese can disagree about the details of them. You could probably live all your life and never eat the same dish twice, since there are even a thousand variations of different dishes. There’s a lot of lovely, lovely spicy food (although Chinese food is never as spicy as e.g. Indian or Middle Eastern) from Sichuan – should go there some time – a lot of heavy soups from the north, rice noodles in the south. I don’t have time or knowledge to specify it more than that it is certainly a lot more impressive, entertaining and delicious than western Chinese food. Well, and they have a lot of dishes of the famine cuisine, which sounds much more smart and catchy than it is. Very little meat (only 20 years ago they had food tickets for meat) and a lot of it is intestines, chicken feet, brain and other gooey stuff. But it’s fairly avoidable. Ahem, but what I do know about Chinese food in general though is that you never go wrong with the 3 main ingredients:
– Beans
– Rice
– Oil
And plenty of it. Firstly, you can get EVERYTHING with beans here. Of course a lot of dishes, but also bean candy, bean cookies, bean ice cream, bean snacks… It can be a real challenge to actually avoid it. The good thing about that though is that you sorta get used to it. I even started craving the bean-filled cakes. Maybe because it’s the closest I’ll get to romkugler for now.
Rice, because it’s true what they say about China; they do eat a lot of it. Most likely with every dish, especially if you go out as a group, sitting at one of those big, round tables with a spinning glass plate in the middle filled with shared dishes. The ordering is most likely “FUWU YUAN!!! Nigganigga… Zhege, zhege, zhege… Nigga… (yi, er, san, si…) LIU MIFAN!” Try google translate and let me know if the result is funny. But yeah, same story, rice snacks, rice candy etc.
Oil. Because it is probably some of the oiliest food you can get hold of, especially in Beijing they say. To the extent that we often consider Ken De Qi (KFC) or Mai Don Lau (McD) as the healthy alternative. Or just a variation to the rice, noodles, rice, rice, noodles, dumplings and rice. There are two things that furthermore justifies the act of going there (I am one of those who would avoid those places much as possible). It’s so much cheaper than home (still expensive in China) and there’s always drama there. ALWAYS. Like the other day where we went to Bruce Lee – or whatever the Chinese fast food chain with his face on is called: Girl threw her tray up in the air, crossed her arms and starred madly at her male companion. He picked some of the stuff up, shaking his head. Or else it’s a girl crying while a guy is trying to tell her something. Or a young couple trying to examine each other’s uvulae. With their tongues that is. It can never go wrong with a fast food restaurant.
And it’s funny about the oily food, ‘cause in general they’re all quite concerned about health. Everybody’s always talking about how it’s not healthy to smoke, to eat cold things in the morning, to go to bed late, drink coffee (try and guess which ones we’re guilty of) how you SHOULD drink this and this tea, drink soymilk if you’re a girl, eat more vegetables and so on. A waiter refused to serve beer to this Italian guy because his hand was broken and would heal slower then. And then you got one of the most polluted cities in the world, oily food and some of the most far out food scandals I’ve heard. Children dying from bad milk, recycled oil used on most restaurants (they pull it up from the SEWERS and refine it or make it out of spoiled meat), serve cat meat instead of lamb (to fix the flavor, the meat is soaked in sheep urine)… I’ll spare you from the rest, it’s better not to think about. But yeah, I guess it adds up the whole thing.
Even though it’s cheap, cheap, cheap to buy food here (of course you can spend 20 € on lunch if you want to, but mostly you can get away with 1-2 € – for cooked food) the rise in price (haw haw) from the farmer to the consumer is apparently massive. Somebody told me that a kilo of cabbage will cost 0,4 RMB if you buy it from the farmer. That’s like… 0,05 €. But because the different cities and provinces have different laws and regulations, the taxes push the price up to maybe 4 RMB. Still not that much, but again if you look at the rise in price and people’s income, a normal salary is around 2.000 RMB/month. There’s a massive inflation in China and if people ever said that stuff here is cheap… Well, maybe a couple of years ago. The prices of food and transportation (0,4 RMB for a bus ticket) is kept somewhat under control (e.g. is gasoline here of the cheap and really nasty highly polluting kind), but everything else, especially imported “luxury” goods, are ridiculously expensive compared to the salary.
Ni chi le ma?
Aggy in China 