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In praise of eating less and little meat
By Wang Yong |
February 21, 2009, Saturday
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LAST weekend, my wife and I had the pleasure of eating a bowl of tuji, or locally grown chicken, in a hillside farmer's restaurant in the idyllic city of Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province.
Although I doubted the chicken was 100 percent "organic" -- fed with no chemical additives -- it did taste better than one bred on an industrial farm where chemical injection is the rule.
That meal reminded me of the good old days of the early 1970s when there was no mass-produced chicken on industrialized and consolidated farms.
Although my family of six could afford only one chicken in about a month at that time -- chicken was usually the only source of animal protein for us - every chicken that did make its way to our table was locally grown, with strong delicious muscle.
Chewing a little piece of the chicken - dipped in vinegar - for as long as possible was the joy of our day.
You may well call China in those days a country short of food. We are better off now, of course, but is the food really better? It depends on how you define "food."
While my family ate a locally grown chicken once a month, nowadays I can hardly find any such chicken in a city supermarket and, if I am lucky enough to find one, I can't afford to eat it more than once a month, either.
There are richer guys who can afford it every day, but there're many who are poorer. I know that because I often go to rough vegetable stalls in Shanghai only to find crowds of ordinary people haggling with vendors over vegetables, down to the last fen.
In the case of chicken, ours is an age of both plenty and poverty: We now have plenty of more robust yet contaminated chicken, while we have fewer healthy free-range birds.
The nightmarish scenario of "modern" industrial farming is satirized in Paul Robert's book, "The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry," published by Bloomsbury in 2008.
The author, a journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and National Geographic, debunks American "superabundance" - an abundance based on the use of nitrogen fertilizer that improves yield per acre but saps soil nutrients and pollutes the groundwater.
To do industrial farming justice, it has succeeded in feeding every American, but the problem is it has overfed the population. Much of today's processed, salty, fatty and preservative-laden foods is not suited to human biology.
More is not better in the economics of food, given humankind's physical realities, says the author. "The belief that (the US) food supply is 'among the safest in the world,' and certainly safer than it used to be, repeated endlessly by food companies and FDA officials, requires more caveats and qualifications by the month," he says.
"In the minds of many health advocates, obesity hadn't simply happened to humanity; it was being encouraged by a food industry whose bottom line depended ... on processed foods and snacks."
What Paul Roberts laments about America is also partly true in China.
Although there're fewer obese Chinese than Americans on the whole, the trend to fat is on the rise in China, especially among the new generation born and bred in a food culture dominated by American-style fast food.
Eat less, Roberts begs, and in particular, less meat. The Western model is not sustainable, he declares.
A review from Publishers Weekly (Reed Business Information) dismissed Roberts' "eat less" argument as "commonplace."
But is there any "uncommon" solution to the superficial "superabundance" other than just "eat less"?
Why do we eat so much? Were not Roman gladiators stronger than most of us although they ate less? Were not China's martial arts invented by Chinese who ate less than we do today?
Less is more.
Although I doubted the chicken was 100 percent "organic" -- fed with no chemical additives -- it did taste better than one bred on an industrial farm where chemical injection is the rule.
That meal reminded me of the good old days of the early 1970s when there was no mass-produced chicken on industrialized and consolidated farms.
Although my family of six could afford only one chicken in about a month at that time -- chicken was usually the only source of animal protein for us - every chicken that did make its way to our table was locally grown, with strong delicious muscle.
Chewing a little piece of the chicken - dipped in vinegar - for as long as possible was the joy of our day.
You may well call China in those days a country short of food. We are better off now, of course, but is the food really better? It depends on how you define "food."
While my family ate a locally grown chicken once a month, nowadays I can hardly find any such chicken in a city supermarket and, if I am lucky enough to find one, I can't afford to eat it more than once a month, either.
There are richer guys who can afford it every day, but there're many who are poorer. I know that because I often go to rough vegetable stalls in Shanghai only to find crowds of ordinary people haggling with vendors over vegetables, down to the last fen.
In the case of chicken, ours is an age of both plenty and poverty: We now have plenty of more robust yet contaminated chicken, while we have fewer healthy free-range birds.
The nightmarish scenario of "modern" industrial farming is satirized in Paul Robert's book, "The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry," published by Bloomsbury in 2008.
The author, a journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and National Geographic, debunks American "superabundance" - an abundance based on the use of nitrogen fertilizer that improves yield per acre but saps soil nutrients and pollutes the groundwater.
To do industrial farming justice, it has succeeded in feeding every American, but the problem is it has overfed the population. Much of today's processed, salty, fatty and preservative-laden foods is not suited to human biology.
More is not better in the economics of food, given humankind's physical realities, says the author. "The belief that (the US) food supply is 'among the safest in the world,' and certainly safer than it used to be, repeated endlessly by food companies and FDA officials, requires more caveats and qualifications by the month," he says.
"In the minds of many health advocates, obesity hadn't simply happened to humanity; it was being encouraged by a food industry whose bottom line depended ... on processed foods and snacks."
What Paul Roberts laments about America is also partly true in China.
Although there're fewer obese Chinese than Americans on the whole, the trend to fat is on the rise in China, especially among the new generation born and bred in a food culture dominated by American-style fast food.
Eat less, Roberts begs, and in particular, less meat. The Western model is not sustainable, he declares.
A review from Publishers Weekly (Reed Business Information) dismissed Roberts' "eat less" argument as "commonplace."
But is there any "uncommon" solution to the superficial "superabundance" other than just "eat less"?
Why do we eat so much? Were not Roman gladiators stronger than most of us although they ate less? Were not China's martial arts invented by Chinese who ate less than we do today?
Less is more.
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