How to understand China: through its food

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0:23Hey Fuchsia, Oli Dugmore from The New Statesman. I'm really excited about our interview later. and not least because we're actually able to do it. My surgery has been penciled in, but it's not today. So we are go. I love Chinese food. And so I'm so excited to talk to you about it. I want to draw on your expertise, hear the tall tales and sort of luxuriate in deliciousness for 45 minutes to an hour. I hope that sounds good with you. See you soon. Hi, Ollie. Sounds great. and I just wanted to warn you that you may end up very, very hungry by the end of this. In fact, that's my sort of paramount intention.

1:02So just be prepared. I hope you've got something planned for this evening. Fuchsia Dunlop has dedicated much of her life to eating Chinese food. If you're interested in Chinese cuisine and culture, you may have come across her through television programmes, heard her on the radio or cooked one of her recipes. And if you haven't, stick around. By the end of this episode, I promise you'll be tempted to dive a little deeper into this extraordinary world. Future joined me on the day her latest book, Five Tastes, was published. To talk about the flavours that define Chinese food, what they reveal about an ancient culture, and the political and economic factors changing Chinese cuisine, both in China and in the West.

1:44I'm Oli Dugmore and you're listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. I hope you enjoy the conversation. And I hope you're not too hungry. Future Dunlop, hello, how are you? Hi, hello. So glad to have you here. You have been described as the English person with a Chinese stomach and having, quote, done more to explain real Chinese cooking to non-Chinese cooks than anyone. What began your interest in Chinese food? Well, I think it really started with an interest in food since I was very, very small. And for as long as I can remember, nothing has made me happier really than cooking. So I was quite a Keen Cook in my teenage years.

2:21And actually I dreamed of going to Paris and going to cooking school there. But anyway, I cooked quite seriously. And then after university, I had a sort of editorial job where I was sub-editing lots of material about the Asia Pacific region. And I just went backpacking to China really for fun. It's in 1992. And it was a fascinating trip and I don't quite know why. But when I came back, I started learning Mandarin in evening classes without any serious intention. And then I did another trip to China, language school in Taiwan. They do these fantastic summer scholarships. And then I got a British Council scholarship to go and spend a year in China.

3:01So that was 1994. And I chose Sichuan University in Chengdu, the Sichuanese capital, partly because I'd had a spectacular lunch there the year before, and also because it was sort of famed as being one of the sort of centers of a great regional cuisine. And when I got to China, my Chinese wasn't really good enough to do anything academic. So I concentrated on the language and meanwhile got totally distracted by the incredible little restaurants around the university. And I started sort of becoming friendly with the owners and saying, would you mind if I came into the kitchen to learn a bit? And then a friend heard about this famous Sichuan cooking school, a German friend, and he and I persuaded them to give us some private classes.

3:47And then, and it was sort of fascinating, started sort of unpicking the grammar of Chinese cooking, like the basic, you know, the knife skills and just what was going on in the walk and so on. And then when I'd finished at the university, the cooking school invited me to enroll on this professional chef's foundation course with a bunch of other, I mean, everyone else was they were mostly 20 year old Sichuanese men and two other women and we just did this fantastic course in all the core skills and dishes of Sichuanese cookery so um and then after that I came back to England and I had this idea to write a Sichuan cookbook because hard though it is to believe now there weren't really any Sichuan restaurants and no one knew no one had tasted Szechuan pepper no one knew, Dandan noodles, you know, this sort of thing.

4:37And so anyway, to cut a long story short, I did manage to write the Szechuan cookbook, little thinking that it would become a whole career because of course it's a rather improbable career for someone I need. I think I should make more life decisions based on where I eat fantastic lunches. I think that's a good way of going about things. You mentioned you were one of few women, am I right? You were the first Westerner to enrol in that course as well, Yeah, they didn't have, I mean, China was just beginning to open up after sort of decades of isolation and they'd never had a regular foreigner in the class before.

5:09And yeah, it was only because I was friendly with them. And of course it was all taught, not just in Chinese, but in Sichuan dialect and the textbooks were all in Chinese. So yeah, it was quite a crash course in the specialised vocabulary of the Chinese kitchen. And you mentioned learning Mandarin and can you speak multiple dialects as well then? No, well, I mean, I speak Mandarin, although it goes a bit Sichuanese in pronunciation when I spend time with Sichuanese people. I mean, I can understand bits of other dialects, but not Cantonese, which is really another language. What did you grow up eating?

5:48So my mother has always been a very adventurous cook. So one of her best friends when I was small was Indian. So she used to make some Indian dishes that he taught her. And also she taught English as a foreign language in Oxford. And we usually had one or two of her students living with us to help with me and my sister and to sort of help around the house. And so they became part of the family. And there was a Japanese girl who used to make Japanese breakfast and some Japanese dishes. We had various Turks living with us and they used to cook occasionally and their recipes would stay in our kitchen repertoire.

6:29And also, one evening, all the Japanese students would come over and cook a big feast and things. So I had a very unusual sort of upbringing in terms of food for 70s Britain. I mean, we had shepherd's pie and cheese souffle and roast Sunday lunch as well, But there were a lot of flavours that at that time were pretty exotic to most British people, I think. And I think I'm right in saying that your first encounter with Chinese food was with century egg. Is that, was that a good encounter? No, that was my first trip to Asia. So in Hong Kong, no, it was ghastly. So I'd never, I went with some friends to a restaurant in Hong Kong and the century eggs, you know, they are black and they have these, you know, runny centers a bit like tar and they just look murky and very disturbing if you've never seen one before.

7:24And so I politely, you know, I'd been brought up to eat everything. And so I ate some and I just remember this black slime on my chopsticks and sort of trying to surreptitiously wipe it on a napkin and things like that. Of course, the really funny thing about them is that, you know, they don't taste really peculiar at all. and it just tastes like a rather delicious egg. I once made a radio programme which involved blindfolding my friends and feeding them eggs without seeing them. And they go, this is nice, just like a nice egg. And then I take off the blindfold and then they would say, what's this?

7:57Yeah. So good. You mentioned your first answer about sort of China opening up and that being part of the story. I mean, could you just give us a sense of that context of what was living in China like? But I think both as a local and as a foreigner, And I mean that both economically and politically. What was it like in China at that time? Well, so it was a time of sort of first encounters, not only for foreign students, but for most Chinese people. So almost all the Chinese people that I was meeting, my friends were meeting, had never interacted with a foreigner before. And so people in China were very fascinated by us.

8:37And I remember literally going out to buy a bus ticket would draw a crowd. People would always make remarks and ask questions. And it was also discovery for foreign students like me because it was completely fascinating. And there were many hilarious, you know, just culture clashes and little encounters. I mean, it was really fun. And every day something happened that was unexpected. And the other thing is that because China had been very isolated from the outside world, I mean, there were no Western brands. There were no, you know, no Western media. There was no cheese in a provincial capital, really, apart from in the two posh hotels.

9:20And so it was really a question of being willing to immerse oneself as a foreigner in Chinese life. So it was very exciting in that way. And also, you know, this is just before email and it was incredibly expensive making phone calls home. Letters took three weeks. And so, you know, there were not many foreigners and we were quite sort of stranded in China. And even, yeah, I mean, at that time, you know, as a foreigner, even a foreign student on a scholarship, we were quite rich compared with a lot of people. so my foreign student friends and I, we could afford to go out to little restaurants.

10:01I mean, these were not expensive places, but, you know, it was the equivalent of about a pound a head for a very nice local meal in a sort of, you know, just a little restaurant near the university. And, yeah, and the other thing was amazing that there was really very little tourism and so going off adventuring, you know, in the countryside, There was almost no Chinese tourism apart from the big hitting sites. So it felt hugely adventurous and fun. That's wonderful. You mentioned in one of your previous answers about the kind of regional variety of the cuisine. And I just, why? Why is it so varied?

10:49Is it because of the size of the country, the length of the history? I mean, tell me about it. Yeah. I mean, so China is more of a continent than a country. And, you know, the differences between regional cuisines are like the differences between European countries. So, you know, you think of the difference between Norwegian and Sicilian food. You get those kinds of differences within China because it has everything from in the north, you know, Siberian forests, freezing winters, in the West, deserts and salt marshes. And then the Tibetan plateau, a huge amount of the country is very high. And then in the Southwest, in Yunnan, you actually have tropical rainforests with a few wild elephants still existing in them.

11:35And then all the agricultural, north and south. And so it's incredibly biodiverse. And the differences in diet, I mean, you know, Southerners find it quite confronting to be stuck eating Northern food. So if you come from the South, you know, if you're Cantonese, you'll be eating lots of seafood and vegetables and soups. And if you go in the North, it's all flour, you know, dumplings and it's heavier food and breads and noodles and lots of sheep meat, which is quite heavy for Southerners. So, yeah, there are different, there's sort of different terroir, different ingredients in all these different places.

12:18And also just to a certain extent, different cultures, because although everyone speaks the same language, there are also, you know, minority nationalities, ethnic groups like the Uyghur and the Tibetans within the country of China who have very distinct food traditions. And there's also a lot of Muslims called the Hui people who you found all over the country who eat halal food. There's Buddhist vegetarian cuisine as well. And then there are some areas that have been very rich and have highly sophisticated stratified cuisines and other places with fantastic rustic traditions and street food. So it's just, you know, unless your favourite and only food is cheese, in which case the variety is a bit limited.

13:08We keep coming back to cheese. Yeah, there's something for everyone, you know. Unless it's cheese. Yes. There is some cheese in China, but it's just very marginal. It's interesting that, you know, in that sense then, that almost the frame that we have certainly in Britain of describing sort of Chinese food is almost so broad to almost be without meaning in that sense, right? Like you said, you've been cooking Chinese food for 30 years, you've been writing about it for 25. Your latest book, Five Tastes, that perhaps when you do boil something down to the five tastes that make it up, that that's actually perhaps a more useful way of thinking about it and framing it and putting it together than talking about it in this colossal geographical sense.

13:52Yeah. Well, I always remember when I was at the cooking school, one of my classmates said to me, oh, fuchsia, I don't like Western food. and this was in 1995 in Chengdu and there wasn't any Western food. So I asked him how he came to this conclusion. He said, oh, I had KFC once. I didn't like it, so I don't like Western food. But I always think that's a real reminder of coming to these great conclusions. But yes, you're quite right. So it's very diverse. But at the same time, there are certain common threads that you can draw out and which you can say makes this Chinese. And one of them is cutting food up into little pieces and eating it with chopsticks.

14:30I mean, most Chinese food is like that. And then, you know, certain seasonings like fermented bean things like soy sauce, fermented black beans, and then cooking methods like steaming and wok frying. And so this book, you know, the idea is to go at it from the topic of flavor and five tastes. So the Chinese have five rather than the Western four. So to sweet, sour, salty, bitter, they add xin or la, which means spicy or pungent. So for things like chilies, pepper, ginger, Sichuan pepper. But five tastes also is a kind of symbol of all the flavours available to a chef. And beyond that, it's a metaphor for the pleasures of gastronomy in general.

15:14So with this book, I've sort of introduced lots of different seasonings and how they go together and flavour combinations that I think are sensationally delicious and can be applied in many places. So you can use them in some traditional Chinese dishes. But I've also, with this book, for the first time, let myself off the hook of trying to really reflect faithfully what people eat in China and actually invented dishes using Chinese seasonings in unconventional ways. So I think I'm hoping it will be, as well as a book of recipes, is a book of sort of tools and ideas for going to your local supermarket or farmer's market and thinking, what can I do to make this taste really delicious in a sort of Chinese way?

15:58I want to ask you about that. You quote the 20th century writer and philosopher Lin Yutang. The quote is, the whole culinary art of China depends on the art of mixture. So first of all, how does that manifest in the kind of average traditional Chinese meal? Yeah, well, I mean, I think his intention was to draw attention to the fact that, you know, whereas let's say the typical English meal, we'd say meat and two veg traditionally, right? And in China, you're much more likely to take that meat and cut it into shreds and stir fry it with one or more vegetables. So you have, because of the art of cutting and the use of chopsticks, the food is reduced to small pieces.

16:40And then you can sort of put it together in different combinations like lottery numbers. And so that's one of the reasons that your average Chinese meal can be very varied because you're sort of mixing and matching in this way. And of course, that also applies to the art of flavour, particularly in Sichuan where I learned to cook. and that's the sort of headquarters of flavor in China. It's famous for being spicy and hot, but it's much more sophisticated than that. And Sichuanese chefs would say the real sort of heart of their cuisine is which means each dish has its own style and 100 dishes have 100 different flavors.

17:23And so the really interesting thing and the really accessible thing for a home cook, wherever you are, is that actually there aren't that many seasonings. It's not like people are using millions of spices. They're using a concise library of things like soy sauce, Chinese vinegar, sugar, sesame oil, just a few things, and then mixing them in different combinations so you have this dazzling variety of flavours. Talk to me about this idea of, well, I guess fusion cuisine, but also like purism and food purists and what you think of that idea about how strict or confined or true you should be to ideas about what belongs somewhere and what doesn't?

18:04Look, I think we all play with our food and we all mix things up. And cooking is always an expression of where you are now and what there is to cook with. And I think with Sichuanese cooking, the most famous signature flavour is Sichuan pepper and chilli. ma la, they call it numbing and hot combination. Sichuan pepper is an ancient Chinese spice, but they've only had chilies in Sichuan for a couple of hundred years or something. Sichuanese chefs, Chinese chefs are always playing with new ingredients that become available to them. I think we all do that and that's fine. Having said that, as a foreigner writing about Chinese cuisine, in the past I did a Sichuan cookbook and my intention, really was to take myself out of the picture and just sort of try and express something about the cuisine as eaten in China.

19:02So that's maybe you can say I was concerned with authenticity. So Sichuan cuisine itself is a moving target because it's always involving, but that I was trying to just, you know, reflect what people ate in Sichuan. But, you know, the way I cook at home, like most of us, is a hodgepodge. You know, we in somewhere like London, we have so many, but I mean, not just everywhere now. We have so many international ingredients available, different influences from foreign cookbooks and also now, you know, immigrants living in this country and social media. And so I, you know, as a cook at home in England, I will go to the farmer's market or supermarket and just try and rustle something up knowing with what I know about cooking, usually from China.

19:49And so with this book, I just gave myself permission to do that kind of thing. So I've got some mashup dishes where I've used Chinese sauces and seasonings with Italian pastas instead of Chinese noodles. And then one of my favorite things in the book is the use of fermented tofu. So this is an ingredient which I don't really understand why it's not wildly popular in the West because there's this huge fashion for fermented foods, also for plant-based foods and vegan and vegetarian eating. And fermented tofu just ticks all those boxes. So it's not like most other kinds of tofu, a main ingredient that you could eat in place of meat if you're vegetarian.

20:35It's cured in, it's first sort of moulded with a kind special cultures of mould and then cured with salt and wine and often spices as well. You get something that's intensely salty with a wildly umami flavour, a bit like roquefort, and creamy like cheese. Delicious. You can't eat a whole cube because it's very strong. But the typical Chinese way to eat it is to have a little bit with your rice or your congee. So you'd have one cube and a bowl of rice and take little bits and just eat it with your chopsticks and eat it with your rice. But it's also used in cooking. So in the Cantonese, add it to stir fries.

21:20So they'll stir fry water spinach, lovely leafy green, and add a bit of fermented tofu at the end. And you get this creamy umami sauce that has a sort of buttery richness to it. Crazy delicious. It sounds great. I also need to ask you if I've been pronouncing tofu wrong my whole life. Is that how I'm meant to say it? Oh, well, in Chinese it's tofu. But in English we use the Japanese transliteration, T-O-F-U. And I don't actually, maybe the Japanese say tofu. So I'm not sure there is a right or wrong. I just tend to use the Chinese way. I just assume I've been doing it wrong in my life. This is where I sit on that.

21:59Can we talk about the perception of Chinese food in Britain? because I think for a long time that idea basically is like a takeaway, kind of greasy or junk food. And I think that's changed in recent years. But I'd just invite your thoughts about why that perception exists, how it's changing, and what really, if there's this idea in British minds about what Chinese food is and how it connects to actually the reality of Chinese cookery. Yeah, well, I think for a long time, and certainly when I was small, pretty much the only Chinese food most English people, most British people had was Chinese takeaway style.

22:42And that formula was sort of, it was created by Cantonese people. So immigrants from one part of China in the South, starting in America and later in Britain. And it was created with a very limited range of ingredients to suit quite hostile Western palates. They came up with something which was very tasty, inexpensive, wildly popular, but quite unlike what they would be eating themselves the other side of the counter. And so you think fried noodles, fried rice, deep fried things, sweet and sour sauces, not that many vegetables, not many soups. Salt and pepper chips. Yeah. I love salt and pepper chips so much.

23:25We didn't have those when I was small. Is that a more modern thing? I think it's a more northern thing. It's so good. Yeah. Oh, delicious. I'm going to have a Chinese takeaway tonight. Sorry, I interrupted you. No, but all that kind of thing. And I think that people in this country got it fixed in their mind that that was Chinese food. So very tasty, not very healthy. Certainly not if you had it every night. Inexpensive, lowbrow, you know. And also it came from immigrants from one region, really. And, you know, we've already talked about the extraordinary diversity of Chinese food. And also it's a very sophisticated food culture.

24:05And sure, they have cheap street food and rustic food in China, but they also have very, very complex banquet cuisine. You know, there are all these different kinds of Chinese food as well as regional cuisines. But anyway, I think that that old stereotype is really being shaken up, partly because we have many Chinese immigrants and visitors from different parts of China. They didn't want to eat that. They want to eat proper Chinese food. And they, you know, so we've got, for example, I was in Edinburgh last week and they've got all these little restaurants doing regional Chinese cuisines and noodles and, you know, not terribly expensive, but very diverse, very nice for Chinese tastes, not for Western tastes.

24:51So I think anyone who's remotely interested in food can see that Chinese is not just Cantonese, not one cuisine. It's very diverse. And then also China is getting richer and more powerful. And I think that inevitably has an impact on the status of the culture and the cuisine. And anyone who's gone to China on holiday or on business comes away wowed about with the food because Chinese people really care about eating. And there's an incredible restaurant scene in Chinese cities. So I think, and also social media is having a big impact because There's fantastic content, you know, showing obscure regional traditions, rustic cooking, everything.

25:31So I think that, yeah, I think Chinese cooked food just seems a lot more exciting and has a rather higher status than it used to. Having said that, in this country, we have very tight immigration rules and it's almost impossible for chefs to come over here because they have to, you know, If you have a restaurant and you want to bring chefs over, they have to have a certain level of English. And most chefs are not highly educated in that sense. And they have to have an income above a certain level. So I think the constraint really, if we had more visas for more trained chefs, we'd also start to see more of the sort of high end food in this country too.

26:18I don't know whether this was intentional in your answer or not, but it just struck me and I'll talk about it, whether or not the way that it's a broader societal question about, you know, how we value and how we, I guess, grade or mark that status of education. Because there is a difference between a formal education of going to a university and studying a specific architecture, engineering or English literature or whatever, versus the level of understanding necessary to produce extraordinary cooked things. Right. And perhaps we, I don't know, in your view, do we adequately value or understand the importance of things that are slightly more vocational, for example, like a working cook?

27:04Yeah, not at all. And it's the same in China. And that's something that I'm always talking about in China, actually, because people in China find it extraordinary that someone like me who went to a very fine university, then went to cooking school. And, you know, when I've done events in China, people have quite often asked me, were your parents devastated when, you know, they sent you to Cambridge and then you wanted to go and learn to cook? No. And also my sort of so-called intellectual, highly educated university friends from China. They also find it quite funny that I want to spend a lot of time with chefs and I really respect their knowledge.

27:43And they are, you know, I see them as custodians of Chinese culture, just as much as calligraphers and scholars, you know. And so this is something, yeah, in China that people traditionally look down on chefs as people, which means without culture. The word for culture in Chinese, has the word for written script in it. There is a sort of idea that that's culture. I think it may be changing a bit. I think there's a great interest now in China in food as heritage. Also, social media means that some younger chefs are connecting directly with the public. I think that's giving them a bit more status and so on.

28:28But I think certainly, yeah, we should respect craft as culture and as knowledge. And not only that, but I mean, I know, although, you know, I know chefs in China who are really philosophical about what they do. I mean, not all of them, but very precise and very thoughtful. And certainly I think they are practitioners of culture at a very high level. Yeah. Furiously hardworking as well. Oh, yes. Kitchen shifts are brutal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I guess the other thing we maybe consider when thinking about Chinese cuisine in the UK is Chinatowns. And, you know, I guess old Chinatowns versus new Chinatowns and what the implications of that have been for the way we perceive Chinese cooking.

29:20Because, I mean, we're talking in London now, you know, I believe still the largest Chinatown in the UK is here. I might be wrong about that. But could you talk to me about that interplay between the kind of, I guess, that precise geographic location versus its impact on, yeah, the perception of the cuisine? Yeah, well, I suppose that Chinatowns were probably partly defensive for Chinese people, but they could find community there and sort of pull together. And Chinatown in London for a long time was the place where students who were in other parts of the country, they would come here and they would sort out their mobile phones and buy food and do all the things that you need to do in Chinese.

30:00But yes, that's a symptom of a time when Chinese people were quite separated from mainstream society and the food was seen possibly. I mean, I think the thing about Chinatown food was that it was always both the food accessible to Western and that was also where Chinese people ate themselves. So when I started reviewing restaurants, Chinese restaurants for Time Out, about sort of 25 years ago or something, that in London, many of the restaurants had two different menus and they had one menu in English, which was all the sweet and sour pork and egg fried rice for the Westerners. And then they had really all the good stuff was on the menus for the Chinese people.

30:41But anyway, so Chinatowns were both sort of, I don't know, creating a sort of little separate area of Chineseness. But they were also a place where Chinese people could buy the food they wanted and eat very good Chinese food. But I think what's happened now is that there are more Chinese people and they are living in different parts of London. So you've got Chinese areas all over the place with little sort of gatherings of Chinese restaurants and food shops. And Chinatown itself has become much more of a tourist thing. I was talking to some Chinese chefs only the other day and they were saying that the market in Chinatown now is mostly tourists and Westerners and Chinese people themselves have plenty of other options, places to go.

31:32So yeah, it's really interesting. And just personally, I used to have to come into Chinatown to do my shopping for good Chinese ingredients. And now I don't have to because there are pretty good Chinese shops in many neighbourhoods in London and outside London. And also, you know, pretty authentic noodle shops and restaurants too. Nice. We're going to take a quick break. Stay with us. We'll be back after this.

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33:44You described the China that you visited for the first time. 30 years have passed since then. How has China changed over that period of time? You know, we could spend many hours talking about that. It's like another country. It's just, you know, Chengdu, the city I lived in, in the 1990s was all these old lanes of, you know, houses built of wood and bamboo, old medicine shops and tea houses, a real kind of old China feel, that's all been replaced by this sort of very high tech modern city. And so, yeah, in terms of infrastructure, because it's all new, it's pretty advanced. So incredible high speed trains and underground systems.

34:30I think that most Westerners who go to China for the first time I'm pretty struck by all that. And yeah, a lot sort of, there was no consumer culture then. And, you know, it was the tail end of the socialist planned economy when everyone had the same things, same thermos flasks in their house, the same paint colors, the same, you know, and now, yeah, there are sort of very glamorous restaurants. You know, if you're well off in China, you can have a very swanky lifestyle. Yeah, it's completely different. And I think also, so, you know, Chinese people are, many more of them have studied abroad and traveled abroad.

35:19And even those that haven't have encountered the outside world through, you know, the media and so on. And so, yeah, people are much savvier and also more adventurous. You know, I have, I think when I was living in Chengdu, most, I mean, I don't think any of my Chinese friends had been abroad and it was an almost impossible dream for them to go abroad. And now many of them have, you know, they've visited me here and they are up for trying Western food. And yeah, it's just completely changed both at a material level and an economic level and also just sort of culturally and psychologically in terms of, yeah, the country.

36:09Yeah, I guess that story of economic development is the story of Deng's economic reforms. But again, hours and hours to talk about all those sorts of things. Over that change that you just described then, how has the Chinese diet changed. In particular, I'd be interested to hear about whether or not the kind of health crises that we face here in the West, whether those are replicated in China. Again, I appreciate this is a multi-layered question, but then we've seen this, I wouldn't say backlash, but reaction in terms of wellness crazes and the way that we think about diet and health here in the UK.

36:43Is that happening in China too? Yeah, so huge change. When I was a student in Chengdu, there were no supermarkets and most people didn't even have fridges. There were no convenience foods. People would go to the local market and there was a little market in every neighbourhood and buy fresh produce and live fish and things and cook it at home. And then, yeah, there just wasn't really, I mean, there was some traditional preserved foods like sort of pickles and you could get takeaway roast duck or things like that. But there wasn't all this kind of ready meal culture. And now there are huge supermarkets.

37:27Most of the old neighborhoods have been redeveloped. So there are fewer open markets and people are cooking less. So when I was a student, the sort of grown up generation were pretty proficient cooks, men as well as women, and people not only cooked, but they made their own pickles and cured their own winter meats. And now you have a whole generation of people who were brought up as only children with terrible academic pressure, many of whom don't really cook. And so the choice in terms of takeaways is astonishing. You can have anything delivered. And so I think there's a decline of cooking skills and people slightly losing touch with where their food comes from.

38:15And yes, there are some of the health problems that, I mean, I'm not sure of the actual statistics, but the Chinese are making many of the mistakes that we've done with eating more junk food and this kind of thing. And with that, yes, there's pressure on women to be very slim, particularly so people going on diets and that kind of thing. And then some middle class people that I know who will be seeking out whole grains and health foods and things as healthy lifestyle choices. And the thing that's really interesting about China is that I think few other cultures at a cultural level have been so insistent on the connection between diet and health.

39:06So for the Chinese, food is medicine. They say, which means food and medicine come from the same source. And Chinese people talk all the time about what you should eat for health, how you're feeling, the weather, the climate. And every food has its medicinal value and so on. And so the really interesting question is that you have this culture where sort of healthy eating is very much stitched into the DNA. And so if people want to sort of confront the public health challenges of, you know, modern eating, are they possibly in a much better position than we are because of this cultural background?

39:47It would be very interesting to see. You tell me more about that, how you're feeling, if you're unwell, what the weather's like, that that almost dictates what it is that that's an idea because i was just thinking about it i might say oh what do you fancy for dinner tonight and you're kind of you know take it on how i feel about something but i would never think of responding okay well maybe i guess you have like chicken penicillin soup or like eating your veggies if you've got a cold or having an orange but i just don't the chinese like everything it's very it's very precise tell me tell me about that well so for example you know a chinese friend might if you get spots on your face they might say, you're eating too much heaty food, so you should eat some cooling food.

40:24They might give you some advice for what you should be eating. And the reason that people eat so much chili and Sichuan pepper and Sichuan is supposed to be because it's a very humid climate and you have to drive out sweat perspiration through eating heating food. So people talk in that way all the time. And there are also ideas about eating seasonally, not just because of what's available, but also to deal with the climate through dietetics, through dietary medicine. And what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. And the other thing, I mean, I think the idea of good food in China is very much enmeshed with the idea of food that makes you feel good.

41:11And this is the most important and valuable lesson that I've learned from China is that you can combine eating for incredible pleasure with eating for good health. And so when you're planning a Chinese menu, there's a real art to it, but it's all about balance. So a good Chinese menu, it might have some lovely, luscious, fatty belly pork, slow cooked with soy sauce and sugar and wine. But it will also have sort of lightly cooked greens and plain rice and a sort of very delicate broth. And even if you have a banquet of like 40 dishes, some of them will be very light and gentle. And the whole idea is that you feel good afterwards.

42:02And so, yeah, but with an equal emphasis on delight. And that's what's so lovely. Like Chinese people are very uninhibited about the joy of eating. And I think somehow, if you go out for a sort of top level French meal, then it might be fabulously delicious. But after all the cheese and the puddings and the richness, you wouldn't exactly think of it as like a healthy food. And then the next day you might want to eat nothing or just eat a salad or something. But with Chinese, you can have the sort of great pleasure and the kind of cure of the same meal. Yeah. Sounds amazing. I want you to just keep scrubbing that pork belly to me, Fuchsia.

42:49That was taking me somewhere. Can we talk about the perspective of the outsider? Because I wonder, you're very popular in China as well. And whether or not your unique perspective in that sense lent something different to the way you thought about the cuisine or maybe helped people to appreciate or, you know, shine a light on or focus on things that maybe were, I don't know, slightly taken for granted. Can you talk to me about like, I guess, the value of the outsider's perspective in that way? Well, so what people tell me, I mean, one thing is, yeah, that I'm quite unusual in that I combine the sort of academic perspective with the practical perspective.

43:32And so in China, I know lots of chefs, but few of them write, some of them write, but few of them write books, for example. And I know lots of writers and gourmets and foodie intellectuals, but very few of them are really interested in the craft of cooking. And so it's quite unusual that I want to do both. So I'm very interested in the history and the culture of Chinese food, but I really want to know the intricacies of knife work and cooking methods. So that's one thing people find, I think, you know, I already said surprising, that combination. But also, yeah, as an outsider, you sort of, you come fresh to something and you may be surprised or you notice things that insiders don't notice.

44:21and just the background to their lives. And I think the best example of that is texture. So texture and kougan or mouthfeel is absolutely integral to the way that Chinese people appreciate food. You talk to anyone Chinese about something good they ate recently and they're almost certain to talk about the texture and mouthfeel. And the Chinese have a very sophisticated and discerning approach to texture. And that's one of the reasons why they eat all these kind of slithery, rubbery things that Westerners don't. So there's some ingredients that have no flavor, like jellyfish or sea cucumbers, you know.

45:00And these are quite baffling to Westerners. And they were completely baffling to me when I was first in China. Like, why would you eat something that has no taste and has this rather unpleasant, slithery, gristly texture? You know, it took me quite a few years to start enjoying them. No, I really do. But that's one thing that, you know, and that's a real stumbling block for most Westerners with Chinese food because there are many ingredients that anyone anywhere will have no problem with, Peking duck, you know, stir-fried vegetables, whatever. But these slithery things are very culturally specific and you just think what's the point if you don't come from that culture?

45:39But anyway, you know, Chinese people in my experience, they they haven't kind of thought that that's what's going on here that that's the problem westerners have and that that's something very unique about their experience so yeah so that's um i think that's one one example of something that that's seeing it differently than outside is our um our viewers will have noticed that i'm still in my sling and there was a chance that we might have had to cancel this recording so that i could well i was going to say get out of my sling, but I suppose after you have an operation, you probably still have to wear the sling anyway afterwards.

46:15I might be overly optimistic. But anyway, what this has enabled is that we've been able to talk before you go to China. You're off there on a trip. And tell me about that trip. Where are you going? What are you hoping to eat? What are you hoping to bring back in your suitcase? So I do these, I lead these culinary tours of China. So the first thing I'm doing is going to Yunnan in the Southwest to take a small group of people on an intensive eating expedition. That sounds great. Which will be really fun. And also, you know, meanwhile, I'm always learning myself and meeting old friends and doing my own research.

46:47And then I have a couple of weeks after that, when I'm going off on a trip with some ultra foodie friends of mine to discover new things, hopefully. And because it's sort of become a lifelong project now, you know, I've got like 160, 170 notebooks, all full of recipes and things. And I just, every time I go to China, I try and go somewhere new and I'm always learning, talking to people about food, learning recipes, and that will all hopefully manifest in future books. Where do you keep your notebooks? You must have a room full of them. Practically shelves full, yeah. Incredible. Future Dunlop, it's been fascinating and inspiring.

47:22Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me and I hope you have a good Chinese supper tonight. Oh, amen. You've been listening to The Exchange with me, Olly Dougmore, and my guest, Future Dunlop. The podcast will be back next week.

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