Cities like Paris and Florence come close to competing on the food front, but they can’t surpass the sheer variety that a walk down any street in Taipei reveals. From one direction comes the rich smell of frying bread, from another the aroma of boiled pork dumplings and from yet another fermented or “smelly” bean curd, a Chinese favorite. Even the raw fruits and vegetables in the markets give off their own sweet smell.
Last fall I left the United States to spend a year in Taiwan on a Fulbright media fellowship. I returned to my birth country to learn as much about Taiwanese and Chinese culture as possible. As a journalist I was dissatisfied with coverage of Asia in the press: it seemed as if journalists paid attention to Asia only when a disaster, natural or political, occurred. Where were the articles about everyday life? I knew that there was a bigger story to be told about Chinese culture. Without a doubt, the story begins with food.
It’s easy to see why food is so central to Chinese society. There’s the pleasure of queuing with old men and mothers for just-out-of-the-oven rolls early in the morning, or poking around the outdoor markets looking for the juiciest yellow-fleshed watermelons. I loved going to the man who sold the fried meat buns and watching him glaze my selection with a spicy red sauce, place it in a plastic bag and wrap it in newspaper so that it would still be hot when I got home.
Then there’s the ingenuity of Chinese cooks. They may not be able to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but they can certainly make it into a sumptuous dish. The Chinese joyously eat everything. A pig, for instance, is literally eaten from head to toe: roasted pig’s ears and stewed pig’s feet are both delicacies. The outdoor-market peddlers come out even in heavy rain and unrelenting heat. They know their customers are willing to brave bad weather to buy the freshest fruit, vegetables and meat they can get. One day I saw a woman riding home on a bicycle with a fish in her basket that was so fresh it nearly flapped itself onto the road.
And finally there’s the actual pleasure of eating. What can possibly compete with biting into a pork dumpling dipped into a sauce of vinegar, soy sauce, hot chilies and fresh ginger and having its warm juice squirt out the side of your mouth? Or drinking a glass of milk tea with an oversize straw that lets you simultaneously eat the little chewy semisweet-candy balls floating in the tea?
At the table, people reach across you, pass dishes and put food on your plate. They constantly ask, “Have you eaten enough?” After class students pour into cafes for a quick fix of soup noodles and gossip before going home to hit the books. Birthday dinners go on course after course. Indeed, all occasions of celebration, from weddings to holidays, center on food.
I’ve always loved to eat, but in America sometimes I feel like I’m an anomaly. Here food is so often an offhand thought, something to be popped from the freezer into the microwave and eaten in front of the television set. We shop in sterile supermarkets where our meat is wrapped tightly in layers of Styrofoam packaging or minced into unrecognizable sandwich meat. We eat so much that is processed that it’s easy to forget the natural texture, taste and color of whatever it is we’re eating.
Is it any accident that the best movies about food involve the cuisine of other cultures? “Eat Drink Man Woman,” “Babette’s Feast” and “Big Night,” to name a few. And isn’t it interesting that the foods we’re known for internationally are the fast foods served at McDonald’s and KFC? That is not to say that all American food is overprocessed. In recent years our country’s interest in eating well has grown dramatically. The Food Channel and the proliferation of farmers markets have certainly helped make food a bigger part of our lives, but it’s still not the centerpiece it is in Taiwan. In that country, sitting down and sharing a delicious, fresh meal is one of the basic ways that friends and families communicate with each other. I wish it had the same ability to bring people together here.
