Consumption in Beijing

The green of the gardens is so lush that you wonder where the water could possibly come from. In Beijing there is so much of everything, particularly food, that it’s incomprehensible where it might all be grown and made, and how many chickens sacrifice their lives every day for the appetites of this one city alone. The scale of consumption, even without factoring in the western influence, is massive. The number of ducks eaten in a single Beijing Duck restaurant – I went to one with 5 busy floors – is immense, and this happens seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, ad infinitum. The ducks must surely be battery or GE ducks. And then there are the pigeons, the oysters and clams, the crabs, the catfish, the squid, the frogs, the locusts and the scorpions. You can see the scorpions impaled, alive, in the markets, ready to become your next kebab. Locust kebabs looked interesting but I was scared of the crunch and the Vincent Price eyes. It’s easy to be tempted by the exotic and extraordinary when an occidental in an oriental mood for foods, and I did try a lot of extraordinary things, frog and snake and lily included, but you do not want even accidentally to be guilty of trying an endangered species or of gorging on GE produce, though I suspect it is unavoidable. It has to be.

The city has changed post cultural revolution, and the conspicuous consumption is part of it, along with the ‘enjoy your life’ philosophy which is practiced everywhere. There may be too many cars on the roads for a city whose infrastructure was not designed for it, but there are also fleets of orange taxis, mostly Jettas and Landras, which dart wildly in and out of streams of traffic and cost little even for locals. They count as public transport along with the super subway (you can travel anywhere for 2 RMB, less than 50c) and the buses, which have fares so tiny you hardly notice. There are few choices of car in China, and in Singapore, my next stop, you can virtually only get Rolls Royce, Lexus and BMW, the most fuel efficient and aesthetic. There are only certain colours and makes of car allowed, and carbon emissions are measured closely. There’s nothing pre-1995 on the roads there; in China, even jalopies are allowed, though few locals want or need them. They hardly need them, and everyone walks, a great antidote for the consumption that their grandparents were denied.

Incredibly, Macdonalds and KFC still thrive, adding to my wonderment about numbers of chickens slaughtered daily. They thrive despite the wonderful fresh and healthy local cuisine. It’s partly down to Americanised coolness and partly due to an incomprehensible ‘fashion’ among particular younger groups. There ought to be more pride in the local product, which is pretty unmatchable, and it’s easy to understand why Beijingers scoff at Chinese restaurants in Australia or NZ as being inauthentic or bastardised. There’s a pride in the local product, and MSG belongs in the past. Only a few restaurants bother to declare they don’t use it; it is so unaccepted now. However those Chinese takeaways in New Zealand … I even saw an Aussie pub/restaurant there. It was called the Outback. To my surprise too there is a significant Russian enclave, full of restaurants and shops, in the centre of Beijing too, and this partly explains the large number of USSR tourists there. The Russian influence is surprisingly strong in Beijing, and their heavier fare has a good audience. To get back to the American fast-foods, I was thrilled to learn that a Macdonalds had been outlawed from the Forbidden City, and that Starbucks was failing to make much of a stronghold in the city.

Green, Yellow and Red

Green, Yellow and Red may be the colours of the autumn streets this week as the trees shed what is left of their pigmentation and fade to brown as the temperature drops (6 today).

They are also the colour of kiwifruit, New Zealand’s most famous Chinese icon. The news that cross-pollination has produced a red zespri has taken the farming world by storm. Peppers come in green, yellow and red so why not kiwifruit? The new smaller kiwifruit tastes like a sweet version of the tamarillo, which has virtually cornered the Kiwi market in red fruit for a century. Blood oranges are divine, but blood Kiwis sound divine too.

Talking about Kiwiana that originated in Asia, Amanda Howell’s famous jandal fence is getting more and more participants as wayfarers discard their Japanese Sandals and string them up on her Foxton fence.

The Jandal Queen

From the ovine to the ridiculous

I am not a clip poster, honest. This one is for all New Zealanders who know how talented sheep are. For one thing, they assist us with insomnia. Did you know they have a spot of Busby Berkeley about them too?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw

Gastroporn

I arrived home early today and discovered an article about the joys of shopping in fresh food markets. These are some of the less lauded markets, but their fare deserves no less laudation. The best way to stimulate the appetite – or perhaps jealousy – is by having a good read. Here it is: http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/epicure/my-market/2009/03/09/1236447124035.html

Alternatively, you can survey the Aussie cuisine website (http://www.cuisine.com.au/home/) which contains sensible recipes with sensible market fare. These are the kind of dishes that regularly end up on the table here, so get yourself over.

You can browse by cuisine, wine type or vegetable. You can browse by whatever fish or meat you desire. A wonderful feature of the website is the Three Ingredients search. Look in your fridge, find three items, and the database matches what you’ve got with what you can make with it. The database is mostly wonderful, but tends to assume that everyone has smoked salmon in their fridges as well.

I was less sure about the kiddie-friendly recipe for ‘Sausages snakes on avocado-potato mash’.

Not for the Faint Hearted

The Age is not for the faint-hearted. As a fan of Jacobean revenge tragedy and not adverse to the odd bit of classic blood horror, I still found the following story far more hideous than Silence of the Lambs or Hannibal even with its man-eating pigs. It’s the one about the Chinese immigrant in Canada, and only read it if really curious about why I put it in the same paragraph as Jacobean tragedy – http://www.theage.com.au/world/beheader-not-criminally-responsible-for-murder-20090306-8qok.html

Somehow, somewhere, I wanted to make a connection between the media and horrorporn; anime and those Japanese horror media stories, and games like Carmageddon and cartoons like Scooby Doo and increased violence among children. For that story, and again it is for real, see: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159766/Cartoon-violence-makes-children-aggressive.html. A researcher into the latter link, Jennifer Linder, said: ‘There is ample evidence that physical aggression on TV is associated with increases in aggressive behaviour, but there was little until this study that has shown a link between televised aggression and resulting aggression among children.’

Anyway, back to the hideousness, the media and horrorporn – and let’s add in gastroporn too (and I don’t mean Nigella). Then the day after The Age went all Peter Greenaway, fusing food, gore and grossness with the following offal story beginning “Snouts, tongues, lips, ears, livers, kidneys, brains and blood, heaps of it”: http://www.theage.com.au/national/diners-rediscover-blood-and-guts-20090307-8ryo.html. The cover picture shows once and for all that brains are better than brawn

I was vowing to return to my vegetarian roots when I came across something even more obscene: the recipe for Scooby Doo Aubergine Burgers, with or without white chocolate sauce: http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/home/you/article-1032877/Scooby-Doo-aubergine-burgers.html

What DID you give up for Lent, by the way?

Holy Cow!

Today’s news is so bleak that I need to paraphrase something trivial: the Marathi-Hindu marketing of soft drinks containing cow’s urine as a health drink that can rival Coke and become part of a chain as big as MacDonald’s. According to the Reuters report from New Delhi, “A hardline Hindu organization, known for its opposition to “corrupting” Western food imports, is planning to launch a new soft drink made from cow’s urine, often seen as sacred in parts of India”. We are told that the flavor is not yet known, but the liquid produced by Hinduism’s revered holy cows is being mixed with products such as aloe vera and gooseberry. The final product allegedly is able to fight diseases such as diabetes and cancer. Well, it won’t get you pissed.

“Cow urine offers a cure for around 70 to 80 incurable diseases like diabetes. All are curable by cow urine,” Om Prakash, the head of the RSS Cow Protection Department, told Reuters by phone.

The Hindu group has campaigned against foreign imports such as Pepsi and Coca Cola in the past, which it sees as a corrupting influence and a tool of Western imperialism.

It may seem to go from the Bovine to the ridiculous, but it does have a mad logic to it, after all I did once read that actress Sarah Miles drank her own urine, and which animal does she resemble?

See: http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/odd/5318162/mellow-yellow/

Knife the Mac

New Zealand has just increased the minimum wage from $12.00 to $12.50 and hour as a way to get the lowest of the low somewhere into the spending system that is supposed to stimulate the economy into a move that is positive in recession times. This seems generous given the embargo even on MP’s and judge’s salaries that is mooted for the coming year – we all need to tighten the belt, not just those at the lower end. These low wage earners with their new $12.50 are the people, after all, about to be least affected by April 1′s tax packages, where MPs and judges will get a smile anyway. And yes, when your take-home play is minimal, 50c can make a difference to your ciggies and beer bill. Or it would buy your kids 2 apples in season.

The downside of the Government’s seeming generosity, and there are those who believe 50c is so perfunctory they may as well have farted in their faces, is, of course, poor, exploited MacDonalds, who have to pay 50 cents extra to 8,000 of their employees because that’s seemingly how many they have earning less than 12.50.

And woe of woes, they buy from wholesalers who quote in US dollars, and the Kiwi has fallen against the Greenback. So what does it mean? Price increases on Cheeseburgers and Big Macs and would you like fries with that? Throughout NZ, apparently, the fast food sector employs 70,000 to 100,000 workers on the legal minimum so even a humble pizza probably comes with an encoded political message about exploiting the underprivileged.

Perhaps this is one more reason to eat salads made of in season vegetables?

Let Them Eat Fat

Two stories across the Tasman coincided this week, leading me to believe that Marie Antoinette was misquoted.

In 2009, in a spirit of defiance, she would spit out vehemently, ‘Let them eat fat’. as I do.

In Victoria, a story breaks that people are forsaking their fruit and vegetables and turning to fat – literally. And I’m not referring to the Fatkins diet-blowhards. These people are you and me (well, not me actually). You can read about them here: http://www.theage.com.au/national/victorians-forsake-fruit-and-turn-to-fat-20090207-80g6.html  In the article’s protein-filled nutshell: “VICTORIANS are eating even fewer serves of fresh fruit and vegetables each day despite governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting healthy eating”.

It seems that regardless of what governments do, fat will out. New Zealand, of course, has just reinstated the fatty pie, pork thickshake and custard square to a local school tuckshop near you. You can catch up with the good news at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10555439

It’s there again in http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10555363 as proof that an apple a day may keep the doctor away, but, ultimately, we are what we eat.

In New Zealand schools must continue to teach healthy living like a skill, along with swimming. You can’t help thinking that the National Government is just starting to dismantle the Nanny State bit by bit. First allow children to eat according to their wish, then let parents spank their children again, then change the driving age, and dismantle the social agenda until everyone is free again.

Free to die, or be responsible for the death of others, as they choose. It’s a free world.

Icons of Melbourne

Many places can be represented, if not entirely summed up, by their icons. Icons are images of artifacts central to the construction of culturised identities. Here are some icons of Melbourne ripe for deconstruction.

Look particularly at the detail of the fountain in Carlton Gardens, where you see toads spitting at Cupidon-child’s genitalia, and playpus effigies raining down on top of them. The Victorian imagination shown here rivals that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

While most of these are agreed to be iconic, there may be one or two which I’ve put in here out of stirring perversity as they may be ironic for reasons of accidental kitchness or merely by their recurrence in Melbourne culture (e.g. the giant fake Christmas tree that no-one seems to like, but it gets wheeled out every year). The cakes in those fantastic facades of the St. Kilda Cake Shops look delightful. You might find, as I did, that the appearance is the best part of them. The dinosaur play-slide in Fitzroy gardens is beloved because the scary has become the playful – but only when dozing.

Please note the residual Victorianism and Australianished Britishness that mark many of my selections, and the oddness of my catching Flinders Street station on the day of a bike rally.

The first Aussie Christmas, December 25, 2008

Since 08 was the first Aussie Christmas, but I was spending time with Kiwi expats over here, as one does, I insisted on Kangaroo steaks for the barbie (barbecue to the uninitiated, and, yes, Aussies do turn every word possible into diminuitives). It was either that or venison, in honour of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. However, childhood desire for Skippy the Bush Kangaroo won out in the end.

In the eye of the storm at the market, I had to say the marlin steaks were far more interesting, as are the array of deli-olivey-cheesy-pickly-figgy items from the iconic Queen Victoria market. The cornucopial nature of the food spilling out from markets here is in direct defiance of any economic trend that we know about. There seems to be a plentiful bounty of fresh fish, meats for miles, fruit and veges to feed all Africa, and more money is spent on cakes and wine than the entire GDP of New Zealand. The delicatessen items could stretch from Earth to the moon several times. There is even fresh snapper and pink salmon flown in (or did they swim?) from New Zealand. You can only gawk and wonder where it all comes from, who produces it and wonder what happens to the stuff that does not get sold. What recession?

Box Hill Centra

Of course it could all have been a conspiracy to make people focus on nice things for the new year months so that retailers, poor things, do not suffer too much by not reaching their targets. The recession will only hit when people look at their Visa Card balances in January and February  and have to refinance their house or give up their BMW or even sell unwanted Christmas presents on Ebay or my old haunt, TradeMe (I’d become an antiques trader of sorts in NZ). My word, the markets are filled with unwanted Christmas presents-in-waiting. You can find there everything you want, but it is everything you don’t want that takes up the greatest amount of space.
Market-hopping is fun in Melbourne though it can also be an adventure sport. There are about 10 commercially operating markets, none of which are open every day, so you need to check opening hours before you venture out. And they all flow forth with plenty. In a weak moment, I did buy a luminous, limegreen battery-operated, squirrel-tail electric duster simply because my house has (not my choice) venetian blinds. Venetian blinds cannot possible emerge from such a tasteful, if slightly damp, city as Venice. They must, at the very least, have come via China, like almost everything else in western culture including spaghetti. I often visit Box Hill, the local China-city (China town is in the city as is quite touristy, where Box Hill is suburban and only locals dare go there) and look at the supercheap produce (99c a kilo for brocolli; strawberries for a dollar a punnet (to my linguist friends – why did I choose that word?) and the displays of meats that all look a bit anodyne as if they have been injected with bleach and the red salmon that looks like it’s wearing lipstick. I seldom buy from here because the organic part of the market at Queen Victoria Market has more of the things I like in the style I prefer (i.e. natural, but also heftierin pricetag, alas).

Box Hill is the place in Melbourne that most reminds me of Auckland, since its 2008-9 demographic and quality gives it rather a lot in common. I must not satirise Auckland too much, though it’s so difficult when you’re an expatriate and all of the news feeds for expatriates is so negative that it can only be designed either by complete imbeciles our out of a desire to stop expatriates from coming back.

A lovely pre-Christmas story (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10549268 ) in that comic organ, The Herald, and all of the rubbish about the infrastructure around Eden Park now not being ready in time for the rugby world cup is enough to make you weep and vow never, never, never to return to the planet’s most incompetently run city since Babel. It all makes reading about Robert Mugabe, Kim Jung Il and John Howard look like a distant comedy.