Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The best Beijing street food is the jianbing, and the best place to get it is the stalls outside the Baoguo Temple complex, now a flea market. The seller first spreads batter on a wide iron griddle to make a crêpe with scallions in it; then breaks an egg over the top and spreads it around so it cooks into the batter; then flips it over and slathers on bean sauce and chili sauce; and finally wraps the whole thing around a piece of sweet fried bread. It’s steamy and fresh and eggy and starchy and delectable.

To vary our massage addiction, we tried out a late-night ear massage. The Beijing place was like a comfortable hospital—extremely clean, and the massage girls wore nurses’ hats. Before a statue of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Guanyin, a variety of offerings had been made, including a high-calorie health drink—in case mercy was getting a little thin on the ground.

We celebrated and mourned our last night in Beijing at the ultra-high-concept Green T. House, with its chairs upholstered in feathers, revolving colored lights, exhibitions of contemporary art, rocking horse in the corner, mirrored tables, and so on. The scene is very sceney, screamingly cooler-than-thou. The menu is an absurdist document, the poetry of which, already strained in Chinese, becomes endearingly ludicrous in English: “A Little Caviar Sashimi with Unimaginable Sauce” or “Mystic Beef Rolls Stuffed with Enoki Mushrooms and Mozzarella” or “Bliss upon Cuttlefish” or—my favorite—“Erotic Dance by Six Mushrooms around a Lonely Chestnut.” The food is somewhat less impressive than the titles, but the models smoking long cigarettes and the young hipsters with amazing haircuts are unparalleled.

For twenty-one days, we ate Chinese food at every meal, except for one night, in Beijing, when beloved American expat friends threw a dinner party for us at their apartment. They had borrowed the chef from the French embassy, and he did a terrific job. But Western food tasted strange after the alluring flavors of the Orient. Having to cut things up seemed vulgar and tedious; the buttered fresh vegetables seemed to lack imagination; and the beef, though cooked to perfection, seemed sort of chunky and bland. It was hard to switch back. We had culinary jet lag and all the familiar things felt wrong for a little while. Like scuba divers, we had to come up gradually to avoid getting sick as the atmosphere changed.

“Food comes first for the people,” says an ancient Chinese proverb, and foodie culture has blossomed in China as hedonism has grown less stigmatized. The average Chinese citizen spent more money on food in 2015 than at any time in the past, and food TV shows such as A Bite of China have soaring ratings. Nearly two-thirds of Chinese mobile-phone users consistently photograph their food before eating, then share these photos through food-oriented apps and social media; fluency in food culture is deemed a mark of sophistication. The China Cuisine Association has asked UNESCO to place the country’s cuisine on the Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Demand for premium and organic foods keeps increasing. Recent research has found that people who eat spicy food all the time live substantially longer; though the exact causality is unclear, the study has been warmly received. Torrents of fabulous new restaurants have opened for wealthy Chinese and Westerners; in Shanghai alone, five recently made the list of Asia’s Best Restaurants.

In the meanwhile, however, increasing pollution of soil and water in China means that some food products are corrupted. Nearly a fifth of China’s arable land is contaminated. Other foods are adulterated; three hundred thousand babies were sickened by milk powder that contained melanine; bean sprouts were found to have been treated with toxic chemicals to make them look shinier; flour with dangerously high aluminum content was found in dumplings and steamed buns; rice was full of cadmium and other heavy metals; and pork that had been infected with phosphorescent bacteria was identified by consumers because it glowed in the dark in their kitchens. Vinegar contaminated with antifreeze killed Muslims at a Ramadan meal in 2011, while fake eggs made of plaster, wax, and slimy additives turned up in provincial markets. In 2013, a raid on a food-storage facility turned up chicken feet that had been frozen in 1967; they were being bleached to sell as fresh. In 2015, pork from diseased pigs was approved by bribed regulators. As many as one in ten meals in China uses recycled oil, often from the drains beneath restaurants.