Changing China

Why we like garlic

It beats gold, stocks and even property with prices up as much as 40 -fold.

Is it because of swine flu or rising production costs or market speculators ?

Beijingers give their reasons for the humble garlic bulb’s rise to success.

Video credit: Christina Hu

Photo credit: David Gray  

Whatever happened to culinary diplomacy?

There are 21,600 reporters covering the Olympic Games, the vast majority from outside China, and a lot of them will be going home with a nasty taste in their mouths.

Al Himmer and Erik Kirschbaum blogged about their experience of crash-dieting during the Olympics, with most of the venues offering only cookies and bananas for reporters putting in 10 or 12 or 14 hours covering a sport.

Inside the Main Press Centre, there is plenty of food to be had. It’s not going to win any gourmet awards but the turkey on whole wheat is just fine and it’s hard to go wrong with a salad bar.

Sadly, it’s the Chinese food that is the real letdown.

Beijing is a city in which any given alley offers everything from noodle soups to savoury pancakes to fresh hot soy milk, and it is difficult to forgive Olympic caterers for reducing a culinary culture so rich and varied to a mushy blandness.

For those of us who live in Beijing, this dietary disaster is only a temporary privation — in a couple of days the Games will be over and we can once again eat three meals a day from three different regions of China if we so chose.

But it’s my colleagues from out of town who I feel sorry for. After several weeks in Beijing, many have had no chance to experience the pleasant surprise of biting into a soup-filled dumpling. They have not slurped the cilantro-spiced broth of a bowl of beef noodles or felt their tongues go numb from Sichuan peppers.

The bin-scavenging Olympics

Listening to journalists bellyache about how tough life is at the Games gets old pretty quickly, but there is one genuinely frustrating aspect of the Beijing media beat — finding something to eat.

The Main Press Centre has a cavernous dining area with food from around the world but reporters out at the venues are typing to the sound of rumbling stomachs — with nothing more than a few nuts and berries available anywhere near the stadiums.

They’re not complaining — just hungry — and in the interest of telling you what life is really like here I thought I’d share their stories. Over to Al Himmer, our man at the basketball, who sums up the situation nicely:

Normally I wouldn’t eat a burger from a fast food joint if you paid me $100. After less than a week of the Beijing Olympics I would sell my granny for one. (Sorry, nan but you’ve had a good innings).

How much did organisers spend on these state-of-the-art facilities? I could look it up but I’m too weak. Suffice it to say it was a wodge-load of cash yet no one thought to stick in a café. I’d be willing to offload another family member for a triple tall latte and a sticky bun.

The basketball venue offers bananas at breakfast, lunch and dinner. There is a mystifying system for pre-ordering meals for the FOLLOWING DAY at this, and many other venues. “But I may not be hungry or have time to eat it tomorrow, and I’m hungry NOW!”

One Reuters colleague told us he’d lined up with punters for half an hour in the scorching heat for a hotdog at the tennis venue, only to be told when he reached the counter that they didn’t actually have hotdogs, or indeed anything else apart from crisps.

Another of our reporters has resorted to scavenging through the bins and yesterday she proudly informed fellow sufferers that she’d dug out a half-nibbled sandwich and half a tub of yoghurt, which she promptly wolfed down.

Other journalists, meanwhile, have it easy. The baseball writers happily tuck into burgers and slurp beers in the pressbox, while others stroll to monster shopping malls just across the road. That’s nice for them.

Now, where are those crisps?

PHOTO: Visitors buy lunch at a food court inside the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) during its opening in Beijing July 8, 2008. REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV

Exploding stomachs slip through language police’s net

Let’s face it, if moves by Beijing’s Government and Tourism Bureaus to take the Chinglish off menus and road signs as we reported in an earlier story really worked, dining out in Beijing wouldn’t be half as fun.

Colleagues eating at a Beijing restaurant in the final countdown to the Aug. 8 start of the Games came up with the following interesting dishes which diners can order at their peril:         

- The celery fires an employee                                                 

-  The clever and dextrous woman hand rips the cabbage

-  The peach kernel sauce explodes the diced chicken. 

Tough choice. Think I might opt for the bad fragrant fish cooked until the bones are soft.

(Photo taken by Ahmed Assar, Reuters Television)

The Olympic rings in noodles and cucumber

What connects deep-fried pork cutlets, black and pink noodles and the Beijing Olympics? An appeal to Japan’s ancient fighting spirit or a clever marketing trick, depending on how you look at it.

All Nippon Airways served what appeared to be an ordinary, tepid airplane lunch on its Tokyo-Beijing flight – “katsu” pork with curry, beefsteak with a cheesy crust, “somen” noodles. But a look at its in-flight magazine revealed that in fact, the aluminium trays contained a small homage to Japan’s athletes, and each ingredient had been carefully selected for its pun value.

“Katsu” means “breaded cutlet” as well as “to win”*; the chewy, cheesy crust is meant to resemble a gold medal; the noodles evoke the five Olympic rings; the red snapper, in Japanese, is golden and therefore another symbol for sporting success. Even the cucumber slices were hollowed out to give them a ring shape.

And in case you still didn’t get the message, the headline in the magazine spelled it out for you: “Gambare, Nippon!” (“Keep fighting, Japan!”)

Photo by Alessandro Bianchi, Reuters

Kevin Fylan adds: I bet there are plenty of other people doing Olympic-themed food. If you spot any puntastic examples, let us know in the comments.