China Gets Richer but Eats Poorly

If food is first and foremost culture, it is inevitably the expression of an identity and a territory. It is a function of the physical and geographical characteristics that mean that every culture has foods it enjoys and sources of nourishment that are completely unknown or rejected as such. Cultural heritage is therefore also a limit on man’s omnivorous nature.

The culture of food in China

There is, however, a proverb in the Chinese tradition that seems intent on refuting this general empirical rule: “It does not matter whether it flies in the sky, swims in the water or walks on the land—everything can be caught and eaten.”

Behind this maxim lies a logic derived from a few defining factors. On the one hand, a geographical element: China can be considered a subcontinent where environmental variations are such that they have created completely different and separate biotopes, guaranteeing a potentially infinite variety of possible foods. On the other hand, China considers itself an ethnically homogeneous nation, dominated by the Han ethnic culture, but the reality is that Chinese society is the product of the assimilation of different cultures and dominations, ranging from the Mongols to the tribes of the central Asian steppes (the dominant ethnic groups during the Ming and Quing dynasties).

China’s strength lay in making itself permeable to these cultural contaminations, while moulding the conquering ruling classes to the style, manners and tastes of the Mandarin caste, faithful to Han customs, creating a genuine melting pot ante litteram. In the absence of precise religious rules, taste and eating habits thus evolved in symbiosis with the rigid social model of division into castes, unlike what happened in the Jewish and Islamic worlds. In the Chinese tradition, the consumption of meat was for centuries the prerogative of the emperor and the court dignitaries; to a lesser extent, along with a wide use of fish, it was the right of the classes of officials and the military, while the common people were left with a diet based essentially on the consumption of vegetables.

The richness and variety of the diet were therefore a direct function of social rank, and a taste for exotic food was a sign of prestige, the exclusive domain of the upper classes.

Chinese growth and the crisis of the Asian food pyramid

With the rise to power of Communism and the formal disappearance of the caste division, however, the strongly hierarchical sense that for millennia had characterised the Middle Kingdom did not fade. Today’s division is based primarily on the relentless pursuit of personal wealth and would constitute – according to various socio-economic interpretations – the psychological foundation of the frantic quest for luxury and “exotic” (foreign) goods, widely perceived as a distinguishing mark of social, economic and cultural elevation, just as it was for the caste of court dignitaries and the powerful officials of the empire.

Bearing in mind that China’s demographic dimensions act as an amplifier of any socio-economic phenomenon, the economic growth triggered by the opening of domestic markets begun in 1978 has led to a spread of wealth on a vast scale, which has not erased the country’s broad pockets of poverty, but has guaranteed the presence of more than 100 million super-rich in a population approaching one and a half billion people.

The rapid spread of a previously unknown spending power has thus driven the food revolution of the last twenty years, vastly expanding that “dietary diversification” factor already intrinsically present in the Chinese culinary tradition. Since wealth is the means of marking social distinctions that are no longer rigidly pre-established, spending power – including in the food sector – has served to extend consumption of the products of the Mandarin tradition (court dignitaries) to the middle classes, importing Western fast-food traditions across all social strata and reducing instead the consumption of that plant-based diet which had characterised the majority of Chinese society (almost the entire population, peasants) until about 30 years ago. China’s economic rise is thus putting in crisis the “Asian food pyramid”, the model developed in 1995 by the WHO with the collaboration of numerous universities around the world, which places the traditional Chinese-style diet at the base of an Asian dietary model. A model built one year after the definition of the “Mediterranean pyramid”, itself in deep crisis and with which it shares several similarities, the Asian pyramid expresses the image of a nation that favours carbohydrates while penalising animal proteins and fats. At the top are the least-consumed products, such as meat; moving down one finds sweets, eggs, poultry, fish and dairy products, followed by fruit, legumes and vegetables in general, until reaching the base of the pyramid composed of rice, flour and bread products and numerous cereals.

The long years of political and economic isolation favoured the persistence of a “traditional” diet through disastrous agronomic choices, based on the forced monoculture of grain crops, which were deemed necessary in order to satisfy an immense domestic food demand. The liberalisations of the 1980s brought epochal changes with the abandonment of the system of agricultural communes and the allocation of land directly to individual farming families, who manage it under a regime comparable to our right of superficies.

The change in ownership structures has brought a 10% increase in the average productivity of the land, which rests, however, on a massive use of fertilisers and plant-protection products far more than on a rational use of resources, water above all, against a backdrop of extremely high fragmentation of ownership, inadequate to satisfy a market of well over a billion people.

All this constitutes an almost insurmountable limit for a country where only 15% of the land is arable, owing to the orographic conformation and the intense building and industrial pressure, which has heavily depleted water resources, largely heavily polluted, and soil fertility, today increasingly threatened by desertification (as reported by the numerous reports of the National Meteorological Institute).

The simultaneous food revolution, which grew hand in hand with the country’s economic evolution, has favoured in agriculture a shift towards higher-yield activities such as animal husbandry, to the point that today China can boast the world record in pig farming.

Meat consumption

Thus a diet once poor in fats has been progressively replaced by another with a high fat content. The 2002 medical-nutritional census reports that for a significant share of Chinese (60%), more than 30% of the daily calorie requirement came from fats of animal origin, when WHO recommendations suggest a limit of 10% for products of animal derivation.

The medical implications in the genetic field take on fundamental importance. The increase in meat consumption would run up against a limit in the metabolic capacities of the Chinese, since they would appear to have a lower capacity to metabolise lipids than Westerners. This claim in the field of genetics seems to find empirical confirmation in the higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases affecting the Chinese population resident in the West, the subject over the years of numerous comparative studies.

The influence of certain geographically defined genetic peculiarities is today one of the frontiers of analysis of medical science in the genetic and nutritional fields, around which very high expectations and conflicting interests are gathering.

From this point of view, China would seem to enjoy a relative position of advantage over other not yet fully developed states, thanks to the intense studies and substantial epidemiological and nutritional investigations that have focused precisely on the Chinese population, by virtue of the relative genetic homogeneity found across the vast country and the preservation of dietary models that remained unchanged for centuries.

Between malnutrition and obesity

What emerges is the snapshot of a country of stark contrasts, ranging from severe undernourishment widespread among broad strata of the population to a dietary imbalance dictated by the “Westernisation of the traditional diet”.

China holds a sad second place worldwide in the grim ranking of child malnutrition (there were still 125 million people living on $1 a day according to statistics for 2011), but at the same time it faces the problems of excess weight that now afflict just under 20% of the population.

The tragedy of child malnutrition, as explained by Huo Junsheng, director of the Food Science and Technology Department of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, in an interview dated December 2011 given to People’s Daily online, lies in its lasting consequences in terms of illness, mental and learning deficiencies, and therefore poor school performance and low productivity at work.

Aware of this reality, the Chinese government is investing heavily in educational competition, with surprising results in terms of the percentage of Chinese students gaining access to the most prestigious institutions of higher education (universities and research centres) in the world.

China Daily reports the data of a nutritional survey conducted on children in the rural regions of Qinghai, Yunnan, Ningxia and Guangxi. The most striking figure is the 72% of children boarding at school who say they feel hungry during lessons, despite the 3 meals a day provided by the school, while 33% say they feel hungry throughout the entire day.

According to data produced by the China Development Research Foundation, in the regions covered by the survey the daily calorie intake would not even reach 70% of the requirement estimated by the FAO for the age group considered.

The abolition of a significant share of agricultural taxes, while on the one hand contributing to an increase in the productivity of cultivated plots, on the other has substantially reduced revenue for the Local Administrations that dealt directly with nutritional policies, consisting of the supply of foodstuffs to the poorest part of the population.

Today it is the Finance department that manages the poverty-relief funds, which are distributed in the form of monetary contributions, in open contrast with the wishes of the officials of the Ministry of Health, who denounce the excess of embezzlement, widespread corruption and the loss of purchasing power of the contributions due to the fluctuating prices of agri-food products.

The counterpart is represented by the more than 200 million Chinese with weight problems, about 20% of the national population and of the world’s overweight population, with a marked tendency towards obesity.

The economic transformations of the last twenty years have weighed enormously on this process, leading the majority of the Chinese population to hold office jobs characterised by the sedentary nature of the work. The average increase in wages is also matched by a decrease in free time, which is mostly spent by over 50% of the population on domestic and sedentary activities such as reading, watching TV or using the computer.

Contrary to what happens in Western societies, it is the elderly population, far less influenced by the revolution in diet and customs, that maintains high levels of physical activity, with evident positive effects on health.

In the capital Beijing, once made famous by communist propaganda for its posters of “workers on bicycles”, millions of cars now crowd the streets, as in the new industrial districts, and the percentage of the obese and overweight population approaches 45% of the city’s entire population.

The problems of malnutrition, both undernourishment and growing obesity, have been part of the government’s strategic plans since 2005. “Revolutionising the nutritional model by re-establishing the original diet […]” has become the mantra of the Chinese Ministry of Health.

Scenarios for the future

China, ministry officials repeat, has all the tools to resolve the impasse. Traditional Chinese medicine offers numerous therapies against obesity comparable to the naturopathy very much in vogue in the West as well. The advantage of traditional Chinese therapies lies in their low cost and the absence of specific medical prescriptions; the limitation is that the desired effects are perceived only in the medium to long term, proving almost nil in the short term.

Driven by an insatiable economy, the government of mercantilist China has spotted an export opportunity in the international recognition of numerous traditional Chinese medical practices (positively launched with the recognition of acupuncture in European health treatments). At the same time, it has launched a massive information campaign in the country in support of traditional medicine, with the aim of re-balancing the nutritional intake of the Chinese diet and reducing dietary imbalances, but also with the clear political intent of underscoring a supposed superiority of the traditional Chinese model, exploitable as a tool for managing a consensus that is increasingly difficult to govern.

In this way China, which has erased the traces of its own past by rebuilding new cities on the ruins of the many hutong demolished to make way for modernity, jealously preserves Wangfujing, a street in the centre of Beijing, just outside the Stock Exchange district, where managers and the financial world gather for the equivalent of an aperitif based on skewers of insects (cockroaches, earthworms, scorpions, larvae, grasshoppers and above all seahorses), following the ancient custom of the merchant class.

Equivalent stalls can today be found on every corner even in the cities born of the frenzied industrialisation of recent years (Guandong, Hangzhou), a sign of the strong identity-defining presence of the culinary and health tradition.

On the relationship between cooking and health, as early as 1600 BC China was already theorising a harmonisation of foods divided into the five fundamental flavours (sweet, sour, bitter, spicy and salty), to which would correspond the nutritional needs of the body’s five main organs (heart, liver, spleen/pancreas, lungs and kidneys).

The return to a culinary traditionalism and the wide spread of entomophagy as a dietary custom represent for China not only a chance to improve its nutritional regime, but above all perhaps the only sustainable way to contain the energy and environmental impact of a dietary regime otherwise unsustainable for feeding a population of more than 1 billion people.

In terms of scale and challenges, China may be the testing ground for the global food problems of tomorrow. The choices of the Chinese government, to the extent that they manage to focus on the care of public health, sidelining commercial competition interests and thus opening up to intergovernmental and multilateral cooperation, may prove fundamental in anticipating what many today define as the real great risk of tomorrow: an economically unsustainable growth of food and nutritional imbalances.

The original article at www.lospaziodellapolitica.com/2013/09/la-cina-si-arricchisce-ma-mangia-male/#sthash.RbaYVDYj.dpuf

If food is first and foremost culture, it is inevitably the expression of an identity and a territory. It is a function of the physical and geographical characteristics that mean that every culture has foods it enjoys and sources of nourishment that are completely unknown or rejected as such. Cultural heritage is therefore also a limit on man’s omnivorous nature. - See more at: http://www.lospaziodellapolitica.com/2013/09/la-cina-si-arricchisce-ma-mangia-male/#sthash.RbaYVDYj.dpuf