There’s nothing Chinese about Chinese ready meals

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/13/chinese-food-ready-meals-salt

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Should health warnings be slapped on Chinese food? That’s certainly the message given by some newspaper headlines, prompted by the release of a survey by the pressure group Action on Salt. The group assessed data on salt levels in takeaway dishes from six randomly selected restaurants in London’s Chinatown and 269 supermarket ready meals, side dishes and dipping sauces, and found that the salt contained in many of them was wildly in excess of healthy limits.

One main course-plus-noodles bought in Chinatown contained nearly double the UK recommended maximum daily intake for an adult; many of the supermarket ready meals contained around half the recommended daily intake. Experts agree that eating too much salt raises blood pressure, and makes strokes and heart attacks more likely.

Certainly, the meals surveyed are very salty. But are they really Chinese? A quick look at the takeaway dishes selected shows that they were all the kinds of dishes adored more by westerners than Chinese people, such as beef in black bean sauce, sweet and sour chicken, prawn crackers and egg-fried rice. The same applies to the ready meals: a giddy parade of deep-fried and sweet-and-sour foods with fried rice and noodles.

All the ready meals are produced in Britain for the British market, by British companies, including Sainsbury’s, Iceland and Marks & Spencer; even Blue Dragon, with its Chinese-sounding name, is actually the British offshoot of a global company. It’s hard to imagine any Chinese person eating Iceland’s Slimming World Chinese Style Banquet Rice, one of the saltiest offenders, according to the survey. If westerners want to eat the unhealthiest Chinese dishes, why should the Chinese be blamed?

Moreover, it’s not just a question of what the Chinese eat, but how they eat it. Action on Salt’s chairman, Professor Graham MacGregor, appeared on Radio 5 Live this morning suggesting that customers would typically eat several of these salty dishes at one sitting, and might even add extra soy sauce at the table. But this is not the Chinese way of eating. Chicken in black bean sauce, egg-fried rice and prawn crackers with extra soy sauce is not a Chinese meal: it’s a western idea of a Chinese meal. In a Chinese context, highly seasoned dishes are almost invariably served with plain steamed rice (or, in the north, bread or noodles), and accompanied by other, lightly seasoned dishes, such as simple green vegetables and plain broths. One dish of, say, deep-fried chicken in sweet-and-sour sauce (a marginal dish anyway in China) would normally be shared by at least two people and probably more, with steamed rice and other dishes. Fried rice and noodles are exceptions, rather than the rule. Even in the Chinatown restaurants surveyed, sensible ordering and sharing would have given a healthier meal.

Few cultures understand the intimate connection between diet and health better than the Chinese

The survey also announced that soy sauce was “over five times saltier than seawater”, which is hardly surprising, as soy sauce is a salty seasoning and condiment like – er – salt. You add it to dishes in the kitchen for a salty-umami flavour, and you might put it on the table, like salt, as a dip for foods that need extra seasoning, such as boiled dumplings. Chinese people do not sprinkle soy sauce over dishes like sweet-and-sour chicken or beef in black bean sauce. No one would include in a press release the shocking news that salt is salty, so why do it with soy sauce? And why are prawn crackers more headline-worthy than crisps?

What’s most striking about the way Chinese people really eat, from a British point of view, is how healthy it is. Most meals consist of plain rice (or bread or noodles – see above) with some meat or fish, plenty of vegetables and a refreshing soup. Even in Sichuan, famous for its spicy food, the dramatically flavoured delicacies are always balanced with the plain. Street stalls serving construction workers and motorway truck-stops in China often offer healthier food than that on which many middle-class British people feed their children, with a dazzling variety of vegetables. Although as the Chinese follow the west down the road of fast and junky food, they are increasingly experiencing the same diet-related health problems, the traditional Chinese diet could be a model of healthy eating. Few cultures understand the intimate connection between diet and health better than the Chinese. Yes, some Chinese food is junky and unhealthy, but most of it isn’t. Why imply that the salty, sugary, deep-fried stuff beloved by Brits is representative of one of the world’s great cuisines?

Ever since Chinese people started settling in the west, there they have encountered unpleasant stereotypes about the way they eat. In a notorious article published as recently as 2002, the Daily Mail denounced Chinese food as “the dodgiest in the world, created by a nation that eats bats, snake, monkeys, bears’ paws, birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, ducks’ tongues and chickens’ feet”. Such language may no longer be acceptable in the mainstream press, but the alacrity with which western journalists pounce on stories about the risks of Chinese food is an uncomfortable echo of traditional racist stereotypes. As one Twitter user astutely remarked, no one would use the existence of Pizza Hut to dismiss “Italian food” as unhealthy. These headlines should instead perhaps have been “Supermarket ready meals dangerously salty”.