The secret to Chinese cooking (that you never really wanted to know)

One of the most interesting pieces of spending some time in a new place or culture, I think, is how quickly you get attached to certain aspects of it. For me, this usually happens in the form of food. Everywhere I've lived I've had a favorite local restaurant or dish that someone has introduced me to and that I end up feeling like I can't live without. Having lived in China for almost 9 months now, I find that I have become firmly attached to local food. I almost never crave western food anymore, and even when I get the rare chance to eat it, it just isn't satisfying. I want all the food I've been eating habitually over the past few months--tomato and egg, fried eggplant, stir-fried cauliflower, vinegar-soaked cabbage, all served over a nice bowl of fresh white rice.

Still, as much as I have come to love the food here, I do have a bit of a complicated relationship with it. As tasty as it is, it is usually very heavy in oil and sodium and comes in portions best suited for a football team, which makes staying healthy a bit of a challenge. I have also had more than my fair share of nights spent crouched on my bathroom floor after enjoying a delicious meal that my taste buds loved but, apparently, my stomach did not. And, most frustrating of all, I have found most of my favorite restaurant dishes impossible to recreate. Though I've played around quite a bit with various recipes and ingredients, I've never been able to replicate the exact taste that I'm looking for.  I have pondered over this problem with a few of my fellow teachers who have also been struggling to master the art of Chinese cooking, but we've never been able to come up with the missing link. At least, not until a few days ago, when one of my fellow teachers stumbled upon a possible answer (that also said a lot about the food poisoning issue) that, frankly, made my skin crawl.

One of my absolute favorite Chinese dishes: tomato and egg

Fengwei qiezi--fried eggplant with red pepper and sesame

Dani and I have been allies since our arrival in China. As the only two meat-free foreign teachers in Qufu, we've often had to team up on group outings to fight for our right to more vegetable dishes. We've also spent quite a lot of time trying to come up with ways to explain to our students why we don't eat meat. Most of our students assume it's a religion issue, and when we try to explain health or environmental concerns they mostly just give us puzzled stares and decide to revert to their original assumption for the sake of simplicity. Dani decided to try to clear up this issue once and for all by turning one of her culture classes into a day all about food--diet, food safety, organic farming, everything you could possibly relate to food. In the midst of a class discussion with her students, though, Dani came across a piece of information that was extremely unsettling and, at first, impossible to believe.

According to Dani's students, the majority of the oil used in the restaurants in Qufu--and even in the campus cafeterias--comes from sewage. That's right, sewage. Apparently, in order to save money, many restaurant owners use cooking oil skimmed from sewer drains that has been "refined" in order to make it re-usable. Just how "refined" the oil actually is, I'm sure you can guess.

I've never held a very high opinion of Chinese food safety, but this was something that was hard to swallow (no pun intended). I decided to do a little googling, in hopes that perhaps Dani's students were simply repeating a popular rumor. Alas, no such luck. I found many articles, that were all very recent, exposing just such a practice that is apparently quite widespread in China.

It's hard to look at a dish this appealing and guess where it's been

There are two main ways this type of "recycling" happens. Underground oil recyclers form buy-sell relationships with "low-end" restaurants, buying a restaurant's used cooking oil and selling it back at a low price once it's been "refined." To add to their collection of cheap oil, these recyclers also sometimes go straight to the sewage drains outside of higher-end restaurants, which don't usually sell their used oil. As a result, especially in smaller cities like Qufu that have very few "high-end" restaurants to speak of, much of the local food cooked and sold to customers is cooked in recycled oil.

The main reason this is an issue (aside from the pure "yuck" factor) is that recycled oil is usually tainted with a high level of toxins, the most dangerous of which is known to cause liver cancer. China, apparently, has one of the highest rates of liver cancer, and considering it's been estimated that up to 1 in 10 dishes in certain areas are cooked with sewage oil, it's pretty clear why.

The legal side of this particular food safety problem has been something I've had trouble pinning down. Like many Chinese policies, their policy in this area is pretty vague. Some say it is 100% illegal, while others say there is no law that specifically bans the practice. Still, the government has made some efforts in the past to crack down on the use of recycled oil and enforce more sanitary methods of using and disposing of cooking oil. The unfortunate thing, though, is that this kind of enforcement is usually pretty ineffective--even nonexistent--outside of major cities. The likelihood of food safety laws being strongly enforced in smaller cities or rural areas is remarkably slim. As Dani's students told her, "There's nothing we can do about it."

It's probably not necessary to say that my appetite for restaurant food has been effectively ruined. There are a few restaurants in town that we feel are "safe," but in general I think I'll be sticking to my own kitchen. But I do plan to boost my efforts to learn to cook some of my favorite foods, and if I don't quite get the taste that I always get in restaurants--well, that's okay with me.