Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…You can see all these things happening, and it is very sad. For example, restaurants that I knew — this is in Chengdu — where they made all their dumplings from scratch, like maybe 15, 20 different kinds every day, now will buy some of them ready prepared. Supermarkets stock easy-seasoning packets to make mapo tofu. [laughs] This kind of thing. Then in the cities there’s a huge loss of cooking skills. Young professionals often rely on their parents to cook for the children at home. They, the middle generation, are not learning traditional cookery. They’re not learning how to pickle and cure. There’s all this being lost. People, they lead more hectic lives and they are increasingly eating ready-prepared food. You can see that China is going down the same sad path as the rest of us in some ways. But the thing that gives me hope is that in China food is understood so deeply as the foundation of health and happiness. It has been a culture that is so obsessed with food. They have this wonderful resource that I hope people will — and some people are now getting to the point of looking at Chinese food as a cultural artifact and something valuable to be preserved. Let me now see if you can talk me out of one of my biases. When I eat food in China there’s nothing I’ve ever been served that I found disgusting, ever, which is saying something. At the same time, it’s rare that I will prefer to eat organs, or offal, or the various stranger items you might be served. If I look around the world, those items seem to be what economists would call an inferior good. That is, in virtually all societies, when incomes go up, at some point people stop eating those things. My background is Irish. In Ireland, in the early 20th century, it was very common to eat a lot of organs and offal. Today, it’s hardly to be found. It’s revived somewhat, but as part of a regular diet, it’s dwindled. Are offal and organs actually just inferior goods and when people earn higher incomes, they don’t want it anymore, and they’re worse? Or are they parts of the Chinese culinary picture as good as anything else and they will persist even with rising income? I think it’s complicated. In peasant farming societies, you have the nose-to-tail eating. You kill the pig and you eat every part of it, for economic reasons as much as anything. Also, in China, the thing that really sets it apart is this preoccupation with the delights of gastronomy and the pursuit of the exotic. In particular, the appreciation of texture. A lot of offal foods have very interesting textures. Like these fire-exploded kidney flowers. They have that kind of slightly brisk crispness with the tenderness of a kidney that has been cut in this beautiful, ornate, crisscross pattern and then stir-fried very fast. It’s a textural pleasure. There are other things. In Sichuan, people love eating goose intestines, which any Westerner would throw away. If you’re a Western person it’s pointless. They’re tasteless. Why would you eat a goose intestine? From a Chinese textural point of view, they’re slippery, crisp, snappy. They have a delightful kou gan or mouthfeel. The other thing is that some bits of what Westerners would consider to be old, awful, and rubbish, it’s a very different concept in China. For example, a duck’s tongue. From a Western point of view, there’s no meat on it. It’s a small, fiddly thing that’s all bone and cartilage. “What’s the point?” As my father would say, it has a high grapple factor for very little reward. [laughter] In China, one of the ways of looking at this is that you’ve got a whole duck. The meat is very commonplace. Each duck has one tongue. It has very particular textures. If you’ve got the duck tongue, you’ve got the prize. You’ve got the best bit. The small, precious morsel. In the past, before refrigeration, if you could afford to have a whole plateful of duck tongues, the number of ducks it represented, or a plateful of boned goose feet, a goose was a huge luxury. If you have 12 goose feet from 6 geese on your plate, you have got the command — [laughter] Of all these ingredients. The appreciation of these delicacies exists — not only the poor farmers but at the highest tables as well.…

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