Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think Cantonese is a superb and fantastic cuisine, but its particular status in China is a product of historical circumstances. The Cantonese south of China, Hong Kong, the special economic zones, were the first places to get rich after the reform and opening up, particularly, and so Cantonese became the prestige cuisine. When I was a student in Chengdu in the 1990s, if you wanted to go out for an expensive, fancy meal, you went to a Cantonese restaurant and ate expensive seafood. It still has that cachet and aura of sophistication. With Shanghainese food, Shanghai is, in Chinese gastronomic terms, a modern upstart city. It’s better known for its street food and home cooking. But it is the best-known part of an ancient region, which really has what you can argue is the Chinese classical cuisine, the food of the Jiangnan lower-Yangtze region. This region is known historically for its extraordinary knife work, delicate flavors, extreme reverence for ingredients. Eating the right foods from the right places in the right seasons. All the values that we associate with Cantonese food, and also with modern Chez Panisse, this modern foodie movement. They’re all there historically in China. Perhaps for historical reasons, it’s been under-appreciated in the last century or so. I think you would agree, Shanghai is one of the wealthier, more modern parts of China. As you see China developing, you see traditional markets to some extent, in some parts of China fading away. Supply chains become longer. Large companies play a bigger role. The refrigerator plays a new role in the food supply chain, so things can sit around for longer. Do you wonder that a lot of Chinese food will become bad in the way that American food has become bad? And if that happens, will it come to Shanghai first or are you more optimistic than that? 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.…

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