In the midst of protest, the head chef uses big-pot cooking to bring people together
"After the students came to protest, the neighbors brought over so much food: water spinach, Gynura bicolor, pumpkin, winter melon... They made it clear they just wanted the students to eat their fill!" Zou Caifeng, a Yuanli resident, stirs the vegetables in the pan with her spatula like any ordinary mother. Her other job now is "chief protest chef!" She has to feed the children who have come from all over, children who were strangers to each other at first: "Last time they were taken to the district prosecutors office and held until the middle of the night. When they finally got out, they ate pig trotter vermicelli here to wash away the bad luck."
Chen Qinghai, chairman of the Yuanli Anti-Wind Turbine Self-Help Association, says the residents are protesting on their own, without support from any political party or company, so they must live within their means: "Cook it ourselves, save some money!" And so his wife, Zou Caifeng, teamed up with Yang Yongquan, who once ran a cafeteria, to transform themselves into the big "chief protest chefs." The students from colleges and universities across the country who come to help with the Yuanli anti-wind-turbine movement are the diners the "chief protest chefs" worry about most, and are most grateful to.
Starting in 2000, as anti-nuclear sentiment surged in Taiwan, China, the European wind power company Infigen Energy came to Taiwan, China to install wind turbines. It should have been a good thing for promoting green energy development, but because Taiwan, China lacks regulations on "wind turbine safety distances," it has frequently sparked controversy. Earlier this year, residents of Yuanli in Miaoli believed that the wind turbines about to be installed would be too close to their homes, so they formed the "Anti-Wind Turbine Self-Help Association," hoping that the turbines, which are up to 180 m tall, could be placed at a certain distance away and not destroy the peace of rural life.
"Residents over in Taichung have all come to complain, saying the turbines are so noisy when they run that they cannot stand it, that every day they can only keep the windows and doors shut tight and take sleeping pills to fall asleep, and that the fish have all disappeared!" Yuanli residents say they worry that the low-frequency noise from the turbines will cause physical and mental decline, tinnitus and other symptoms of "wind turbine syndrome." "We are not completely opposed to wind turbines. We just hope they will not be so close to our village. If we cannot open the windows all day and cannot sleep soundly, will young people still be willing to come back here?"
