A Complete Analysis of Food Culture on the Dining Tables of Taiwan, China

It just so happened that around that time, the great director Ang Lee's most spectacular and sensational film since he began his career, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” had utterly captivated these foreigners, and they clamored to see his other works, so right after leaving the cinema, we went straight to rent “Eat Drink Man Woman” to watch.

I heard that Ang Lee himself is a skilled cook and a devoted eater. Right at the opening, of all the elaborate dishes the master chef Old Zhu prepares, the preserved mustard green pork belly “kou rou” steals the scene the most: a whole strip of pork with a lovely marbling of fat is boiled, deep-fried, plunged into ice water, cut into thick slices, and placed with spices, rice wine, and soy sauce into a bowl, then steamed slowly in a bamboo steamer. Afterward the whole bowl is inverted onto a round plate lined with bok choy, and the sauce left in the bowl is reduced over low heat in a wok and poured over the pork belly.

Rich but not greasy, intense but not heavy, that glossy sheen and meaty aroma came rushing at me right through the screen, straight to my brain.

In a film exploring modern family relationships, the cooking process of this one dish alone is so complete it could serve as a multimedia tutorial, because Ang Lee said outright: “A bowl of pork belly kou rou best represents the feeling of a Chinese family gathered around the table for a meal.”

What dispels sorrow? Only pork. What satisfies a craving? Only lard.

After watching the film, I was so dazzled and bewitched by that bowl of kou rou that I decided to do a little rehab for the pig's reputation, and I singled out the pork belly scene to riff on it: “Do you know how to write the Chinese character for family, jia? Family, what exactly is family?” I took a sheet of paper and wrote down the Chinese character “jia” (family).“You can write family, jia? Family, what exactly is family?” I took out a piece of paper and wrote the Chinese character “jia.”

Then, facing these foreigners who barely knew a character or two, I played the little Chinese teacher and began explaining the characters: “Jia, family, is ‘a pig under a roof.’ The moment we smell a whole pot of pork with soy sauce simmering slowly over a low flame, wave after wave of meaty aroma filling our noses, the lid going ‘pssht pssht,’ no matter how far from home we are, this is home.”

I looked at these people before me who would rather die than eat pork, struck speechless for a moment by the “pork code” hidden in those ancient and mysterious pictographs. I shrugged, and simply held back my laughter and kept bragging: “Anyway, in our culture the pig represents prosperity and abundance — even piggy banks are often made in the shape of a pig.”

At the table, a Muslim friend could accept it intellectually, but emotionally still could not understand at all the Chinese food world's love affair with pork. He seemed to have been holding it in for a long time too, and finally mustered the courage to ask: “But isn't the pig often used in Chinese to insult people? Very lazy, very stupid, very dirty, very greedy, very gluttonous — pig-headed, Zhu Bajie, and so on. The body is a temple — such a terrible animal, why do you still eat it?”

Now it was my turn to be stumped; on this point I really had no idea.

For Muslims born and raised in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, pork is not only something that would never be brought to the table, it should not even appear in one's line of sight. The mere thought of eating pork immediately triggers a gag reflex, as natural as the desert being dry and dusty with flying sand and stones.

F saw that I had fallen a little silent, and spoke up to smooth things over: “Actually, Germans are very familiar with this kind of contradiction. At New Year we give each other pig-shaped marzipan (mazipan). If someone who never studied lucked into a good grade, we say ‘I had a pig!’ (Schwein gehabt). The pig means luck, but at the same time the pig can also be used as an insult, like stupid sow, damn fat pig, and so on.”

Although F doesn't eat pork either, she grew up in Germany, where people are crazy about pork knuckle, so she understood this complex of both disdaining and loving the pig perfectly, and was far more sensitive to dietary differences than the other Muslim friends who had never stepped outside the Islamic dietary circle. At least when I ate pork intestine vermicelli, her expression stayed the same, and she never raised an eyebrow.

 

“Pigs are stupid?” I said. “Pigs are clearly very smart, with a high IQ. In George Orwell's “Animal Farm” the pigs are the leaders.”

F: “That's because the pig's only function is to be food. If a pig doesn't fight to come out on top, once it loses the struggle it turns straight into ham.” She added, “By your logic, such a smart, sentient animal — don't you feel uneasy eating it?”

 

F laughed and said: “Pork is indeed very fatty and very greasy.”

Me: “Just eat the lean parts, then.”

F: “Haven't you noticed that pork has a strange frequency, that it twitches for no reason?”

I rolled my eyes: “You're overthinking it. Don't you ever get curious about exactly what harm pork does? Why is it banned on religious grounds?”

The moment religion came up, F finally stopped joking and said seriously: “The Quran explicitly says not to eat it, so we simply don't — there's plenty else we can eat anyway.”

My interest piqued, I asked: “So in the Quran, is there anything very negative about the pig? Like the pig being evil or something.”

B even solemnly brought out a computer and googled the online Quran (2:173): “…….He has only forbidden you carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine………” After confirming it, he poked his head out from behind the computer: “No. The pig is also a creation of God, it's just dirty and unfit to eat.”

I thought about it: the more you protest, the more you reveal — when there's a sign urging people not to jaywalk, it means plenty of people love to jaywalk.

So I guessed that in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, there must have been people eating pork, right? Otherwise, why bother explicitly prohibiting it?

With modern farming techniques, the feed-to-meat conversion rate of pigs is far better than that of cattle and sheep, so logically speaking it should be a cheap and excellent source of nutrition. So we're back to the question of “why completely stop consuming this source of protein”?

 

After much deliberation and consulting a good deal of material in the library, my conclusion is still that old saying: “Those who live by the mountain eat from the mountain, those who live by the water eat from the water” — the local environment shapes the local food culture.

 

Islam originated in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, all yellow sand, developed from the Middle East westward to North Africa, and eastward all the way through Central Asia to Xinjiang, China, and southward to northern India. This vast territory happens to be exactly the arid regions where water sources are scarce.

 

The pig's ancestors evolved from forest river valley areas rich in water, roaming all day through shady grass and thickets, searching for roots, tubers, nuts, and grains. By nature delicate and afraid of the sun, they need shade to shield them from sunlight, so unlike grass-eating cattle and sheep they cannot simply be grazed in the open wilderness, migrating long distances under the sun, surviving by gnawing on grass roots and chewing bark to ruminate.

 

And everyone has misunderstood the pig — pigs are not dirty, they even love to bathe. Pig skin has no sweat glands and cannot tolerate heat at all, so to cool down they very much like to throw themselves into water to rinse off. If there's no pond or stream nearby, they have no choice but to roll in a mud pit from time to time and make do, which inevitably gives people the impression that pigs are dirty.

 

This further violates Islam's constant emphasis on cleanliness.

 

When the Prophet Muhammad was expelled from Mecca and exiled to Medina during the arduous early period of founding the religion, in order to meet the water needs of the many people who followed him, he displayed many miracles similar to Jesus feeding five thousand with five loaves and two fish in the New Testament. “The Prophet, in mortal flesh, blessed by God, actually caused sacred water to spring from his fingers, filling a huge water storage barrel with fresh drinking water to quench everyone's thirst!”

These miracles directly reflect the scarcity of water resources in desert regions, where life and death hang by a thread; when there is not even enough water for people to drink, it should certainly not be wasted on pigs.

 

Furthermore, the good feed-to-meat conversion rate of modern pig farms is built on the cultivation of new crops such as corn, soybeans, and potatoes. The pig's digestive system and nutrient intake are extremely similar to humans, so ancient documents record that pig farmers had no choice but to feed pigs dates and wheat that people could eat too.

 

In peaceful times, pigs competing with people for food and water was already unbearable; in years of famine it inevitably made poor, starving people hate social injustice all the more.

 

The Quran teaches: “Whoever knows his neighbor goes hungry and cannot sleep, yet eats his fill and sleeps soundly, is no Muslim turned toward God.” Raising pigs consumes water sources and food grain, seriously violating the Islamic community spirit of “feeling the hunger of others as your own,” which Islam values most.

 

And if pig farmers do not spend heavily to buy food that people could eat to feed the pigs, then the omnivorous pig, finding nothing to fill its belly, when hungry has no choice but to eat feces and garbage, further confirming its reputation as “dirty.”

 

Not to mention that pigs also carry zoonotic diseases, yet their only function is to provide meat — unlike cattle and sheep, they cannot be milked or produce wool and leather.

 

Judaism, which likewise comes from the Semitic peoples long settled in Mesopotamia, has since ancient times regarded pork as unclean. Islam not only inherited much of the teaching of the Old Testament but also took on Judaism's tradition of sternly abhorring pork — this is certainly no accident.

 

With the excavation of the “pig-pattern pottery bowl” and cut pig bones from the Hemudu culture site in Yuyao, Zhejiang, South China, the history of Chinese pig-raising and pork-eating can be traced back 7,000 years, and the ancestors of that time had long since domesticated water buffalo to cultivate rice.

 

The pig, unchanging in its delicate nature of loving water and shade, was kept penned in every household's backyard, which fit perfectly with the warm, rainy rice cultivation of South China.

 

The pig's omnivorous appetite for anything became, after humans settled down, an indispensable organic garbage and swill bucket. Even pig manure was an exceptional fertilizer, rare and precious for intensive agriculture.

 

The pig's fatal shortcomings in the nomadic desert regions, when placed in the rain-rich land of fish and rice, turned out to be virtues worth writing volumes about.

 

And so the pig became the central backbone of grain production, pig-raising and rice-farming complementing each other, and a bowl of rice topped with two glossy slices of pork belly kou rou distilled all the satisfied sighs and laughter of 7,000 years at the Chinese dining table.

 

“So even when our director makes a film, he never forgets to praise pork belly kou rou. Report complete.” I delivered a long lecture and, with great solemnity, drew the conclusion that “therefore we love pigs the most.”

F clapped her hands and couldn't help laughing: “That logic is a little strange. From the pig's standpoint, the pig must think we Muslims love them more………………”

She paused, “After all, we would never slaughter a pig to eat it.”

Photo source http://paper.wenweipo.com/2012/03/16/OT1203160009.htm