以食为疗 Let Food Be Medicine - for planet and people

In my early China days more than 20 years ago, I was enthralled by average Chinese having a deep understanding of how food impacts our health. 以食为疗 | let food be medicine - soon became a guiding proverb for a new found lifestyle which abandoned Western industrial food for a varied Chinese cuisine. I turned vegetarian barely two years after my arrival to the country and remained so ever since.
 
While I was bored in my Chinese classes which I soon abandoned, I was inspired in our neighborhood restaurants, where I copied laminated menus and quizzed the owners of small food stalls about the ingredients and the meaning of each dish. Food was without doubt my entry ticket to a culture which is now closer to me than what I used to call home.

The Shanghai born physician Adeline Yen Mah explained in her 2001 book 守株待兔 | Watching a Tree to Catch a Hare - which I devoured in my Kunming days over peanut sauce filled erkuais | 饵快 (see above picture) -  how the healthy diet of Chinese peasants outperformed already in the pre-CCP era the diet of wealthy urbanites; and how the variety of Chinese vegetables offers itself to a balanced as well as vegetarian diet.

Watching a Tree to Catch a Hare became the entry point to a much larger topic of how food, culture, individual and societal health are interconnected. I readily learned from my Chinese relatives which 'cold' food like bitter gourd (see picture below 苦瓜烧鸡蛋) should be eaten during hot summer days, and which 'hot' food like ginger should be eaten during cold winter months.

China has experienced during the last two decades an enormous transformation of its cuisine. While traditional cooking remains to be a cultural stronghold, going out for a decent lunch or dinner is not anymore, a bargain like it once was. The recent lockdown of Shanghai has moreover shown that access to healthy and fresh food is everything else but a certainty.
 
A surge in diabetes, obesity and many other nutrition related diseases reveals that Chinese society follows despite its rather recent agrarian roots a similar trajectory as affluent Western economies. The findings of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project, which was conducted in the 1980s and turned by biochemist Colin Campbell into a bestselling book on nutrition have been largely ignored.
 
Campbell concludes that people who eat a predominantly whole-food, vegan diet and reduce their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases. Who would have thought that the science of health and nutrition receives tailwind from a Chinese government which has set its sails towards Sakoku, the island of isolationist policies?

The 14th Five-Year Plan of China sets forth a national strategy towards lab-grown meat and plant-based eggs among food production technologies that will be supported to cut reliance on overseas know-how and imports. This is overall great news, considering that China has turned into the world’s largest single market for meat and thus a major contributor of food caused climate change.
 
The shift towards plant-based foods might also impact the epidemiological future of animal born and human contracted viruses like Covid-19, since there are indications that the intensive and economy of scale husbandry farming techniques practiced in China are a direct cause for the increase in pandemic diseases.

Quite few years back, I attended an interesting course about China’s food security under the title “Can China Feed Itself?“ (see above research chart) and now wonder if the Chinese government’s interest in food independence is not a best practice for other nations and regions to follow. Reducing the reliance on global trade and industrial food corporations is in line with sustainable farming techniques and the Permaculture method.
 
Whether plant-based high-tech foods reduce the dependence on large corporations remains to be seen. A world in which industrial agriculture produces ingredients which are healthy for planet and people is however to be preferred over the system which we have inherited from US capitalism and which has been the subject of numerous documentaries like Forks over Knives, Planeat, Food Inc. or Fed Up.  

So, go CCP, go! 加油共产党！

Source documents:

• Watching a Tree to Catch a Hare
• China-Cornell-Oxford Project
• The China Study
• Ministry of Agriculture on 14th Five Year Plan
• South China Morning Post on 14th Five Year Plan
• China’s 5 Year Plan Includes Plant-Based Eggs, Cultured Meat. Why that’s a big deal?
• On the Metaphysics of a Plague: Why intensive live stock farming is the source of Covid-19
• Can China feed itself? Study
• Forks Over Knives documentary
• Planeat documentary
• Food Inc. documentary
• Fed Up documentary
• UN Global Land Outlook Report 2017