The Potato Marches On
The Chinese as potato eaters? Oh yes, if Ms. Feng, former potato farmer turned potato promoter and the Chinese government have their way, according to a couple of fascinating pieces on potatoes in China this week in the Wall Street Journal and accompanying blog. Worth a look for the images and the text of the potato song, as well as for the story.
Now changing tastes may sound trivial. But when tastes change, so frequently does people’s health, retailing and restaurants, transport patterns, and farming. So changing tastes are not trivial at all.
And one of the biggest taste changes over the past two hundred years has been the increase in potato consumption. After a slow start, it became a staple in Europe and the European colonies and former colonies in the nineteenth century. It has been gaining in Mexico since the Rockefeller Foundation promoted it post World War II.
It’s one thing to have potato as an extra. In India and Mexico, it’s appreciated for its ability to absorb the flavors of spices or to make a tasty filling for tacos.
And it’s been around in China for several centuries as one of the articles points out, julienned and cooked “al dente.”
Potatoes Stir Fried with Vinegar and Chile Peppers. http://umami.typepad.com/umami/2007/07/post.html. Licensed for non-commercial re-use
In China and in Chinese-owned restaurants in Hawaii it crops up as a salad. No, not the cooked potato salad of the west, but a raw potato salad identified, goodness knows why, as Italian. Ten years ago in the then ground-breaking listserv eGullet, Sun-ki Chai of the University of Hawaii reported on the Kit ‘n Kitchen, a Chinese Italian restaurant in Honolulu whose owner comes from Hong Kong.
One of the most common non-pizza, non-pasta Italian-East Asian dishes is the raw potato salad. . . Once again, I had no clue about the origin or how it got classified as “Italian”. The dressing is an “oriental style” one that seems to feature a combination of miso, vinegar, and oil. Raw potatoes are pretty similar to daikon or jicama in texture, and have an extremely mild taste.
That’s a fresh, natural way to eat potato that has yet to catch on in the mainland United States!
But it’s one thing to eat potato as a side dish, another to make it one of the basic dietary carbohydrates. It’s a root. Grain eaters generally look down on root eaters.
Furthermore, grain eaters tend to like textured foods. They don’t like the soft boiled masses, or the mashes, or pastes, and purees, which are the easiest ways to prepare roots.
In Europe, it took breeding, government coercion, marketing, repeated attempts to make bread primarily composed of potato, and the addition of fat to make fries and gratins and creamy mashed potatoes before the potato became a major part of the diet.
In China, it’s taking government encouragement, marketing, and attempts to make noodles and steamed buns, the traditional wheat dishes of northern China, out of potato.
The government’s food scientists . . . just launched what they describe as the nation’s “first-generation potato buns,” now stocked in the capital’s supermarkets. Other potato-based products, including potato noodles, are also being developed.
Will the government succeed in making potato buns? It’s not clear. In Europe, in spite of the best efforts of the French Academy of Sciences, bread made primarily of potato never worked.
What does seem clear is that whether as a side dish or as a staple, Chinese potato dishes will add to the world’s repertoire.
Spent nearly a year teaching at Wuhan University, in deepest China, in ’86. My dept. chair’s wife had me in for Sunday din a couple of times a month. She always served some sort of tudow, usually fried, as a courtesy to me. Her teen-aged kids chuckled afterwards when I asked them how often they ate potatoes: “hardly ever”, one said; “never” the other said. I’d suspected as much when the boy didn’t even try to pick up the round spud with his chopsticks, but instead simply speared it and munched it at the end of the stick! :)
Well, that was a courtesy. I wonder whether that is changing. Slowly, slowly, I would imagine.
Brought up a long unvisited memory — when I was a little girl in Idaho, my mother would sometimes slice raw potatoes very thin and make sandwiches with lots of mayo.
Fascinating. Now I have to ask around all my friends because I have never heard of Americans eating raw potatoes before.
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Interesting. Any reason China is moving toward potatoes? Problems with the rice crop? Or trying to cut back on methane emissions (since a rice paddy puts out so much methane)? Or is this just happening in the north, in which case one wonders if it has become difficult to grow wheat.
Discovered that al dente sort of noodle-like approach to potatoes on my first trip to mainland China, back in 2000. Loved it — but actually didn’t recognize it at first. Still, potatoes were rare side dishes, not major food groups (except for sweet potatoes — those were pretty commonly seen, especially among street vendors). I wonder what is behind this move.
I think it’s just part of the general push to produce as much food as possible for a huge population. As you know, potatoes are enormously high yielding per acre. I need to try one of the potato dishes!
The age-old problem of feeding urban populations (something urban populations often fail to appreciate until it’s too late). With so many people moving off the land, it’s going to be a struggle for China.