Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories by Lorraine Clissold Page B

grains are packed with nutrients, especially when accompanied by fruits and nuts. The same cannot be said for the modern-day proprietary products that rely on the additional nutrients of milk and a large number of synthetically prepared added vitamins and minerals to allow them to make their nutrition claims. Modern breakfast cereals are simply an over-processed, over-packaged variation of the boiled grains that featured in traditional diets and are still eaten in China today. During my time in China I was very sad to see the breakfast cereal manufacturers move in with a vengeance. In The Food of China , E. N. Anderson includes a survey of Western and Chinese foods used by Chinese immigrants who had been in the US for five years. 6 It shows that two-thirds of the families surveyed had adopted the breakfast cereal and milk habit, and indicates that dry cereals were the greatest Western influence on their diet after bread. The most important meal of the day is the one where there is the most time pressure, and so advertisers have spent millions convincing us of the benefits of ‘special breakfast foods’. The overall eating experience is not a particularly satisfying one, despite food manufacturers’ claims to the contrary, and all that salt and sugar can be habit-forming. Certainly my daily bowl of branflakes was the last vestige of my Western diet, and I used to enjoy a couple of pieces of wholemeal toast with honey and a banana, all washed down with a cup of good strong English tea. In Western terms these are pretty healthy options, and it is easier to form a habit than to break one. So I probably would have kept the whole idea of zhou on the back burner, limiting my intake to half a dozen bowls a year to humour Guo Gui Lan, had it not been made easily available to me and presented as a favourable option.
    Make your own zhou

    The best grains for
zhou: short grain white or brown rice • wild rice • millet • quinoa • cornmeal • Job’s tears (coix seed) • buckwheat • barley
    Other ingredients you might like to add:
aduki beans • mung beans • split peas or lentils • sliced Shitake mushrooms • chopped sweet potato • sweetcorn (add just before serving) • Chinese dates (jujube) (see page 194) • wolfberries (sometimes sold as gouji berries) (see page 194) • dried apricots • prunes
    Toppings (for savoury zhou ):
chopped spring onion • minced coriander • chilli sauce • soy or fish sauce • sesame oil • chopped or boiled peanuts, pinenuts, walnuts • sprouted seeds (allow to soften) • fine slivers of ginger
    We were having breakfast at the Riverside Hotel in Hoi An, a former Vietnamese trading port famous for its mixture of cultural influences. There is excellent French bread available on the streets of Vietnam, but it had not reached our breakfast buffet – the yellow-looking buns actually tasted more like a processed cake. There was some dubious looking ‘toast’, but I knew that the French had never worked that one out for themselves so there wasn’t much hope of their passing it on to the Vietnamese. Ignoring the children’s squeals of horror and against a background of their gagging and retching noises, I decided that it was time I started eating zhou . Following the lead of my fellow Asian guests, I filled a small bowl with the white paste-like substance and then scattered a mixture of deep-fried garlic chips, shallots, chopped green onion, peanuts and fresh red chilli over the top, followed by a few splashes of fish sauce and sesame oil. By the third day my body had stopped wondering where the toast and honey had gone. I never looked back.
    Liquid food at any time of day
    When the Chinese started to mill flour in the Han dynasty (long before Marco Polo reputedly made his way along the Silk Road), they compensated for taking the moisture out of the grain by serving their noodles in liquid. In the West we eat bread with our soup; bread is baked, which makes it very dry or yang