“What do you eat?” – Part I – Food on campus

This is the question I have been asked most often since I arrived here. With Chinese food being so, how shall we put this, keen on embracing all animals and vegetables being incorporated into the diet, coupled with the fact that China is not exactly renowned for its food hygiene and safety standards, I can understand why people may be curious. Even the Chinese learning podcasts that I've been listening to mention “strange yoghurt companies that appear and disappear overnight”, and my neighbours just told me that the water company that I ordered water for my water cooler was recently investigated for arsenic poisoning (!)

                The truthful answer to this question though is, half the time, I don’t really know! I figured that it would just be too difficult to maintain my usual diet, and that it would be best to throw myself into the local cuisine and just do as the locals. Not only would it be too hard and expensive to source western foods, there is also no kitchen area in our building, or in any of the other dorms to my knowledge (so no baking posts for three months!). All the people in my lab eat at the very cheap campus canteen. It serves bog-standard, school dinners type food, three times a day. The times are very early, as Chinese people seem to rise more or less at dawn and get down to work early. This means breakfast is from 6:30 – 8:30, lunch is from 11:00 – 13:00 and dinner is from 17:00 – 19:00. The plus side is that his gets me out of bed quite early, which might be a shocker for many people who know my usual routine. I am surprised at how easy it has been to adjust to this though.

     Going through a normal day, I get up to leave just enough time to get breakfast before the canteen closes, where I normally like to get a type of eggy bread, which is surprisingly tasty. It’s a bit like a cross between an omelette on the underside and a savoury pancake or naan on the top side, and is actually quite tasty:

Naan bread type side

Omlette side

It was too tasty and I was too hungry in the morning to wait any longer, so a bite occurred in between the photo taking of the two sides.

I usually supplement this with some kind of sweet bread roll. They have various types, but the two good ones I’ve found are a small purple bread roll (I assume flavoured with some berry paste in the dough?) and the other one is kind of like the Chinese equivalent of a doughnut, but instead of fried, it is boiled, and instead of jam, it has sweet red bean paste on the inside. They also sell some soya milks, but they don’t taste as nice as some of the ones I’ve had in England, so I just bring my own bottle of water. The two things together cost me about 20p.

Chinese doughnut with red bean paste inside

So far, so breakfast. Lunch and dinner and pretty much the same, so I’ll just cover them together. Basically, you get a tray with plain, boiled, sticky rice automatically on it (unless you ask specifically not to have any), and then you can choose from a selection of meat and vegetables, depending on what you feel like. I say “choose” but in reality, since you don’t know what you’re going to get, it’s really just pot luck and experimentation to get something tasty. And also, they only have one serving spoon and they don’t change in between the dishes, so there can be a chance that you get a little bit of something else on your plate! (Not so good if you’re a vegetarian or Muslim, lol). Nevertheless, the dishes are quite wholesome, and not that bad. Here are two examples:

The above is fried chicken (we think, although it looks suspiciously pink to me, and could be anything from pigeon to cat for all I know) and cauliflower with some other mixed veg.

        This one is battered chicken nuggets (again, I’m assuming its chicken) and a spicy aubergine side dish. There are many more options besides.
 

Obviously, some of the ingredients are instantly recognisable, and I can decide whether or not to go for those, other things are just guesses and seeing what tastes good. They also have tofu coming in all shapes and sizes, including a puffy fried tofu which I’m really glad they serve here, as I always liked it, but it was so expensive in England! I try to get those whenever I can. Here, one of these meals usually costs me between just 50 – 70 p!

           You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned any Chinese names for these dishes yet. Well the thing is, I’ve asked my other lab mates, and they don’t seem any wiser on the food situation than I am. There are some things they recognise, but others are just invented by the kitchen (probably for convenience and financial purposes) and there is no menu, just prices next to each dish, so they don’t know either! The canteen at it’s peak times can get very busy, and between the heaving hoards of people, few are prone to keeping the line held up to have a chit chat with the kitchen staff about the food, so nobody seems to know much about what they’re eating.

           Moaning about the food quality, or lack thereof, seems to be a sport among the Chinese students in the lab, as each meal is peppered with some comments about how there is no choice and how the food is so terrible. Many of them do not even finish their meals and the first phrase that they’ve insisted I learn is “不好吃”( Bù hào chī) or “not tasty” which is mentioned liberally around meal times (I was later to discover the delicious wealth of food that China has to offer, and eventually started to agree with them).

I’m slightly confused by this, as it seems to me like there is plenty of choice. Each meal time has at least a couple of red and white meats, one or two fish options and at least one tofu option. There are also four or five veg options, and I can always find something that looks remotely appetising. They say that I will get bored after I’ve tried all the flavours, but overall, as far as school dinners go, it’s not bad. Sure, it’s not gourmet food, but it’s regular, reliable, cheap, and most importantly in this country, it is safe. Spoon swapping or no, it must be said, that I’ve not once had a stomach upset from the school food (only had it once so far, but that was when we ate out one time). I think that’s the most important feature. But then maybe I can see the positives so clearly because I’m biased. It could be just that I’m enjoying not having to cook so much that I can’t yet view the situation clearly. And now with all my new found time in the evening where I can do so many things, worrying about whether there is choice doesn’t really register on my radar. And besides, the canteen is only a one minute walk from my dorm, so I can spend even less time thinking about food and concentrate on making use of my time here and properly enjoy it. Maybe since these guys have only ever had this throughout their school and university, it seems boring, and since they’ve never had to cook for themselves, they don’t know that this is a convenient luxury. It just reminds me of the line from Avenue Q’s “I wish I could go back to college” song  – “what would I give, to go back and live in a dorm with a meal plan again?”. It definitely feels like that for three months at least, I get to have that wish come true :P (even if that means that “when I walk through the quad, I think ‘Oh my God – these kids are so much younger than me!’”).