Nothing tells you more about globalisation, our hyperlinked-up world, than the ways we shop, cook and produce our food. And nowhere have its effects been as dramatic as in China. Global agribusinesses have moved in to produce cheap meat. That then feeds into the supermarkets and fast-food chains that have sprung up mushroom-like in their thousands across the land.
Fuchsia Dunlop was the first westerner to train as a chef in China at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine in Chengdu. Her cookbooks, journalism, and her memoir, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, document the country she first encountered almost two decades ago as well as the ferment of recent years. A few weeks ago she was in Shanghai.
Mrs He charges through the busy market, greeting her friends and neighbours as she goes. Here and there, she stops to pick out some water bamboo stems, their husks peeled off to reveal ivory ziggurats of flesh or to have a bowlful of snaky eels weighed and gutted. Before long we are back at her flat on the outskirts of Shanghai, laden with produce and ready to start cooking the evening meal. And as dinner time approaches, the table begins to fill up with delicious dishes, sweet and sour radish, yellow croaker soup with pickled vegetables, a stew of those eels and water bamboo.
