The Other White Meat

Turtle is a  very common meat here.  The locals will eat the common snappers that come out of lakes and rivers and ditches, just like we do back home.  But their favorite turtle is a soft shelled variety.  The shell isn't completely soft - two-thirds of it is hard bone.  But the bone is thin and is covered by thick skin and gristle that adds an other inch or two the the diameter.  When when you steam that skin and gristle over a bed of rice, it turns all gooey and chewy. 

The Chinese prize the mouth-feel of tendon and gristle and skin.  If cooked well, these add a gelatinous richness to the food.  In fact, lean meat is not very popular.  (Most locals I know detest turkey breast and can't understand how Americans can eat the stuff.)  A good cut of meat comes with bones and fat.  A great cut of meat comes with skin and tendon as well. 

In fact, the most popular cut of meat is the pork belly - the stuff that we make bacon out of.  They take the whole pork belly - skin and all - and dice it into cubes that are about one inch by one inch by one and a half inches.  The the long dimension starts with the skin and includes the subcutaneous fat and ends with a healthy streak or two of meat.  The cook these cubes up in something like a barbecue sauce.  It is very good to eat, though a cardiologist could have no worse a nightmare.

Pork ribs are very popular too.  In the U.S., most folks idea of perfect ribs would be those cooked low and slow so that the meat falls away from the bone.  In China, they would consider such and outcome to be a sign of a lousy cook.  Here, the ideal rib requires you to fight the bone a bit to give up its goodies.

Pork is the most common meat in China - ranking only behind rice and wheat in the diet of the average person.  It is considered so important that the national government maintains a Strategic Pork Reserve.  They tap into these reserves whenever the price of pork us rising toward politically unpopular prices.  People with pork are happy people.  Pork is so historically rooted in the Chinese psychology that the Chinese character for the word "home"  (家) is made by placing the character for a pig (豕)  under a roof (宀).  Home is where the pig is.

We could go on and on about pork in China.  So let's end with a story from recent news.  The Chinese women's volleyball team has lost a string of matches in the run-up the London Olympic games.  The coach is blaming the loss on the fact that his team has not been able to eat pork for the past few weeks.  They have been playing these matches all over China and, on the road, they must rely on local markets for their food.  These would be local markets where the pork producers have a habit of using chemicals to enhance pig growth.  The coaches have forbidden pork out of fear that their players will eat some tainted bacon and end up testing positive for steroids when they get to London.