Category Archives: Things we’ve eaten

…that we’d never eaten before (or even thought to eat before).

Living in China? What do you do about food safety/pollution?

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Just now I opened my latest ZGBriefs China news digest and found: “Rat meat and Chinese food safety” and “20 million taps (and not a drop to drink)”. Right as I sat to down to write this post I also checked my Weixin (微信 – a Chinese social media thing). At the top of my feed was a post about someone encountering “gutter oil” 地沟油 at lunch. Gutter oil comes from the kitchen slop that restaurants dump down the nearest manhole. Some enterprising (desperate?) soul scoops it out and skims off the oil, which he sells to restaurants and street vendors. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Or they drive around at night collecting it in barrels from the restaurants directly (I’ve seen that, too). And these aren’t the worst Chinese food safety examples I can think of; they’re just the ones that happen to be immediately on hand as I write this. This is truly just the muculent tip of a putrescent iceberg.

Why am I bringing this up? I don’t want a blog full of expat whining. But I got this e-mail a few days ago from a couple who’s been in China for three months:

Hello Joel!
[...] I’m living with my husband in a town in the middle of nowhere called Neixiang (Hunan Province) we’d had tons of shocking experiences here… and now we’re mainly concern about what food is safe to eat.

I’m not talking about eating cat or dog, but eating safe and clean. After reading news about food scandals in China we became more and more afraid of buying food on the streets and even at super markets.

If you have time, could you please tell us your experience with Chinese food brands and give us some advice about what brands has more quality standards than others?

How would you answer? If you live or lived in China, what specific things do you do to make your food safer?

Here’s what I replied with (plus some links)…

Other than spending tons of money and eating only imported products, I don’t know if it’s possible to eat safe and clean in China (and outside China, safe and clean is really just an illusion anyway, but that’s another topic). We’re less stringent than a lot of other expats, and I don’t think what we’re doing makes it safe and clean, but at least it’s something.

Fruit & veggies: We wash all our fruit and vegetables really well.

Milk/dairy: Our girls drink/drank imported milk and formula for their first two years. We drink the major domestic brands, but not because we think they’re necessarily safe.

Meat: Some meat vendors in vegetable markets are “certified” (so they claim, usually by displaying posters and/or certificates on the walls). We get our chicken at Metro 麦德龙 (a bulk import store, cheaper than regular import stores), but the beef and pork there is still too expensive. So we’re eating “certified” vegetable market pork and beef while still looking for better options. We also eat less meat than we did in North America.

Packaged/bottled products: We don’t usually buy packaged products like bottles of vinegar or soy milk from the tiny window shops (小卖部) or traditional vegetable markets (菜市场), because things are more likely to be fake. In our first year our teacher pointed out some details of things we’d bought: labels glued on crooked and printed in slightly lower quality, caps were just plugs instead of factory sealed screw caps, etc. Packaged stuff has better chances at a supermarket.

Street food: We don’t eat tons of street food (about once a week for me).

Water: Our drinking water at home comes in big blue bottles, like an office water cooler. At least there’s a chance that it’s better than the tap water (and it tastes way better). During our first week in Qingdao I asked a convenience store owner if we could buy the blue bottles from them. She said we didn’t need them, that we could just drink the tap water. When I balked, she said, well, children shouldn’t drink the tap water, they have to drink bottled water, but for adults it’s fine. We went across the parking lot to the other little convenience store and got the blue bottles.

Air: We didn’t buy an air purifier; they’re prohibitively expensive. We use the China Air Quality Index app to keep track of the pollution levels (though you hardly need it; it’s obvious when the API is over 150), and on really bad days we try to keep our daughters inside. I also googled for pictures of house plants that are supposedly good for the air, and got dozens of a kind in the plant market that looked similar (not scientific, I know, but I like the green anyway, plus they’re cheap). Most importantly as far as air quality is concerned, we left Tianjin (next to Beijing) for Qingdao. Short of building pollution domes over your life like some international schools, you can’t fight the bad air. Your options: wear uncomfortable and expensive high-tech masks, live and work under a (literal) bubble, embrace an early death, or leave. We left. Sort of.

Being in China means choosing to ingest and absorb all kinds garbage. There’s no avoiding it, there’s just lessening it. There’s a joke floating around online that when a Chinese person dies if you flatten their body you’ll get the entire Periodic Table of Elements. Our first year in Tianjin, back before the Olympics when restaurant place settings didn’t come shrink wrapped with your meal, our Chinese teachers would obsessively wipe out every cup, bowl and plate before eating with them. What did they know that we didn’t? So don’t forget to ask (delicately!) your Chinese coworkers, waiban, students, etc. what they do about food safety and pollution. They aren’t unaware.

P.S. - Not exactly the kind of food safety issue we’ve been talking about, but still, this dumpling chef doesn’t mess around:

Don’t eat dog? We sure missed that memo… [Updated]

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When we were beginner language students I translated a dog restaurant menu just for fun. Now this week in Beijing they’re telling people to stop eating dogs. A friend posted this photo yesterday:


“Please refuse to eat dog meat! There’s all different kinds of food, but ‘friends’ are extremely precious.”
– The Beijing Loving Animals Foundation
请拒吃狗肉！食物多种多样，而“朋友”弥足珍贵
– 北京爱它>动物公益基金会

If there’s a campaign to stop eating dogs, our district in Qingdao has definitely not received the memo. Here’s some pictures I just happen to have on hand, taken right in our neighbourhood and at the nearest restaurants:


“Five Spice Dog Meat” 五香狗肉 Spring Festival gift box.


This hotpot restaurant’s menu includes fish head meat 鱼头肉, beer duck 啤酒鸭, dog 狗肉, and eel 鳝鱼.


At a competing restaurant dog meat tops the hotpot menu 狗肉火锅.

These photos can be found in our public China Instagram feed.

Pro Tip! “Dog food” — is that food for your dog (狗粮), or your dog for food (狗肉)? You’ll probably want to be careful you don’t confuse this:


(pet food store)

with this:


(dog meat gift bag from Chinese teacher)

or this:


(dog meat restaurant)

Pro Tip #2! Dog meat is a wintertime food. In the spring and summer it won’t be available at many restaurants that usually serve it. Because Chinese medicine. So you’ll probably have to wait a while before you get to try any.

On the first glance, it’s not immediately obvious why Mainland Chinese would be campaigning to not eat dog, or any other animal. I found some interesting explanations here: China’s dog-eating controversy is class warfare

And of course we’ve had our own dog eating adventures:

China also has other creative uses for dog, aside from food:

[Update Apr 19]
Dog is more popular around here than I realized. Normally I eat with a group on Friday nights, but everyone had to work overtime tonight. So I was on my own for dinner, and took my time walking around just to see what was available. In five minutes I found five places that serve dog. I’m sure there would have been more but friends called and said they could make it after all so I stopped looking and went to meet them. See if you can find “狗” in each of these pictures:

Baijiu 101: “One does not simply… drink baijiu”

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For better or worse (no, actually, just for worse), an abominably-tasting booze with an alcohol content from 30% to over 60% is waiting for every foreigner that plans to be more than a tourist in China. And you risk all manner of relational and social faux pas if you mishandle it. It’s a gastronomical landmine in your mouth and bloodstream. Culturally speaking, baijiu basically weaponizes Chinese meals for foreigners, turning dinners into cross-cultural minefields.

If you’re planning to go to China, consider this your much needed heads up about the dreaded 白酒 (bái jiǔ):

Seriously — this post should be part of every NGO’s China orientation process. And there is plenty below for baijiu veterans, I promise. :)

But before we get to the details, let’s consider your options. “There are few things funnier than watching someone drink baijiu for the first time,” and after their initial cultural hazing, different foreigners end up having different ways of dealing with it. These broad categories won’t include everyone, but they’ll sketch out the parameters:

  1. The Fake Teetotallers, who simply refuse to drink — period — usually with some excuse like “I have an allergy” or “It’s against my religion”, and to heck with worries about creating bad feelings and disrespect and cultural inappropriateness and cross-cultural miscommunication. (The ironic thing being that for everyone I’ve known who used the religion excuse, drinking wasn’t actually against their religion but lying was.)
  2. The Eternal Fratboys, who basically get wasted every chance they get and don’t care what the method tastes like, so long as it lets them momentarily escape the fact that their bodies are pushing 30 or 40 but on the inside they’re stuck at 19. (Yes, this is sad and tragic. But you are loved, and there is hope.) Some of the people infected with expatitis could go here as well.
  3. The Cross-Cultural Diehards, who still have not given up hope that we can be culturally appropriate and send warm feelings to our boss/coworkers/neighbours/etc. without getting sloshed like squirrels that couldn’t lay off the rotten Jack-o-Lanterns. Maybe we’re just too idealistic. Maybe our love for cross-cultural challenges outweighs our sense of self-preservation. Maybe we didn’t get enough booze as children so we have a felt-need to rationalize our desire to drink and ‘Chinese culture’ is the greatest excuse ever. Either way, this third option is where you try to drink enough to fulfill your social duties (giving face, etc.) without betraying your personal standards (getting drunk like the aforementioned squirrels, etc.) and/or puking up everything you’d ever eaten in your entire life (more on this later). Many people feel this bio-cultural balancing act is actually impossible, given the current place of baijiu in Chinese culture. But that doesn’t stop us from employing all manner of creative, elaborate techniques in the attempt to do so (which are shared down below).

Now we’re in for a treat. Nankai Rob is the Most Under-Appreciated Genius of the China blogosphere. And he’s just written a 6-part magnum opus on dealing with baijiu. His anecdotes, observations, and road-tested baijiu avoidance strategies provide cultural insight that will introduce you to the baijiu basics and give you a fighting chance at staying (more or less) sober:

A Salute to Baijiu

Part One: One Reason for Baijiu Being the Draught of Satan

I’d like to begin by saying, for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, what baijiu is. Baijiu is alcohol. That I can say for sure. It is also, and I will brook no discussion on this point, the foulest thing ever brewed and willingly consumed by humanity.

Part Two: A Second Reason for Baijiu Being the Draught of Satan

An expensive Scotch, or tequila (yes, tequila; if you don’t believe me, drink a glass of Don Julio), or vodka, is like a perfectly balanced dinner party: one or two personalities are dominant, and the others are represented tastefully but completely. Baijiu is more like a knife fight. Between five inebriated circus clowns. In your living room.

Part Three: Representative Baijiu Experiences 1-2

In the interest of demonstrating the varieties of horrible-ness you can experience with baijiu, I offer up five of my own representative experiences.

Part Four: Representative Baijiu Experiences 3-5

[From #3] That night I threw up everything I’d ever eaten in my entire life. Everything. The egg-salad sandwiches I loved eating in third-grade, the lamb stew I make periodically in Tianjin, the Mexican food I eat whenever I’m in El Paso visiting my parents, EVERYTHING… I learned something fascinating about baijiu while bent over the toilet retching, however, and that is: there isn’t much difference between the taste of baijiu when you’re drinking it or puking it up.

Part 5: How to Look Like a Hero When There’s a Banquet

Few things in official Chinese life are more important than the banquet… everything from simple teacher meetings to festival gatherings are cemented with booze. It’s tradition, and it extends back quite literally thousands of years… Here’s the funny thing about all this: I have yet to meet a Chinese person who enjoys getting hammered at banquets… because it’s cultural, we foreigners are presented with an interesting situation. It’s quite possible to play the “dumb foreigner” card to get out of drinking much (though that won’t work in high-stakes business or politics), but you can also, if you play your cards right, make such an impression on the Chinese people with you that they’ll think you’re a hero.

Part 6: How to Not Get Hammered at a Banquet
Ten ways to get away with drinking less than expected.

You can see our own blogged baijiu adventures under the Baijiu (白酒) topic. Some highlights:

Re-sold Chinese sewer oil hits the news again

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I’ve seen people fishing discarded restaurant oil from the manholes outside restaurants, and every night in Tianjin you can see the trucks making their rounds to all the restaurants, filling up big barrels with used oil. That people illegally sell this oil back to restaurants, grocery stores and street vendors has been an open secret for a long time, but for some reason the State media has decided to make a big deal of it again. From the China Daily: Illegal cooking oil produced on huge scale

For more about “gutter oil”, see:

In case you ever wondered what it’s like to eat BBQ’d silk worm larvae (蚕蛹)

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The carapace is tough but flexible. Biting down causes hot mush to burst out into your mouth. Two more chews and two squirts later it’s finally empty. You manage to down the bug guts in two or three swallows, but the outer shell is the challenging part. It takes a lot of chewing, and the thought of sliding it to the back of your mouth in order to swallow makes you wonder if you’ll gag. Your choice: try to swallow all of it quickly in one go and risk gagging, or chew and chew and chew, swallowing little shredded pieces of it at a time, prolonging the experience. You take the second option, feeling each piece of the exoskeleton slime across the back of your tongue and down your throat. Thankfully it doesn’t have much taste. And without legs and wings, it’s easier to eat than that giant cockroach in Thailand.

You can see more info and pictures of silk worm chrysalis (蚕蛹) here. I heard separately from friends and students that one of these things has the equivalent protein of three eggs.

We love this sidewalk BBQ place because of the 热闹 atmosphere. The wide sidewalks are usually filled with folding tables and stools and diners. This night we had to walk through the kitchen and eat in the back alley because three chéngguǎn were charged with doing nothing but standing on the opposite sidewalk from the afternoon until 12:30am to make sure none of these restaurants put out their tables! I went and complained to them. They were friendly, and said they had to manage that particular road (the restaurant is on the corner of a T-intersection). The other road, literally around the corner in plain view, had tables and stools and the usual illegal street vendors, but these three guys were only watching these particular restaurants on this particular road. All they did was stand there, for hours, looking at the opposite sidewalk. That’s how things work here. They’re the ones that said, Don’t worry, you can eat outside in the back alley.

The blurry, non-flash-or-tripod photo above on the right shows the true colours and lighting and warmth.

To put things in perspective, this place also offers giant (giant!) white snails, bullfrogs, the usual assorted animal organs, and… wait for it… sheep penis on a stick. So all things considered, silk worm larvae are not so far out of one’s comfort zone.

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