There’s nothing like a snowy day to make me what to drink coffee and write a blog post.
My farming travels have been somewhat limited and my recent travels to China were not to visit a farm but to visit my brother, sister-in-law and little niece (yes, they moved to China and had a baby-they are tough people!). I was only there for a week, but you can’t be in a country without eating, so I guess that gives me some credibility.
China has this funny combination of being a first world with third world characteristics. It’s a rising power in the world but sanitation is poor, the masses live in cramped spaces, and manufacturing is a major part of their economy. One of the first things my brother told me was to not drink the water. Do NOT drink the water, he said, only bottled water. Duly noted. The second thing he told me was no fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s a little bit of a mystery to me, and I think him, why exactly there is a risk to eating fresh fruits and vegetables. The reason was bacteria-I was risking various intestinal diseases-but what I mean is how did the bacteria get there? We’re not entirely certain, and I think there would have to be a mass investigation of it to find out, but I think the general cause would be a low understanding and application of what is generally considered sanitary.
China is a place of kind, friendly people who have a much smaller personal bubble both physically and socially. I had expected to need to clutch my purse at all times, but instead I found that I was a bit safer than I would feel even in the States. And even my little niece didn’t seem to be in much danger with these friendly, curious people (many hadn’t ever seen white people and even fewer had seen a white baby.) After a long walk at a tourist spot, my sister-in-law and I struggled to get a cab only to have two young Chinese girls flag one down, and without spoken communication (most do not know English) waved us over to get in. But as friendly as they are, they have less need for personal space because they are used to being packed in as tight as sardines and there are few taboos as a result. It wasn’t uncommon to need to step around small puddles and bits of stool even within public buildings. This is because the children wear something called “split pants” where in public they simply need to squat and go. No diaper needed. This may not be as big of a deal if it weren’t in such crowded city conditions where there is more of a chance of them polluting the surroundings. But they are used to dirty conditions. My brother was even witness to a janitor using the same mop to clean out the hole-in-the-ground toilets on the floor, spreading any kind of fecal matter all over the ground. But the ground isn’t the only unclean thing.
The air was horrendous. Everything that you hear about China’s pollution problem is true. Approximately half the time I was there I could look directly at the sun. Not due to normal overcast clouds, but because of the smog, which would drift in and out depending on the weather-if it was windy, rainy or the like. The sun on some days was less brilliant and more tolerable to the eyes than a lamp covered by a shade; simply a distant light-colored disk in the sky. My brother had an app on his phone giving him the air quality rating for the day. Quite often it was hazardous or dangerous and it wasn’t uncommon to see people walking around with breathing masks on. Although I was surprised more people didn’t all things considered.
Everything was crowded, nothing was truly sanitary and even the pets on pet street (self explanatory-a street where you buy pets) were crowded into uncomfortable, small cages. The friendly, kind people of China are unfortunately used to crowded, unsanitary conditions. All things considered, it only makes sense that eating anything uncooked and not in a package might be considered generally unwise.
Even with the lack of sanitation and terrible air pollution you couldn’t complain about the food. While farms in America have turned into big homogenous business, often producing and offering a small range of fruits, vegetables and meats, farms in China are still very much small time family business. I did no interviews and research, but I can only assume this lends itself to huge diversity in produce. When farming isn’t all run and managed by the same company, your chances of diversity go up because people will more than likely produce a wider range of products. While in America you’d be hard pressed to find types of produce outside of what is generally offered at the grocery store, in China diversity seems a little more prime-and the produce is fairly inexpensive. On the negative end, China is low on regulating what might get sprayed on food (bean sprouts are carcinogenic) and also seem to use some old methods of genetically modifying plants by sending the seeds to outer space where they get blasted by radiation and come home with different characteristics. A quick Google search only turned up old articles, the most recent one from 5 years ago, but according to my brother, the practice hasn’t stopped. Apparently they monitor the plants to see which have shown improved characteristics and then put them into use.
All in all the experience left me wishing for more small time farmers, but grateful for whatever weak regulations we have for protecting the environment from post-apocalyptic clouds of smog and blatant carcinogenic sprays on bean sprouts. Sometimes you never know how much better or worse something could be until you see it. There were both positive and negative take-aways from China’s dirty, diverse food system. The difference between diversity and monotony, cleanliness and uncleanliness, and bad and worse pollution problems.
The Denver Adventure 