Thanksgiving with Chinese characteristics

Last week I was walking home and stopped short when I saw some turkeys running around in the street! The only other time I had heard of turkeys existing in China was when a Peace Corps Volunteer had ordered a turkey to be sent to his home in Sichuan from a Beijing business catering to foreign ex-pats. The turkey arrived the morning of Thanksgiving still alive (unexpectedly!) on his doorstep. So imagine my surprise when I saw these turkeys running around just 2 blocks from my apartment.
There were five turkeys. The owners said they raised them for fun, not to eat. But when I went back this week, only three were left, the other two sold to Americans living in town for just over $50. I am not that committed to turkeys on Thanksgiving to purchase one.

Instead, my friends and I decided to celebrate Thanksgiving in China with a frozen chicken. I like to cook, but I don't really cook much meat, especially not roasts, and especially not roasts in a toaster oven. I saw the workings of a disaster in the making. But my friend Jonathan came all the way from Beijing to help. His help came in handy when it came to defrosting the chicken to find that the head and claw feet were still on the bird.
(Sorry for the graphic details). Aside from be-heading the chicken, we had a few minor incidents involving opening a can of pumpkin pie mix without a can opener and blowing fuses by using the toaster oven too much.

We also found a little mini-keg of black German beer for the special occasion. The problem was the directions for getting the beer out were all in German and the process was not as simple as it looked (so we thought). We thought we had to pump the bottom spout. We each took turns scraping our fingers to pump the keg. But only a small amount would trickle out. At one point, we joked that we would be thankful if we made it through the evening with no trips to the emergency room.

I don't know if anyone has ever used one of these things, but.....
The next day Jonathan, determined to get the rest of the beer out of the keg, figured out there was an air hole on top. No pumping necessary. The beer poured out smoothly.

In any case, we had a great dinner. [Sorry, we could not fit the cooked chicken on the table, but it turned out surprisingly well].
It was a fun holiday in China. But I have to say how nice it will be to be back in the US for the rest of the holiday season. [I will be in CO Dec 16 and 17, then Pittsburgh until New Years-you should know how to find me].

Supermarket Surveying

The last few weeks I've been busy preparing, writing, and re-writing survey questions to ask Chinese consumers about their rice-buying preferences. This weekend the surveying started. I got a group of undergraduate students together to help me and we entered Carrefour, clipboards in hand. Five of us hovered around the rice section and stopped people to ask for two minutes of their time.

I was scared, primarily because I generally hate being on the receiving end of such actions. We got turned down, but we also had people who were generally interested and wanted to talk to us. I was generally amused with how people reacted to me. Some people thought I wanted to import rice to my country so I was asking about the best rice. Others thought we worked for certain sellers, in the store to promote brands (this does happen quite frequently and 2 of the rice sellers for different brands there offered to help us out-we declined). And of course, I had a mother who took the opportunity to ask me to teach her child English.

I think some people stopped to find out about me. One gentleman I approached answered all of my questions; in between answers he asked my assistant about me. The conversation went something like this:

• Me: When you are buying rice, how important is the appearance of rice?
• Him: Very important. (To my assistant): Is she here to study or to travel?
• Me: And taste?
• Him: Very important. (To my assistant): Is she Russian? (never mind that he was already told I was an American PhD student doing research on Chinese rice).
• Me: Nutrition?
• Him: Somewhat important. (To my assistant): Her Chinese is good, where did she study?
• Me: Does the price matter?
• Him: The price is important as long as it reflects the quality of the rice. (To my assistant): Is she used to the weather here?
• Me: Do you think whether or not the rice is 'green' rice is an important factor in buying rice?
• Him: Green rice is very important. (To my assistant): Does she eat rice?

And so on.

I'm not completely satisfied with the surveys because there is only so much information you can get in a quick supermarket survey. I know the responses are quite limited and I hope to do follow-up, in-depth focus groups based on the survey results. But I do feel good that I actually collected data. I've been here for a while, talking to people about rice, reading about rice, and just thinking about rice. They have all been very important parts of the research process, but it feels good to have the beginnings of concrete data in my hands.

In other news, China announced greater food safety regulations on Thursday. It was in the news and in newspapers all over the place here. Is it a step in the right direction for China? Yes. Does it get to the root problem of China's food safety regulation and enforcement? No. Am I skeptical that things will get better as a result? Yes. Maybe cautiously optimistic is a good term to describe my reaction. Very cautiously.

Cooking

Two weeks ago, if you would have asked me if I cooked in China, I would have said not much. Its not that I didn't like to cook-its one of my favorite things to do at the end of a day. In fact, I learned to love cooking by living in China the first time. But I haven't cooked much this time because food here is so easy and simple and fast and cheap and good. I can walk outside my building and go in any direction and 20 minutes later I will be full and probably paid about a dollar, if even that. Plus, I have not had a lot of cooking supplies in my kitchen.

Moreover, I am here to study food, so I should eat the local food, right? A few times, I have gone into some kitchens of nicer restaurants to watch the cooks. I tell them who I am and what I am doing here and why I want to watch and take pictures. They don't necessarily have much to offer about quality rice, but I still think its fun to see how Chinese kitchens operate, as I have worked in my fair share of US restaurant kitchens.

Over the past week and a half, however, cooking has kept me busy every night. I've been slowly accumulating more cooking supplies and shopping for new ingredients, and constantly coming up with new ideas of things to cook. I just got a little toaster oven that can bake and roast things. It pretty exciting. Ovens are rare here. Having a double burner gas stove is about as high class as it gets. Now I have to look for baking supplies to do some real baking....

I think I attribute my new excitement for cooking to a number of reasons.

1. Its getting dark really early these day and venturing outside after 4 pm when its dark is kind of depressing. Along with the dark, it is cold and windy and snowy and icy (they do not use salt here and the sidewalks are already covered in ice).
2. I've had my share of oily, salty Chinese food. I feel bad saying this because its what I miss most about China when I am in the US, but its been 5 months straight of Chinese food and I am ready for a break.
3. My friend in Harbin, Melissa, helps me. She does not have a kitchen herself so she comes over and we cook and listen to music and drink wine and watch episodes of Sex and the City. Then we drink coffee and do work on our respective MacBooks and talk about things that geography grad students talk about.
   
4. I just read a memoir by Julia Child about time she spent in France learning to cook (thanks, Abby H!). Reading it reminded me how fun cooking can be. Last week I asked the group of agriculture graduate students I give small lectures to once a week what they want me to talk about next week and they told me they want to hear more about American food. I thought of Julia Child's cooking demonstrations. How fun it would be to do a demonstration! But it would be a lot of work, too so I may have to hold off on that idea.
   

Cooking here is creative because ingredients are not always easy to find. So sometimes I have to substitute things. Its fun and the results are always good. Maybe this is a phase but I think that creative cooking will get me through the winter here. I'm ready for hibernation. Today the official sunset time was 4 pm, which means by 3 the sky is starting to get dark. And it keeps getting earlier. Today the high was 21, low was 0. And its supposed to get colder this week.

But its OK because I have fun research which keeps me going. Seriously, I've had a few people tell me recently that my mood changes when I start talking about my research. Its true! I get excited when I talk about my research. But that might be a problem because it means I am not excited when I'm not talking about my research? I might have to work on that...