Oct. 2020; Let food be thy medicine

“If you eat this, it will bring you good luck for the next year.” One of the many things that stand out here as different to my own western upbringing, is just how superstitious many people can be. If you’ve lived here for any amount of time you’ll bound to have been witness to the festival/holiday+relevant food ritual. Eating dumplings for **** day. Mooncake at Mid-Autumn. Along with the shared popular opinion of foods and festivals and their associated supposed “luck,” people are also seemingly an endless source of knowledge about what’s healthy and what’s not. “Eat this, good for healthy.” “This good for lady.” “This make man strong, you know” (wink wink.) 

As I’ve mentioned before, being a non meat eater here it can be incredibly hard to find anything suitable when you’re out for lunch or dinner or whatever. Even when the menu item may be just a vegetable dish, more often than not it’s cooked with some form of animal fat to add taste. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked and double checked with the wait staff at a restaurant that a dish has no meat, no animal oil in its ingredients, only to be running a marathon to the nearest toilet half an hour later. (after close to 20 years of no meat products, my body quickly rejects anything like that, and decides what’s inside needs to be outside ASAP. Trust me, there’s been some hilarious-dash-horrific things happened over the years you really don’t need to hear about.) It pains me to say it, but (apart from living in Germany) I find food the hardest aspect of living in China. Germany was even harder. People love meat there like I’ve never seen before. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, meat meat meat. I was even at a restaurant once for a company dinner meeting thing, and the restaurant had absolutely no vegetables. Zero. They had to buy me some French fries from the place across the street. When people there found out I didn’t eat meat they would look at me like I just told them I murdered my entire family and hid the bodies in the furniture. I was told countless times that I was the first non meat eater they’d ever met. (But I was in a tiny town on the South East border, not somewhere fancy like Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich.)

Over the years here, it seems people are often fascinated with the concept of not eating animals. When people ask why, and I give my reasons, the answers I’ve received go from bemusing to ridiculous. “I can’t stop eating meat.” (Yes, you could if you wanted or had to. Say you find yourself trapped on an island ala Castaway. Would you suddenly implode from no pork dumplings? No, you would not.) “I don’t like vegetables.” (Humans are omnivores, you are not a lion. Your body is designed to eat green stuff too.) And my personal favourite, “if I don’t eat meat I’ll die.” Yes, truly, I’ve heard that on more than one occasion. Guess what, I’m pretty sure meat eaters die too. And actually, sooner than those that don’t eat meat, but we’ll get to that later.

The expression “you are what you eat” seems so incredibly simple, yet most people fail to grasp its obvious understanding. Your body, your organs, grow, regenerates, improves or fails, because of what you put into it. That’s it. We all know that if you put 20 cigarettes of smoke into your lungs every day, sooner or later they’re gonna be kaput and you’re gonna be on a one way trip to the boneyard. If you down a bottle of Jack a day guess what, you’re gonna turn grey and your liver decides it’s time for a long earned vacation. But somehow we consciously choose to ignore the correlation between our food, what goes in our mouth, and our long term health. Now I know people here work a lot, as do many people around the world. The expense of living in a first-tier city, the pressures of work and kids and family and so on. And so I can, up to an extent, understand the popularity of ordering food for delivery to your home instead of spending the time and energy of buying produce and cooking for yourself. Fresh produce is not cheap, going to the shops and buying it is heavy and bothersome (but you can order from dingdong or pupu or whatever), and many people have no idea of how to actually cook for themselves. (a very separate social issue; ask any 50 year old if they could cook for themselves when they were 15 and they’ll say yes. Ask the same to any 20 year old now and guess the answer…) But let’s look at the facts; these food places are only really concerned with making money by selling you tasty stuff to shovel in that big hole in your face, and have no concern over how good or bad it is for you. Our bodies naturally crave sugar, salt and fat, so guess what most of these places chuck liberally into their offerings? You got it. But we know this already. This weeks Sunday scribble is absolutely not intended as some kind of preachy lecture about turning vegan or saving the planet, in fact I massively dislike anybody who preaches on about anything. Preaching on just gets peoples backs up and makes them want to do exactly what you’re asking them not to do. But let’s say here’s a few ideas to think about, food for thought so to speak, about the reasons and benefits of why we might want to consider changing our diet a little….

Obesity is a global issue, and guess which country is ranking number 1 for childhood obesity? Yep, unfortunately ours. According to an ongoing report by the world health organisation, over 20% of under 18’s here are considered severely overweight or obese. By 2030 around 30% are forecast to be the same. One issue is that many people think fat kids are cute (hence the disgusting videos of little beach ball infants on DouYin eating like they’ve just broke out of Auschwitz.) And another is that often the grandparents are left to look after the little ones as the parents slave away at work, and the oldies treat the little sugar monsters with candy, crisps, KFC and anything else their growing stomachs desire. I swear that when I first arrived in Shenzhen 10 years ago I very rarely saw an overweight kid. Now everyday I see red faced 10 year olds with a waistline bigger than my own, who struggle to walk more than 15 minutes without taking a rest and glugging a coke. I wish parents with overweight kids take some time to read up and educate themselves about the serious health problems associated with poor diets as their children are growing and their bodies are forming. Organs grow, brains grow. Do you want theirs to be made of broccoli or burgers? If you love your kid, feed it like you do.

*brief side note; I’ve never been one of those people that harp on about the way animals are mistreated in farming and slaughter. You can find all that out for yourself, if you choose to. But as a non meat eater, for several reasons, I have to mention it’s benefits, and the connections of eating meat to our health and overall wellbeing.

Unless you’ve spent your life as a hermit in a cave or you were raised by wolves, you know our planet is basically knackered (almost) to the point of no repair. And what can we blame for this? Ourselves, completely and totally. Some things are hard to change, cars and transportation, factories overly producing crap we don’t need but feel we have to buy. But one thing we can all, today, right now, change to improve the world for ourselves and the world for our children’s generation and their children’s generation, is our eating habits. Yep, it’s as simple as that. It might surprise you to learn that over 50 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture. Eating meat causes almost 40 per cent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, ships and planes in the world combined. Now you may understandably be doubting these numbers, so go check on the wonderful worldwideweb thing and read up. We know we are burning the worlds forests for plantations, but do we think that’s for sweetcorn or carrots for us? Nope, largely it’s for soy beans to make animal feed. (not tofu or soy milk for us unfortunately.) I would never say everyone should stop eating meat, but cutting down somewhat will only improve the planets environment. If you love the planet we all share, treat it like you do.

So here’s the main one; Our own, personal health. So maybe you don’t have kids to care about, and maybe you don’t give a toss about the world we’re destroying at a rather terrifying rate, and you don’t give two hoots about animal welfare, but you must at least care a little about that soft squishy thing you’re walking around in. If you want to keep that thing in good shape for the coming years, guess what can inarguably help you lead a healthier and longer life? Yep, cut down on anything with a face. Let’s break this down a little;

The worlds number one killer, heart disease. The risk of developing heart disease among meat-eaters is 50 per cent higher than it is among non meat eaters. Truth, fact, like it or not, that’s just the way it is.

The big-C; Cancer; Non meat eaters are about 40 percent less likely to get cancer than non-vegetarians, regardless of other risks such as smoking, body size, and socioeconomic status. Fact.

Stroke; Because meat cholesterol causes blockages in blood vessels, it’s no surprise that it leads to strokes. Consumption of red meat in particular increases the risk of a stroke by 47 percent.

Add to this list diabetes, alzheimers disease, arthritis, cellulites (caused by hormones in meat), premature ageing, acne, skin problems (yep), kidney stones, E.Coli, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalitis), trichinosis from pork, salmonella from poultry, scrapie from lamb and mutton, and a whole lot more. Now eating meat doesn’t entirely cause most of these, but cutting back on meat will surely help to lessen the chances. Feel free to doubt all this and go find out for yourself, the internet is your friend. And while you’re there, check to see how many diseases are caused by an animal free diet. (spoiler alert; it’s none, absolutely zero.)

For some reason we associate fat and sugar with unhealthiness, but meat with health. Has anyone ever questioned why non meat eaters live, on average, 5 to 10 years longer than non meat eaters? Many people fall back on the misinformed and ignorant argument of “but we need meat for nutrition.” Nope, wrong, incorrect. We can get nearly 100% of everything we need from plants, nuts, vegetables, beans, tofu and the like. Protein, iron, zinc and calcium, we can all get from non animal sources. There are some things we simply cannot get from those, like vitamin B12, D3 and carnosine, but one tiny supplement pill a day can deliver us with all those and more. (Personally, I’ve never taken any form of supplement.) We eat meat because we like it, and we were raised eating it. We somehow blindly disassociate meat with animals and their (mostly horrific) lives. Eating meat is normal, not eating meat is weird. Or perhaps that should be the other way round… Eating meat is a choice, and not a necessity for survival.

This is too big of a subject to do more than barely scratch the surface of, but I implore you to do this; educate yourself on what you consume. Our bodies are our temples, and the world is our home. I can only talk about my experience, and after being asked so many times by others it’s clear that some people want to know more. So this is me; Some people stop eating meat because of the environment, some because of health reasons. Mine was simply because I love animals, and I can’t justifiably let them live and die in such a terribly inhumane way, just for me to stuff my face with them and shit them out. I stopped eating meat 19 years ago, and in that time I’ve never been sick or seriously ill. Never. I’ve had an upset stomach plenty of times, as mentioned earlier, but apart from that I’m feeling no different than when I was 25. Nothing hurts, nothing aches. I’ve been to the hospital 3 times in 20 years, twice for injuries and once for food poisoning. I never get headaches (but damn I do get hangovers.) I sleep around 6 hours a night (or less) and I don’t nap in the daytime. I have breakfast possibly twice a year (If I’m in a nice hotel and it’s too good to resist.) Now I’m not saying anyone should be like me, we all have our own way to get through the day. But if you love your kids, the planet, animals at all, or value your own health, there’s changes we could all make for the better. And the easiest way to improve our world, ourselves, and our children’s future, is right there on our dinner plate. It’s really that simple.