Food, food, and more food. Part I

Friends, family, and colleagues,

As promised, I give you a glimpse into what our meals look like for the first week here.

Breakfast
Since we're in the hotel, we have a continental-style breakfast served every morning. There's an impressive spread of food which ranges from breakfast meats like the ones found in the US to fried rice, sauteed rice noodles, fried eggs, steamed rolls. I typically wash this down with coffee and milk. I couldn't find sugar anywhere, maybe I'll come back without a sugar addiction! There's also an assortment of fruit juices, including watermelon juice. This has since become my go-to fruit juice.

Lunch and Dinner

For lunch yesterday, we ate in one of the back-rooms at this showcase building for JAAS. It reminded me of the Philadelphia flower show set-up with a lot of greenery, flowers, and neat walkways. Dr. Li mentioned that it was a popular spot for weddings. This was a massive convention center which had a translucent roof to let in natural light. I snapped a couple of photos of the area. This facility was much larger than it looks.

The center had their own brewery!

Nearly all the large meals are served in the back of the building in a large, private room with a private bathroom. We sit at a large round table with a giant turntable or "Lazy Susan" in the middle. Below, there's a photo of the typical setup. That food is placed on the glass platform that can then be rotated around until the desired food is in front of you. Every place we have eaten uses chopsticks, though someone often comes over with a fork and knife for me. I'm proud to say I haven't needed either of them yet.

It is uncommon to drink alcohol during lunch, but we had the chance to try some "black beer" which had the flavor of a stout with the consistency of a lager. It was very tasty. I'm fairly certain that it was made in the on-site brewery, but I didn't ask. Additionally, we had green tea, which is served at nearly every meal. We also had this juice which is made out of corn, and it tastes just like liquid cornmeal. I wasn't a huge fan of it, so I stuck with my beer (黑啤酒).

Typical spread of food
I want to start out by saying that at every meal, there is a lot of food. I haven't eaten this much since my first year at Cornell. Seriously, there's a lot of food at every meal. I might skip a meal just so my body knows what hungry feels like again.

There is typically a rice dish at every meal, whether it's white rice, fried rice, or even a rice noodle. The fried rice here is very flavorful, and isn't coated in salt like what'd you'd get at an American Chinese restaurant. I was told that in southern China, it's common to have rice at every meal whereas northern Chinese eat more wheat. At every dinner, a typical dish is fish soup, which is made from a fish that we think is called the pufferfish in English. We're still ironing out the details with the language barrier. I'm not a huge fan of fish, but the soup is very good. One note about the food is that it is flavored with a lot of spices, so instead of relying on salt or sugar, they impart flavors which are complex and satisfying.

Fish soup

Additionally, there's always a beef dish of some sort. There's also a pork dish. Often, there are multiple dishes of each, either served cold or hot. There's also a lot of vegetables available. At each meal there are no fewer than 5 different vegetable dishes. These can range from string beans, bok choy, potatoes, corn on the cob, soybeans, to greens. Yams are also very popular here. I'd be hard-pressed to cook a meal half as large as they do here. Another popular dish is black fungus. This is a black jelly fungus which is served spicy and is a bit rubbery. Overall, the texture is a bit different, but the flavor is excellent.

Dessert is usually consists of fresh fruit. This includes watermelon, muskmelon (commonly called cantaloupe), kiwi, and cherry or grape tomatoes. Both Dr. Paret and I are impressed with how sweet the fruit is, especially the melon. That's what the breeding institute prides itself on; the quality of varieties it puts out is much more important than the yield that we emphasize in the US.


Given that we've only been here a few days, I'm sure I'll have more to write on the subject. I apologize in advance for not having more photos of the food itself. As someone who finds it annoying when people photograph their food, it's difficult for me to bring myself to do the same. But, for the sake of the blog and my readers, I'll make an effort to include more pictures.

Mason