Free Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories by Lorraine Clissold Page A

offer,’ he said. ‘So we’ve got to forget the tofu and vegetables and think about rich meals made of meat. ’
    Wouldn’t it be better, I tried to suggest, to eat tasty and satisfying meals every day of the week? Could they not promote a diet that would make nutritious food a way of life instead of an optional extra? No one took me seriously; for a start they didn’t believe such a phenomenon was possible and in any case their target was only two to three meals per week per household.
    Multi-dish eating
    The Chinese diet doesn’t countenance overindulgence, but it doesn’t have ‘healthy options’ either. People eat well at every meal, never making do with a couple of snacks and one main eating occasion. One great advantage of the Chinese style of eating is its multi-dish approach. Chinese meals do not have a centrepiece: the dishes arrive on the table in random order so that everyone can take a little from each of a selection of different foods. The variety of foods relieves the diners from the burden of choice and their palates from boredom. It is a relaxed and stress-free way of eating, with everyone using chopsticks to select tasty morsels from the various dishes. A Chinese table always promises satisfaction yet it is almost impossible to count calories by the chopstickfull.
    In China no single ingredient is ever served in large quantities; the preference is always for a large number of different foods served in manageable amounts. Rather than increase the quantity of any particular dish, a Chinese chef will add another element to a meal. Cold dishes and stir-fries are usually served on small dinner plates or in shallow soup or cereal bowls, which show off the chef ’s exquisite knife work, rather than in large, irregularly shaped containers which would hide their qualities from view. The table might also feature a simmering tray and a clay pot, and always a big bowl of soup. By taking a little from each of the dishes the diner soon feels satiated. It is bad manners to take too much of any one dish and good manners to try a little of everything. This enables all the diners to consume a feast without feeling uncomfortable.
    Children who are brought up to eat in this fashion are never overwhelmed by a mound of food. A child is much more likely to experiment with a small tasting of a new ingredient when everyone else is digging in and there is no pressure. In this way they learn to listen to their own appetites and so do not fall into the ‘American portion’ trap, where larger quantities promise more satisfaction, and which, when combined with a lifelong habit of ‘clearing the plate’, can lead to eating too much of the wrong things in adulthood. There is, incidentally, no concept of ‘children’s food’ in Asia, although many of the colourful and interesting dishes appeal to a youngster’s sense of adventure.
    Eat promiscuously
    In my journey into Chinese food culture I inevitably moved away from the type of Chinese dishes favoured by ‘foreigners’ towards those enjoyed by native Chinese people. Sometimes even I found myself outside of my comfort zone. Yet the more I ate, firstly in terms of quantity but most importantly in terms of variety, the better I felt. To really benefit from the Chinese approach you too need to be adventurous and accept that you cannot limit your diet to the foods you prefer.
    The Chinese poet Huang Ting Jian, writing in the eleventh century, listed three bad attitudes: ‘To be greedy for something palatable, to shun what is unpalatable and to be oblivious to the source of what one eats. ’ He could also have said: ‘Don’t be fussy and squeamish or always choose what is tasty and convenient. ’ Either way his voice would most likely have fallen on deaf ears in today’s society.
    Our dietary preferences are strongly defined by cultural boundaries that we are all too often blissfully unaware of, especially as ‘foreign foods’ in our own countries are cleverly adapted