The Edible Oil Crisis: Do We Really Need So Much Oil? | Kouzi’s Foodie Perspective
I. A History Without Stir-Frying
“No stir-frying? How do you eat, then?”
With my mouth, obviously.
All animals eat with their mouths, but humans are the only species to eat stir-fried food, and the Chinese are the nation that loves it most. Yet, even for the Chinese, who are perhaps the most passionate and skilled at the art, the history of stir-frying spans only a few hundred years. To borrow a common framing: if the history of animals eating were condensed into 24 hours, stir-frying would only appear after 23:59.
One and a half million years ago, food met fire. Fire allowed humanity to leave behind the era of eating raw meat and blood, ushering in a new epoch of civilisation and biological evolution. Regardless of the ingredient, everything went into the fire. Some were tossed directly into the flames (fire-cooking), others were roasted via a natural medium (stone-cooking). Later came pottery (ceramic-cooking), where heating with water became ‘boiling’ and heating with steam became ‘steaming’. The Chinese characters for various cooking methods—smoking, steaming, searing, simmering, braising, charring, boiling—all trace back to the Seal script, where the character for ‘fire’ sits at the bottom; it only changed to four dots with the advent of Clerical script. The era of the Clerical script, which introduced the age of stroke-based characters, was also a time of great innovation in ceramic cooking.
On that note, I must do a bit of debunking. The famous dish ‘Fish Stuffed with Mutton’ involves dicing mutton, winter bamboo shoots, and mushrooms, stir-frying them, stuffing them into a fish, wrapping it in pork caul fat, and then pan-frying or deep-frying. It is claimed to be Yi Ya’s creation. However, the pottery of Yi Ya’s time was incapable of stir-frying fillings, let alone pan-frying or deep-frying; he could only roast the fish.
Bronze vessels existed then, but were primarily ritual objects. Their rarity at the time was comparable to Yuri Gagarin’s “Vostok 1 spacecraft” in 1961. If aliens were to study Earth’s civilisation and conclude, based on archaeological finds, that Yi Ya deep-fried that mutton-stuffed fish in a bronze pot, a foodie can only respond with a sceptical ‘heh’.
Another contemporary case involving fish is Zhuan Zhu’s ‘roasted fish’ (recorded in the *Records of the Grand Historian* and other texts). Because Zhuan Zhu specialised in roasted fish on Lake Tai, the Jiangzhe region still regards him as the ‘ancestor of chefs’.
Another anecdote involving Yi Ya is ‘Yi Ya cooking his son’—he killed his four-year-old son to feed to Duke Huan of Qi, using the method of steaming.
II. Iron pots were also a rarity
In *Water Margin*, the heroes ‘eat meat in great chunks and drink wine from great bowls’. How was this meat prepared?
When Shi Jin befriended the three leaders of Mount Erlong, ‘…he chose three fat sheep, boiled them, and placed them in large boxes to be delivered by two farmhands’. Boiled whole sheep—now that’s a ‘great chunk’.
When Lu Zhishen sought refuge on Mount Wutai, ‘he caught a scent of meat, walked into the clearing, and saw a dog boiling in a sand pot by the wall’—that was one large sand pot.
Once again, a bit of debunking: the various ‘Liangshan Banquets’ seen today are later fabrications. Any stir-fried dishes are anachronisms; sand pots may be large, but you cannot stir-fry in them.
The steamed buns sold by Wu Dalang are exactly that: steamed. *Dongjing Meng Hua Lu* mentions ‘stir-fried chicken, mutton, and rabbit’, but in *Water Margin* (a Ming dynasty story about the Song), there is no mention of ‘stir-frying’. Instead, we often see ‘meals, soups, and vegetables’. Top-tier foodies of the Song dynasty, like Su Dongpo, served guests wheat rice with vegetables and meat cooked together in one pot—steamed. His famous ‘Dongpo Pork’ is a classic of slow-simmering in a sand pot…
While the Song dynasty saw the emergence of iron pots, they were not yet widespread. Back then, an iron pot capable of stir-frying was practically the evolution of Gagarin’s Vostok 1 into Elon Musk’s Starship. The Liangshan heroes ruled as kings in a lawless frontier; spring breezes didn’t reach them, nor did the law, and high-end ‘fashion’ items like iron pots certainly didn’t. At most, they had large sand pots for boiling whole sheep or dogs, or steaming human-meat buns.
Even into the Ming dynasty, iron pots retained a status of prestige. When Zheng He sailed to the Western Oceans, the state gifts he brought for various countries included the famous ‘Guang pots’—iron pots produced in Guangdong.
As a foodie, it’s hard to watch Liangshan plays where characters sit before a table of stir-fries with total sincerity, and it’s especially unbearable to see fried peanuts on the table. Today’s popular drinking snack not only requires an iron pot to fry but also requires peanuts—which didn’t enter China until the Ming dynasty.
Oil has existed for ages; China’s history of oil pressing is long. It was first used for lubricating axles and lighting (‘used both as axle grease and as candles’, *Qimin Yaoshu*, Vol. 5). By the Song dynasty, Shen Kuo mentioned in a rather novel tone: ‘Now Northerners love to fry things in sesame oil; regardless of what it is, they fry it in oil.’ Shen Kuo, a native of Hangzhou, had spent his youth stationed on the northern border; this remark comes from his *Dream Pool Essays* written during his later years in retirement at Mengxi Garden in Zhenjiang.
By the Qing dynasty, the Jianghuai region flourished. In the households of Ningguo and Rongguo, there were pots, there was oil, and there was stir-frying. In Chapter 61 of *Dream of the Red Chamber*, during the clash between the cook and Siqi, the private dishes of the young ladies are mentioned: ‘Sister Qingwen wants sow-thistle’… ‘Meat isn’t good, tell her to stir-fry some wheat gluten, and use less oil’… ‘The Third Miss and Bao-girl happened to agree they wanted some oil-and-salt stir-fried goji sprouts.’—Sow-thistle with wheat gluten and salted goji sprouts, presented lightly.
When Granny Liu visited the Ningguo estate for the second time, there was the famous ‘eggplant shreds’ (qie xiang): ‘The peel is removed, leaving only the flesh, which is cut into tiny shreds and fried in chicken oil…’ Frying is essentially the same as stir-frying; both use oil as a medium for heating in sturdy metal cookware. The difference is that frying uses more oil and higher temperatures, producing a more flavourful Maillard reaction that makes one salivate. Such extravagance was only found in the Jia household; a moderately prosperous rural family like Granny Liu’s had never heard of it.
Never mind Granny Liu from two or three hundred years ago—even my own grandmother a hundred years ago had an iron pot in every house, but stir-frying wasn’t a daily occurrence. My grandmother ran a small business and wasn’t poorly off, but stir-frying was reserved for festivals or when guests arrived.
III. The problem lies with refined oil
The most important part of stir-frying is neither the “frying” nor the “vegetables”, but the “oil”—excessive amounts of refined oil heated to high temperatures.
The refining process of oils, which claims to “remove the coarse to keep the essence”, is much like the processing of refined flour and rice: it is a process of stripping away the essence and leaving behind the dross.
Fats are essential nutrients for the human body, particularly a necessity for brain function. Modern medicine subdivides them into Omega-3, Omega-6, Omega-9, and so on—all sounding very sophisticated and high-end. However, throughout millions of years of human evolution, our health relied not on instruments and indices, but on the natural, healthy proportions of fats found in whole foods.
Gourmands like me love nuts, yet we are always reminded that “while nuts are good, they are too oily and should be eaten in moderation.” This sounds correct, but is actually counterproductive—the problem for modern people is not too many nuts, but an excess of refined oils. Restricting nuts is like chasing the wrong culprit. I ignore such “well-meaning” advice entirely: by avoiding stir-frying, eating out, and rejecting processed products, there is no room for refined oils to enter; thus, I can eat nuts whenever I please.
IV. Barefoot on the Path to Self-Rescue
Yet some ignore all this, simply setting off at a run. Don’t try to frighten people with claims that “running without shoes damages the feet”. Professor Lieberman of Harvard, an expert in human evolutionary biology, notes: “Long before shoes were invented, humans ran fast and well.” Faced with exorbitantly priced, fancy trainers, Lieberman leaves them in the dust: to hell with shoes.
I first learned of Lieberman a few years ago while I was living a “half-farmer, half-X” life in Taiwan, growing rice and running food courses. Essentially, I was getting paid to take people out to eat and drink, chatting freely about the details and history of food from my perspective as a gourmand. To my surprise, one student was delighted, saying I was on a par with a certain barefoot-running foreigner, though that man used human evolutionary history as his basis. Being somewhat uninformed, I only then discovered Lieberman; later, among the books I brought back from Taiwan was his *The Story of the Human Body*.
Lieberman believes that the human body, having emerged from a long jungle era, was suddenly plunged into the upheavals following the Industrial Revolution. Unable to adapt to the environment of modern civilisation, it can only respond with disease. If the history of human evolution were compressed into 24 hours, modern life—the way we live after the 23rd hour and 59th minute—has made humans unprecedentedly long-lived, yet unprecedentedly miserable.
Lieberman is the “barefoot man who outran the shod”; he is ahead of the pack on the path to self-rescue.
To cope with health problems, modern people take medication and supplements to replenish various nutrients. But what we truly need is to re-examine our dietary structure—the conventional assumption of using oil for daily stir-frying is not that reliable. Thus, while cooking oil is under scrutiny, as a gourmand, I have the confidence to choose *not* to stir-fry, whether between “this fish” and “that flower”, or between deep-frying and quick-frying.
Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations in this article are by the author
Editor: Wang Hao