Amid the Cooking Oil Crisis, Do We Really Need to Eat That Much Oil? | Kouzi’s Foodie Views
I. No History of Stir-Frying
“No stir-frying? Then how do you eat your meals?”
“With my mouth, obviously.”
All animals eat with their mouths, but humans are the only species that consume stir-fried food, and the Chinese are the people most devoted to it. Yet even for the Chinese, who cherish stir-frying above all else and excel at it, the practice is barely a few centuries old. To borrow a familiar analogy: if the history of animals consuming food were compressed into a single day, stir-frying would only make its appearance after 23:59.
A million and a half years ago, food met fire. Fire delivered humanity from eating raw flesh and blood, launching a new age of civilisation and physical evolution. Whatever the ingredient, it all went into the flames. It was either tossed in directly to burn (direct-fire cooking), or cooked through a natural medium like heated stones (stone cooking). Later came pottery (pottery cooking), with water-based heating called “boiling” and steam-based heating called “steaming”. Trace the Chinese characters for cooking methods—such as smoking, steaming, simmering, frying, roasting, and boiling—back to seal script, and they all feature the “fire” radical at the bottom, which only evolved into four dots with the advent of clerical script. The era of stroke-based characters begun by clerical script was also an age of relentless innovation in pottery cooking.
This calls for a bit of culinary debunking. The celebrated modern dish “Lamb Concealed in a Fish” is said with great certainty to have been invented by Yi Ya. It involves dicing lamb, winter bamboo shoots and shiitake mushrooms, stir-frying the mixture, stuffing it into a fish cavity, wrapping it in pork caul fat, and then pan-frying or deep-frying. Yet in Yi Ya’s era, pottery vessels were simply unsuited to stir-frying fillings, let alone pan-frying or deep-frying. The only viable method for cooking fish at the time was grilling.
Bronze vessels did exist by then, but they were primarily used for ritual purposes. Their rarity in that era was akin to Yuri Gagarin’s “Vostok 1 spacecraft” in 1961. Should extraterrestrials one day piece together Earth’s history and deduce from unearthed artefacts that Yi Ya deep-fried that lamb-stuffed fish in a bronze pot, culinary enthusiasts will simply have to shake their heads in bemusement.
Another famous culinary tale from the same period involving fish is Zhuan Zhu’s “grilled fish” – which, as the name suggests, was indeed grilled fish (recorded in Sima Qian’s *Records of the Grand Historian* in the biographies of the Assassins and the House of Wu, as well as in the contemporary Han dynasty text *Wu Zhao Chunqiu* by Zhao Ye). Because Zhuan Zhu specialised in preparing grilled fish around Lake Tai, he is still revered across the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions as the forefather of cooks.
Another notorious anecdote involving Yi Ya is “Yi Ya Cooks His Son”, in which he killed his own four-year-old child to serve to Duke Huan of Qi. The cooking method employed was steaming.
II. Iron Woks Were Also a Rarity
The heroes of *Water Margin* are famed for “gobbling meat in great chunks and downing wine from massive bowls”. But how exactly was that meat prepared?
When Shi Jin forges an alliance with the three chieftains of Erlong Mountain, the text notes: “…they selected three fat sheep, boiled them whole, packed them into large wooden boxes, and dispatched two farmhands to deliver the gift.” Boiling sheep by the whole number certainly counts as substantial fare.
When Lu Zhishen takes refuge at Mount Wutai, the narrative describes how he “suddenly catches a whiff of cooking meat, steps out into the courtyard to investigate, and sees a whole dog simmering in an earthenware pot by the wall” – indicating a pot of considerable size.
This warrants another quick debunking: the myriad modern “Mount Liang Banquets” marketed today are largely anachronistic. Any stir-fried dishes on the menu are later inventions. While those earthenware pots were indeed large, they were entirely unsuited for stir-frying.
The steamed wheat cakes that Wu Dalang hawked in the streets were, as the name implies, steamed. Although the Song dynasty chronicle *Dongjing Meng Hua Lu* already contains references to “stir-fried chicken, stir-fried mutton, and stir-fried rabbit”, the Ming dynasty novel *Water Margin* – which is set in the Song period – makes no mention of “stir-fried dishes” at all. Instead, phrases like “serve them rice, broth and vegetables” appear frequently. Even a discerning epicure of the Song era such as Su Shi (Su Dongpo) would entertain guests with *maifan* (whole wheat grains steamed together with vegetables in a single pot). His signature creation, Dongpo pork, is a classic example of slow-braising in a clay pot over low heat…
It is true that the Song dynasty marks the initial emergence of iron woks, but they were far from widespread. At that time, a stir-frying-capable iron wok was roughly the equivalent of evolving Gagarin’s “Vostok 1” into Elon Musk’s “Starship”. The outlaws of Mount Liang operated in remote, lawless hinterlands where imperial edicts did not reach. Naturally, such high-end, cutting-edge culinary equipment was just as inaccessible. They were limited at best to large clay pots for boiling whole sheep and dogs, or steaming buns (allegedly filled with human flesh).
Even into the Ming dynasty, iron woks retained an air of prestige. During Zheng He’s expeditions across the Western Seas, the imperial fleet carried state gifts for the nations along the route, which included a celebrated Ming export: the “Guang wok” – an iron wok manufactured in Guangdong.
Culinary enthusiasts naturally take issue with period dramas set on Mount Liang that show characters sitting solemnly around tables laden with stir-fried dishes. What is particularly unbearable is the sudden appearance of deep-fried peanuts. This modern pub snack requires not only an iron wok to prepare but also peanuts themselves – a crop that did not arrive in China until the Ming dynasty.
Oil has long been known in China, with a history of oil extraction stretching back centuries. Its earliest applications were practical rather than culinary: lubricating cart axles and lighting lamps (as recorded in the fifth volume of Qimin Yaoshu: “It serves both as axle grease and lamp fuel”). It was not until the Song dynasty that Shen Ku remarked on its culinary use with a tone of mild surprise: “Today, northerners have taken to frying everything in sesame oil, regardless of what it is.” Shen, a native of Hangzhou who had garrisoned the northern frontiers in his youth, penned this observation in his later years while retired to the Mengxi Garden in Zhenjiang. The passage appears in Dream Pool Essays.
By the Qing dynasty, as the Jianghuai region flourished, the grand households of Rongguo and Ningguo boasted both woks and cooking oil, and with them, the art of stir-frying. In chapter 61 of Dream of the Red Chamber, amidst a heated exchange between the head cook and the maid Siqi, we learn of the young ladies’ private kitchen preferences: “Sister Qingwen has asked for wild leek shoots…” “Rich dishes won’t do for her; tell them to stir-fry some wheat gluten instead, and keep the oil to a minimum.” … “Miss Tai and Miss Bao happened to mention a craving for ‘stir-fried wolfberry shoots with oil and salt.’” — The gluten with wild leeks and the wolfberry shoots arrive on the table, light and unadorned.
During her second visit to the Ningguo residence, Granny Liu encounters the legendary “eggplant xiang”: “Peel the eggplants, taking only the clean flesh, dice them finely, and deep-fry in chicken fat…” Deep-frying shares its essence with stir-frying: both rely on oil as a heat-transfer medium within heavy metal cookware. The distinction lies simply in the greater volume of oil and higher temperatures, which intensify that mouth-watering Maillard reaction. Such culinary extravagance was the preserve of the Jia mansion, utterly unimaginable to a modest country household like Granny Liu’s.
Set aside Granny Liu from two or three centuries past. Even my own grandmother, a century ago, lived in an age where iron woks had become common household items, yet stir-frying remained a rarity. My grandmother’s family managed a modest trade and were far from hard up, but a stir-fry was only prepared for festivals or when guests arrived.
III. The Problem Lies with Refined Oil
The most critical element of stir-frying isn’t the “stir” or the “vegetables”, but the “oil”—specifically, refined oil used in excess and cooked at high temperatures.
The refining process, marketed as “stripping away the coarse to extract the pure”, much like that used for white flour and polished rice, is actually one that discards the vital nutrients and leaves behind the dregs.
Fat is an essential nutrient for the body’s functioning, and an absolute necessity for brain activity. Modern medicine categorises it into numerous subclasses of Omega-3, Omega-6, and Omega-9, presenting it with an impressively scientific and premium flair. Yet, over millions of years of human evolution, our health was sustained not by instruments and metrics, but by the naturally balanced ratios of fats found in whole foods.
Nut lovers, like myself, are perpetually met with warnings such as, “Nuts are fine, but they’re too high in fat and shouldn’t be overconsumed.” This advice sounds sensible but misses the point entirely. The modern problem isn’t an excess of nuts, but an overconsumption of refined oils. Limiting nut intake is like punishing the innocent while letting the real culprit go free. I simply disregard such well-intentioned but unpalatable warnings: by avoiding stir-frying, eating out, and pre-packaged processed foods, refined oils find no way into my diet, leaving me free to enjoy nuts whenever I please.
IV. Running Barefoot Toward Self-Rescue
But some ignore all that altogether and just take off running barefoot. Don’t try to scare anyone with claims like “running barefoot will hurt your feet.” Harvard’s “barefoot professor,” Lieberman, who specialises in human evolutionary biology, says: “Long before shoes were invented, humans ran fast and far.” Faced with the constant influx of outrageously priced sneakers, Lieberman simply walks away: to hell with shoes.
I first heard of Lieberman a few years ago. Back then, I was in Taiwan living a “half-farming, half-X” life, growing rice and teaching food classes, which basically amounted to getting paid to take people out to eat and drink. Drawing on my own foodie philosophy, I would freely speculate on the details and history of food and drink. To my surprise, one student was thrilled to hear this and said I was comparable to a certain foreign barefoot runner—though he bases his arguments on human evolutionary history. It was only then that I, in my ignorance, learned of Lieberman. Later, among the books I carried back from Taiwan was his *The Story of the Human Body* (published in Chinese as *From Jungle to Civilisation: The Evolution of the Human Body and the Origin of Disease*).
Lieberman argues that the human body, having evolved over millennia in the jungles, was suddenly thrust into the drastic changes following the Industrial Revolution. Unable to adapt to this modern civilised environment, it responds only with illness. If we compare human evolutionary history to a 24-hour clock, modern life—that lifestyle which began in the final minute (23:59)—has made humans longer-lived than ever before, yet also more in pain than ever before.
To address various health issues, modern people turn to medication and supplements to fill nutritional gaps. But what we actually need is to re-examine our dietary structure. The conventional assumption that we should use oil for daily stir-frying is far from reliable. Thus, with cooking oil under the spotlight, as a foodie, I have the confidence to simply opt out of stir-frying—whether it’s for “某某 fish” or “某某 flower” dishes, or for deep-frying and high-heat wok tossing.
Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations in this article are provided by the author.
Editor: Wang Hao