Amid the Cooking Oil Crisis, Do We Really Need to Eat So Much Oil? | Kouzi’s Foodie View
I. A History Without Stir-frying
“You don’t stir-fry? Then how do you eat?”
With your mouth, obviously.
Every animal eats with its mouth, yet humans are the only species that stir-fries, and the Chinese are the people who love stir-frying the most. But even the Chinese – those who love it most and do it best – have only been stir-frying for a few hundred years. To borrow a ready-made formula: if the history of eating were a twenty-four-hour day, stir-frying would appear only after 23:59.
One and a half million years ago, food met fire. Fire freed humans from tearing into raw flesh and drinking blood, ushering in a new era of civilisation and bodily evolution. Nothing was spared the flame. Food was thrown straight into the fire (direct-fire cooking), or roasted over some natural medium (stone cooking); later came pottery (pottery cooking) – heating with water was called “boil”, heating with steam was called “steam”. The Chinese characters for all the cooking methods – smoke, steam, boil, simmer, fry, roast, cook, and so on – trace back to seal script, where every one of them has “fire” at the bottom. Only from the clerical script onward did that radical become four dots. The clerical script ushered in the age of stroke-based characters, and the era of pottery cooking also blossomed into ever-greater variety.
I must take this opportunity to debunk a little. The so-called famous dish “Fish-Belly Lamb” as served today – diced mutton, winter bamboo shoots, and shiitake mushrooms stir-fried and stuffed into a fish belly, wrapped in caul fat, then pan-fried and deep-fried – is confidently attributed to Yi Ya. But in Yi Ya’s day, pottery could not support stir-frying a filling, let alone pan-frying or deep-frying; the only option was to grill the fish whole.
Bronze vessels already existed then, but they were mostly ritual objects. How rare bronze was in those days can be gauged by comparison: it was on a par with Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spacecraft in 1961. If alien archaeologists were to unearth a bronze vessel and conclude that Yi Ya deep-fried a mutton-stuffed fish in bronze, us foodies could only laugh preemptively.
A contemporary fish-related incident involves Zhuan Zhu’s “grilled fish” – also a whole grilled fish (from Records of the Grand Historian, “Lives of the Assassin-Knights” and “Hereditary House of Wu Taibo”, as well as Zhao Ye’s Annals of Wu and Zhao, “The Account of King Liao and Prince Guang”). Because Zhuan Zhu specialised in grilling fish on the shores of Lake Tai, the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions still revere him as “the founding father of cooking”.
Another tale associated with Yi Ya is “Yi Ya cooks his own son” – he murdered his four-year-old boy and served him to Duke Huan of Qi, prepared by steaming.
II. Iron Woks Were a Rarity Too
Water Margin has heroes and champions “tearing into great hunks of meat, gulping down huge bowls of wine”. How is that meat cooked?
When Shi Jin befriends the three chieftains of Er Long Mountain, “…he picked out fat lambs, boiled three of them whole, packed them in a big box, and sent two estate servants to deliver them.” Lambs, boiled by the whole animal – now that is a hunk.
When Lu Zhishen flees to Mount Wutai, “suddenly a whiff of meat hits his nose; he steps out into the yard and sees a dog boiling in a great earthenware pot against the wall” – and that earthenware pot is sizeable.
While I am debunking, let me debunk once more: the various themed “Liangshan Banquets” on offer today are all impostors where stir-fried dishes are concerned. The earthenware pot may be big, but stir-frying it cannot.
Wu Dalang’s steamed flatbreads, sold from a street vendor’s basket – steamed. By the time of Dream of Splendor of the Eastern Capital, phrases like “stir-fried chicken, stir-fried mutton, stir-fried rabbit” had already appeared, yet in Water Margin – a Song dynasty story actually penned in the Ming dynasty – there is no mention of “stir-fried dishes”; instead, lines like “he served them rice, soup, and vegetables” pop up time and again. A supreme gourmand like Su Dongpo of the Song dynasty, when hosting guests, served a simple wheat-and-vegetable dish steamed all in one pot – steamed. His signature “Dongpo pork” is a classic of slow-braising in an earthenware pot over a low flame…
Though the Song dynasty coincidentally saw the emergence of the iron wok, it had not yet become widespread. In those days, an iron wok capable of stir-frying was roughly what the leap from Gagarin’s “Vostok 1” was to Musk’s “Starship”. The Liangshan outlaws, enthroned on their mountains beyond the reach of civilisation, enjoyed neither the spring breeze nor the rule of law – and an iron wok, that high-end, grand, upscale fashion item, naturally found no way across the frontier either. At most, they boiled a whole lamb or a whole dog in a big earthenware pot, or steamed the occasional human-flesh bun.
Even into the Ming dynasty, the iron wok still held an exalted place. When Zheng He sailed to the Western Oceans, iron woks were among the state gifts presented to the countries they called at – specifically the Ming’s famed “Guang pots”, iron woks produced in Guangdong.
As a foodie, I also cannot bear watching characters in Liangshan TV adaptations solemnly sit down to a table of stir-fried dishes – especially when a plate of deep-fried peanuts sits boldly among them. This modern bar snack requires not just an iron wok for stir-frying but also peanuts – and peanuts did not reach China until the Ming dynasty.
Oil has been around for ages. The Chinese have a long history of extracting oil, first for lubricating cart axles and for lighting (Qimin Yaoshu, Volume 5: “fit to grease an axle, fit too for a candle”). As late as the Song dynasty, Shen Kuo still remarked in a rather novel tone: “These days northerners love frying things in sesame oil; whatever the ingredient, it goes into the pan with oil.” The Hangzhou-born Shen Kuo had spent his youth garrisoned in the north; this observation appears in Dream Pool Essays, written in his later years in retirement at Dream Stream Garden in Zhenjiang.
By the Qing dynasty, in the prosperous Jianghuai region, at the Rong and Ning estates, there were woks, there was oil, and there was stir-frying. In Dream of the Red Chamber, Chapter 61, the kitchen maids, locked in battle with Siqi, reveal the household’s private little dishes: “Miss Qingwen fancies celery shoots” … “Meat isn’t good – have them stir-fry some wheat gluten instead, and go light on the oil.” … “Third Miss and Miss Bao happened to be chatting and decided they’d like stir-fried goji shoots with salt and oil.” – Celery shoots stir-fried with wheat gluten and less oil, and salt-fried goji shoots: a light affair, indeed.
On Granny Liu’s second visit to the Ningguo Residence, the infamous “qiè xiǎng” dish makes an appearance: “Peel the aubergine, take only the flesh, dice it fine, and fry it in chicken fat …” Deep-frying and stir-frying are essentially the same – heating food in a hard metal vessel with oil as the medium – the difference being more oil, higher heat, and a more glorious Maillard reaction that sends the aromas soaring. This was the sort of extravagance only the Jia household could manage; Granny Liu, well-off though she was by village standards, had never heard of anything like it.
And if we step back just two or three centuries from Granny Liu to my own grandmother a century ago: every household had an iron wok, but stir-frying was not a daily occurrence. My grandmother’s family ran a small shop and life was not too bad, yet they only stir-fried for festivals or when guests visited.
III. The Problem Is Refined Oil
What matters most in stir-frying is neither the “stir-frying” nor the “dishes”, but the “oil” – refined oil, used in excess, at high temperatures.
The “refining” of oils and fats – stripping away the coarse to keep the fine – is, like refined flour and polished rice, really a process of discarding the essence and keeping the dregs.
Fat is an essential nutrient for the body to function – brain function, above all, cannot do without it. Modern medicine subdivides fats into various Omega-3, Omega-6 and Omega-9 types – very high-end, grand and upscale indeed. But over millions of years of human evolution, our health was maintained not by instruments and metrics but by the natural, healthy balance of fats found in whole foods.
A foodie with a sweet tooth adores nuts and is always met with the same warning: “Nuts are good for you, but too oily – don’t eat too many.” This sounds right, yet it is fundamentally misguided – the modern problem is not too many nuts but too much refined fat. Cutting back on nuts is like punishing the genuine Li Kui while the impostor Li Gui walks free. I ignore this kind of unpleasant, well-meant advice entirely: no stir-frying, no eating out, no processed products from elsewhere – refined oil finds no way in. Nuts? Eat them freely.
IV. Barefoot Running on the Road to Self-Salvation
But some people pay no heed to any of this – they simply take off and run. Do not try to frighten us with talk of “running barefoot hurts your feet”; Harvard’s barefoot professor Lieberman specialises in human evolutionary biology: “Long before shoes were invented, humans ran fast and well.” Faced with ever-changing, sky-high-priced running shoes, Lieberman has simply raced ahead and left them in the dust: to hell with shoes.
I first learned of Lieberman a few years ago, when I was living a half-farming, half-X life in Taiwan – growing rice while running food courses, which was really just charging people to go out and enjoy food together. From my foodie’s perspective, I freely rambled about the details and history of eating and drinking. To my surprise, a student was delighted and said I was quite a match for some barefoot-running foreigner, except that fellow used human evolutionary history as his argument. It was only then that this narrow-minded soul learned of Lieberman. Among the books I carried back from Taiwan was his The Story of the Human Body (from Jungle to Civilisation: How Evolution Shapes Our Bodies and Fosters Disease).
Lieberman argues that the human body, emerging from a long jungle age, plunged without warning into the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and, unable to adapt to modern civilised surroundings, could only respond with illness. If the history of human evolution were a twenty-four-hour day, modern life – that lifestyle born only after 23:59 – has made humans unprecedentedly long-lived, and unprecedentedly miserable.
Modern people deal with health problems by popping pills, taking supplements and topping up on every sort of nutrient. But what we truly need is a fresh look at our diet – the taken-for-granted assumption of cooking oil in a daily stir-fry is not nearly as reliable as we think. And so, when cooking oil is in the spotlight, I can feel confident, as a foodie, in choosing not to stir-fry – whether the choice is between this oil and that, between deep-frying and stir-frying.
All illustrations in this article are by the author unless otherwise noted
Edited by Wang Hao