No Fried Pork Rind, No Tofu? — Grandma Kouzi

I. A Caregiver Who Refuses All Soya Products

So eating at our house became “one house, two systems”: for my parents, dishes are cooked the way they’ve always liked—fish, meat, pan-frying, stir-frying, the lot. I don’t eat meat, so I make a separate dish: greens and tofu, mostly simply boiled to let the natural flavours shine. It all goes on the table and everyone eats together.

Then the caregiver joined us. She eats the same as my parents, is perfectly fine with my not eating meat or heavily processed food—she even compliments it as “wellness eating”—but she simply won’t touch my tofu.

I thought I was careful enough. When I buy soya products, I only pick the freshest, plainest ones. I never buy flavoured dried tofu or tofu skin, let alone fried tofu puffs or braised soya products. I’ve already been that cautious—so why does she still refuse?

She says she used to eat tofu, but ever since her village stopped frying pork rind, she stopped eating tofu—and all soya products, full stop. My head is spinning—what on earth does making tofu have to do with frying pork rind?

II. How Frying Pork Rind Got Mixed Up with the Tofu Pot

Although I don’t eat meat myself, nor any meat product, I find pork rind quite reasonable. Pork skin is good-quality collagen. Yes, the processing involves deep-frying, but the residual oil on the rind is minimal, and before eating you blanch it in boiling water to boil off the surface grease, leaving virtually nothing behind.

These are small family-scale operations. The oil used for frying pork rind is usually home-rendered lard, sourced from various slaughter by-products—the bits of fat still clinging to the skin, the fat attached to offal—in short, anything no one wants to buy and no one will pay for gets rendered down. Lard is a good-quality saturated fat, stable and heat-resistant. The frying temperature for pork rind isn’t high, so I can accept this method.

After frying the pork rind, the oil turns pitch-black and becomes waste. Where does this black oil go?—Home, carried off by the tofu makers. Every tofu-making household nearby needs this black, murky oil.

Anyone who has boiled soya milk knows it loves to boil over—spilling out before it even reaches the boil. And turning off the heat the moment it foams up won’t do either, because the milk isn’t cooked through yet. It tastes raw and beany, and drinking it not only tastes awful but can give you diarrhoea.

Soya beans contain soyasaponin. The saponin molecule has a lipophilic aglycone and a hydrophilic sugar moiety, giving it excellent surface activity. It causes the liquid to “boil” prematurely—before it actually reaches boiling point—producing copious, persistent soap-bubble-like foam, as if one were heating a pot of soapy water. But the temperature at this stage isn’t high, only seventy or eighty degrees Celsius. It’s “false boiling”.

So making long-simmered soya milk demands great care: the pot mustn’t be full—only half—and someone must stand vigil at the stove throughout. Start with high heat, but switch to low before the false boil begins, and keep stirring, and stirring, until it truly comes to the boil. I once did the stirring at Sister Black Cat’s home in Pingtung, in southern Taiwan. She insists each pot must simmer for at least twenty minutes after the initial boil—thirty is better—and during that whole time you must stir ceaselessly with a massive iron paddle.

Pingtung sits at the very southern tip of Taiwan—it’s scorching hot, and standing at the stove means heat piled on heat. I used to suspect she never simmered that long on ordinary days and was simply milking me because I was free labour, so I quietly conducted an experiment: I ladled out a bowl of soya milk five or six minutes after it came to the boil, then another bowl after a full thirty minutes. Once cooled, I tasted them side by side—the thirty-minute long-simmered soya milk is indeed superior, carrying a natural fragrance all its own.

But typical tofu-making households have enormous woks over enormous stoves, boiling fifty kilos or so of soya milk at a time. They find all that stirring a nuisance—and splitting one pot into two costs them labour, time, and fuel.

So the tofu-making families in the village call in the black oil. Add a ladle of oil while boiling the soya milk, and the pot can be nearly full. The film of oil floating on top breaks the surface tension of the bubbles, so there’s no more fear of boil-over. Once the milk is thoroughly boiled through, the topmost layer of black oil, froth and all, is skimmed off before making tofu.

The caregiver says that in the village where her family lives, dozens of households have been making pork rind and tofu for generations. Some of the neighbouring villages are pig-slaughtering villages: they collect pigs from farming households even further out in the countryside, and every family slaughters and sells meat. The villages on the edge of town have been prosperous since our grandparents’ day; families further out in the rural depths are all keen to marry their daughters into them, because these places shelter beneath a big old tree—there are small businesses that serve the city, and as long as you’re hardworking, you can live comfortably.

But now the pork rind trade in the village has vanished altogether.

The relevant authorities carried out a hygiene sweep, and pork rind processing was swept away. The authorities declared that rendering lard from slaughter by-products is unhygienic, that home workshops with pig skins hanging out to dry in wind and sun are unhygienic—in short, unsafe and unsanitary on every count, and it all sounds perfectly reasonable. These justifications are high-end, grand, and top-notch; thoroughly health-oriented and thoroughly people-first.

With no pork rind workshops, there was no more black oil to spare, and the tofu-making households in the village found themselves greeted by salespeople from the chemical factory. What they brought was a “wonderful product”—defoamer. The composition and mechanism of defoamers are not the subject of this article; readers are invited to look it up for themselves.

Every so often a three-wheeled cart would roll through, unloading crate after crate of defoamer. You just toss a handful in when boiling the soya milk—far easier than black oil. No more straining to skim off all that dark, greasy froth; it’s light and effortless, and the tofu-makers were all delighted. But from then on, the caregiver stopped eating tofu—and all soya products, full stop.

I had known about defoamers before this, but I still ate tofu and soya products. On the one hand, plant protein is a dietary necessity for vegetarians; on the other, I harboured a habitual, blind trust in familiar processed goods, feeling that the quality and quantity of defoamer was, like the coronavirus, “manageable and controllable”.

But our caregiver saw things differently.

“Everyone says black oil is unhygienic—yes—but the black oil has to be skimmed out. If you don’t skim it clean, the tofu comes out black; whether there’s any residue left is plain to see at a glance. But defoamer is colourless, tasteless—crate after crate carted in, ladle after ladle sprinkled into the pot, and it all stays inside the tofu, the tofu skin, the shredded tofu, the dried tofu. Eating that is eating medicine. Even if they gave it to me for free, I wouldn’t dare.”

The caregiver is fiercely stubborn—she refuses everything without a second’s thought, rejecting all soya products: fear the house, and its crow is guilty too. I find this stubbornness rather admirable—a form of self-respect and self-care.

IV. Can You Avoid Soya Products—Can You Avoid Trust?

In this story, the relevant authorities are being “people-first”: for the standardisation of the production process, for the health of consumers, small workshops are no longer allowed to make pork rind the old way, and the black oil problem is solved. The authorities are dutiful and conscientious, the chemical factory has gained new customers, the tofu-makers find things simpler and less labour-intensive—everyone feels it’s fine. I don’t eat meat, and I don’t eat pork rind, so banning tiny household pork-rind workshops makes no difference to my plate. But this “people-first” decision touches the tofu and soya products I do love.

A vegetarian cannot do without plant protein, but making tofu from scratch is too much of a project, so I have worked out a few ways of eating beans without buying soya products from outside—you still eat beans, just not the processed kind.

Among them is a stir-fried sauce I picked up from the caregiver. Stir-fried sauce is a long-standing classic of mine—I have carried it all the way through Taiwan and won fans the length of the island. The original recipe calls for diced dried tofu; now I have learned a trick from the caregiver and call on the soya bean itself in all its glory. Her classic method is to boil the soya beans, then stir-fry them in chilli sauce. The choice of ingredient says everything—there is no contest in calibre. A soya product brimming with the “deep affection” of defoamer is nowhere near as good as the blunt, honest simplicity of stir-fried beans.

I have made a slight variation: I use soya beans, sometimes chickpeas—each has its own charm. I don’t eat spicy food, so I leave out the chilli and stir-fry with sweet bean paste alone. For the sake of texture, too, I first dry-fry the beans on their own to trigger the Maillard reaction; once the skins are toasted and fragrant, I add the seasonings and sauce and stir-fry everything together.

For stir-fried sauce, I can swap in soya beans for dried tofu, but another classic in Kouzi’s kitchen—”tofu skin wheat rice”—cannot be replaced; I had to part with it. From a purely nutritional standpoint, the impact on my protein intake as a foodie is minimal; I could even make tofu myself, though it would demand an enormous amount of time, and giving up tofu and tofu skin would not be the end of the world. The real issue is that my willingness to accept things from outside has narrowed by yet another category—my trust in the outside world has narrowed with it.

V. People-First: First for Whom?

This little essay has been written in fits and starts over more than a year, and I am making the final edits just as Scott, author of Seeing Like a State, has passed away. He told many stories of states bent on acting “for your own good”—though many of those stories were, in reality, nothing short of disasters. Leguminous crops are vital to human survival; their contribution is immense. Tofu is the Chinese people’s great invention. Built upon it grew a whole ecology of soya products and processing industries, and the livelihoods in the caregiver’s village are an extension of that ecology. From the land where beans are grown and pigs reared to the tables of neighbouring households, the small businesses that sustain a host of solid homes are no less great, and no less long-established. It is a pity that this chain has now been broken—not just the livelihoods of the farm families who made pork rind, but the soya products on the caregiver’s table as well.

As a farmer, I grow all sorts of beans in Enren Valley; my self-sufficiency grows by the year, and I worry little about the safety of my own food. As a foodie, I have devised all kinds of ways to eat all kinds of beans, and every now and then—sated and with time to spare—I find myself worrying on others’ behalf: who are the people who buy and eat all these soya products, who ultimately digest all that defoamer? Where do they stand in this “people-first” chain? It’s common knowledge that fishmongers don’t eat their own fish, and málà tàng sellers not eating their own creations is an even older convention—I wonder whether the people who decided to ban pork rind in small workshops, or those who carry out enforcement on the ground, eat shop-bought soya products. And the people who produce, distribute, and use defoamers; the people who make tofu at the pot’s edge—do they eat it?

This world is full of high-end, grand, top-notch “people-first” policies. How they truly connect to our daily lives is something we may not have all stopped to think about.

Last year the relevant authorities published a draft food-safety regulation, which in essence would have banned farm families from making dried goods, citing poor hygiene and uncontrollable quality. I don’t eat spicy food and almost never buy dried chillies; I only buy the odd pinch of Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and the like, since I don’t stir-fry and use very little. But my reaction to the draft was: if it ever becomes law, I will stop buying any dried goods at all. That was an instinctive response—I cannot fathom how food safety and a ban on dried goods produce such a causal link.

In the end, enough people signed a boycott that the draft quietly died. Farmers still pick their Sichuan peppercorns, fennel seeds, and chillies to dry in the sun, and I still buy the odd small quantity.

I also wonder: do the people who write these regulations eat tofu? Eat fish? Order takeaway?

Foodthink contributor

Grandma Kouzi

Farmer and Trailwalker, village brewer. Full-time foodie, part-time farmer, amateur writer.

 

 

 

Unless otherwise indicated, all other images are provided by the author.

Editor: Wang Hao