Food & Wine: Are China's Ingredients Getting Worse?

This article first appeared in Food & Wine Magazine (吃好喝好). It is the first in a series for Food & Wine exploring the changing taste of ingredients in China. For the Chinese version, please click here. (中文版)

I hear it all the time from Western fine-dining chefs in Shanghai: vegetables here taste like water. I’ve struggled with this for years, wondering how much is cultural chauvinism, how much is nostalgia or idealization, how much is ignorance of what Chinese vegetables to eat and in what season, how much is a difference in geography, climate and the variety of the seeds, and how much is true.

At least some of it is true; I see it in my own shopping. I spend time tracking down #88 potatoes from Yunnan, Dandong "iron-skin" tomatoes from farmers on Taobao and Shanghai’s Meishan pork when I want something special. I know Michelin-starred chefs who have farmers in Guangdong grow their vegetables to order from Italian seeds.

But that’s not the full picture. In 20 years in China, I’ve eaten many incredible vegetables — China is, in my opinion, the best country in the world to eat vegetables, in terms of variety if nothing else — and enough flavorful countryside chickens to fill a large farm.

For every watery onion, I’ve had just as many aggressively strong bunches of garlic chives. For every disappointing stalk of asparagus, I’ve eaten bamboo shoots so fresh they taste to me like cream and vanilla. I didn’t learn the original flavor of pork or how to appreciate a free-range chicken until I moved to China.

At restaurants, I see more and more Chinese ingredients end up on Western fine-dining tables across the country, from grouper at Maison Lameloise or Fujian sole at Da Vittorio in Shanghai to jiaobai, lily bulbs and silk gourds on the tasting menu at Shenzhen’s Ensue. For Chinese chefs, this is so obvious it’s not worth mentioning. ?

So which is it? Are China’s ingredients incredible or industrial? I put that question to several chefs last month, including Stefan Stiller of three-star Tai’an Table and chefs at Nanling (南伶), Hai Jin Zi (海金滋) and Song Song (松松酒家), all Shanghainese restaurants in Shanghai. The answer, of course, is both. In their opinion, the country has a number of very high-quality ingredients but things have changed dramatically in the past two to three decades for a lot of produce, as the food supply chain modernizes and industrializes our food, and not always for the better.

Qi Zhihai (戚志海), who has worked at Nanling since it opened in 1998, told me that many restaurants now use what they call "small meat chickens" (小肉鸡), which have more meat but less flavor. Liang Chaochao (粱朝朝), who has been a chef for 20 years, now at Hai Jin Zi, said pork has become milder and chicken less dense. Yue Cuibiao (岳翠彪), of Song Song, echoed this, saying that in his 26 years of kitchen experience, chicken doesn't have the same texture.

In this column, over the coming months, I will untangle this topic and go deep into the background to understand the changes, and the forces driving them. All of the chefs said the flavor of pork had changed the most during their careers, and that tomatoes no longer have any taste. By following the changes in these two ingredients, through farms and farmers to the logistics and purchasing departments of the markets where we buy our groceries, and from chefs to consumers, I will trace the ways that flavor is changing in China.

Already, I can see that chefs are adjusting their methods to match the state of the ingredients. They are reducing the time they need to cook chickens, whose meat is less dense than before, or like Hu Renyi (胡仁义), a chef for more than 35 years, now at Du Jiu Yue (杜九月), they are using black tea to get rid of an unwanted aroma (肉夹气) in today’s pork. They add ketchup to tomato dishes and say that even the spices and soy sauce have changed.

I see it in the markets as well. Since late 2021, researcher Rachel Chow and I have been tracking the available produce at a very average wet market in downtown Shanghai for an upcoming project. In those two years of weekly visits, in which we take an inventory of the market, we have seen firsthand how many vegetables that were once seasonal are now sold year-round.

By our count, more than 25% of the market’s produce is essentially season-less: available throughout most of the year with no change in availability.

For the consumer, there is an illusion of abundance when you no longer have to wait for the right season for lily bulbs or jiaobai. It feels like progress to be able to choose from 200 varieties of vegetables on the supermarket apps. But how many of them taste like anything? How many do you really want to eat?

This topic has a personal angle for me as well. In the United States, where I’m from, we’ve already ruined tomatoes. Our pork tastes like chicken and our chicken tastes like cotton. We have an incredible food supply chain, delivering us anything we want, in any season, from around the world. But being out of season, industrially grown or raised, and shipped long distances, much of our produce doesn’t taste like anything.

On a grander scale, we are wiping out diversity while mono-cropping our farms, leaving our food supply exposed to greater risks of disease and pest outbreaks.

One of the great joys of cooking in China, for me, has been the tradition of seasonality and the common knowledge of what to eat and when. But in my decades here, I’ve seen that fade in China just as countries in North America and Europe have newly “re-discovered” the age-old concepts of seasonality and locality, part of a backlash against the post-World War II industrialization and lengthening of our food supply chains.

It’s become “trendy” in the past decade or two to emphasize how local your ingredients are, giving rise to farm-based restaurants New York’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Copenhagen’s Amass (now-closed). (Tellingly, chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill now says of the “farm-to-table” movement that by the time you talk about the farm, “it’s too late”. Instead, he says, we’ve got to talk about the seeds.)

We are just starting to see the downsides of wanting perfect-looking year-round tomatoes. I hate to see China make the same mistake. But instead of lamenting the change, which is probably necessary in order to feed the country reliably and sustainably, it’s more interesting to me to understand how exactly this is happening — from the feed that modern pigs eat to the varieties of tomatoes we choose to grow.

As consumers, eaters and chefs, it’s important that we understand how our food is being raised and grown, and when it’s harvested and why, so that we are able to have an informed conversation about how much tradition, how much seasonality, and how much flavor, we are really willing to give up in the name of progress.