People of Shanghai are very particular about foods and tend to light tastes, biased by tradition to slightly sweet tastes. Meat or vegetables, fresh ingredients are their preferred choices. Gongdelin Vegetarian Restaurant is a restaurant nationwide famous for its vegetable buns, the fillings of which are made of dices of green vegetables, oil gluten, shiitake, winter bamboo shoots, blended and stirred up together. The buns, just coming out of steaming, look snow-white fresh with meticulous textures. Peeling off the dough comes the greenish oily aroma dribbling from the vegetarian fillings. This is one of the author’s favorite snacks. Shanghai people including the very ordinary families would take pains to clean the ingredients. The two ends of the bean sprouts must be removed. Leek buds must be cleaned piece by piece and cut in equal length. Pork chops are lightly hammered by the cutting knife blade and then marinated with flavors before cooking. Almost every family has the workmanship to make neat wontons and dainty dumplings of bean paste fillings. Compared with people in the north, Shanghai people usually have less appetize or meat in their daily diets. In my recollection of childhood, our family kept the tradition to meal only with vegetarian diets at the time of Lunar New Years and the Lantern Festivals. This was just a family habit with no particular reasons at all. In more than thirty years since I came to live in Canada, vegetables have been dominating my diets in summer, only with some meat in winter. I think this suits my personal physiological needs well and has gradually become my new diet.
Vegetable or Meat is Sometimes a Choice not by Mind but by Body
The formation of human dietary habits is closely related to their inhabiting environments and being meat-eater or vegetarian is given by nature. As for the Chinese nation, the common people living in Zhongyuan (the Central Plains) regions rely on grains, fruits and vegetables for generations while the nomadic people have little chance in their lifetime to live on fruits or vegetables. The fisherman around the gulf region have fish and shrimp as their staple foods while the bananas are the dominant food for tropical inhabitants. Among these ethnic groups, there are both vegetarians and non-vegetarians living the way they do for generations and generations, reproducing their offspring one another. Some enjoy lives of longevity as by elderly people and some die premature deaths as by sick little children. During the last 60- 70- years, millions of young people were forced to reside and work in the countryside with little or almost no meat for their meals but their bodies were still strong enough to sustain heavy farming labor. Between the last 70s – 80s years too, the residents of mainland China had very limited meat for food, but their minds had not been contained at all, out of which emerged some greatest scientists like Nobel laureate Tu Youyou. Since living resources have become abundant and logistics advanced immensely in the past 30 years, people have too many choices for their food, which improves their living standards tremendously. Everyone begins to pay attention to health care and diets .In choice of being vegetarians or meat-eaters, utterly personal I believe, favor of being vegetarians has become a social tendency. People today choose to be vegetarians for different reasons. Some do for religious beliefs, some for environmental protection, some by the idea of “kill no lives”, some for personal health, and some for diets chosen to their own likings.
Balanced Nutrition is the Healthiest
Human bodies can well digest and absorb foods whether they are meat or vegetables. Meats are balanced in the amino acid contents and their nutrition is thought comprehensive and rich. With less saturated fat acids and cholesterols, vegetarian foods are thought to help control the fat concentration in blood and therefore reduce the chance of myocardial infarctions. Fat in meats is indispensable for our body metabolism and large volume of cellulose in the vegetarian diet can help prevent constipation and hemorrhoids, and thus reduce the incidence of colon cancer and rectal cancer. From the existing studies of the correlation between diet and longevity, it is difficult to conclude what diet are healthier. Anyway, more daily physical exercise, strict work and rest rules, less alcohol drinking and no smoking are favorable for longevity. From Chinese medicinal perspective, vegetarian foods are biased to coolness. So they need other ingredients like ginger, jujube, and pepper or cinnamon powder to be added for moderation in the right amount during the cooking. Such notion is equally applied to in the religious fasting diet with shallots, onions, chives and garlic for the same effect. In addition, adolescents in puberty need to consume more protein for fast growth. Patients with chronic kidney diseases and cancer patients in chemotherapy and electrotherapy treatments need supplement of sufficient protein. Those with metabolic disorder and thus unable to break down too much purine contents from soy products, gout patients should instead take fish and meat proteins for their specific physiological needs.
Health Care Decoction – Ginseng Soup for Longevity
Here is my recommended decoction for a ginseng longevity soup:
6 grams of ginseng, 6 grams of atractylodes, 3 grams of dried ginger, 3 grams of cinnamon, 3 grams of dried tangerine peel, and 3 grams of licorice. Cook them to boil in three bowls of water, keep them simmered for another 20 minutes before adding your favorite meet and/or vegetables and flavors to make a delicious nourishing soup. Ginseng and atractylodes in the recipe help vascular circulation and tonify spleens, while dried ginger cinnamon help reduce dampness and tangerine peel and licorice help vascular circulation for stomachs. Together they disperse the coolness with the warmth, nourishing the spleen and protecting the stomach. This soup is exceptionally good for vegetarians to have in winter. Those who frequently suffer from swollen gums and throat inflammations are unfit for it.
