Sea slugs and Jain diets

The real reason for the mutual incomprehension that plagues India-China relations

Hola Global Jigsawers,

The summer has begun in Spain. Schools are off and my bratskies are at home running amok. The big news is that my brother and his family arrive today to visit us for a few weeks. These are our first post-Covid visitors and I can’t help but feel a creep towards normalcy. I also got my first vaccine a couple of days ago. Yay, but also, ouch. My arm is still mighty sore two days later.

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I tell stories of connection, culture and the confounding loveliness of the world. These rarely get space in the mainstream media. But, if they make you smile or think anew about the world – its foods, languages, quirks – then I do hope you agree they are worth putting out. What I am trying to do, in essence, is make a stand against the toxicity of tribalism aka known as twitter trolling. If you, like me, believe that we are not put here on this earth to hate and fulminate, but to “fit” together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, do …

Today’s post is about how food goes some way in explaining the mutual comprehension that bests India-China relations. Enjoy!

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India and China relations are beset by mutual incomprehension. For example, New Delhi and Beijing have pointedly divergent narratives of their border dispute, from whom to consider the aggressor, to what territory belongs to which side.

 How far these “misperceptions” are feigned and how far they are genuine is for the pundits to dissect. The broader fact remains that the Buddhist connection notwithstanding, the Chinese and Indian civilizations are very different. And nowhere is this more manifest than in attitudes to food.

Social status more or less

In China, social status is signaled by increasing the variety of foods available to satiate one’s appetite. The meatier and the more exotic a food is, the more it is coveted. In India, the opposite holds true. Upper caste Hindus signal their elite status by increasingly delineated food choices: no meat, no onions, no non-vegetarians in the kitchen.

If “you are what you eat,” the average Indian and the average Chinese would appear to be from different planets, rather than neighbouring countries.

There is a joke in China that the Cantonese will eat anything that has four legs other than a table, anything that flies other than an airplane, and anything that swims other than a submarine. To an Indian, this feels less like a joke and more like a statement of fact, especially if you swap “Cantonese” for “Chinese people in general.”

The sea cucumber

Over the years I lived in China, amongst the most common items I was served at official banquets was the sea cucumber. These are uncucumber-like, slimy, spiny, black, gelatinous things. They have been described thus: “They don't have any limbs; they don't have any eyes. They have a mouth, and they have an anus and a whole bunch of organs in between.” This is also about how appetizing they tasted.

Sea cucumbers in China, called hai shen, were usually served floating in a soup. They were expensive (a kilo could set one back $3,000), ergo bestowed honour on both guests and hosts, which explained their banquet-staple status.

I became quite expert at hiding hai shen behind bowls and under little mounds of rice to avoid eating them. Sometimes, I had no choice but to gamely chew my way through them, if a beagle-eyed local government official took it upon himself to ensure I was correctly appreciating the culinary offerings.

On one such occasion I had choked down the sea cucumber course and was pleasantly surprised by the follow up - a broth with a slightly sweet, almost coconutty flavour. I turned to the official with unfeigned enjoyment and made some remark about how delicious this course was. Big mistake. Said official beamed and bobbed. “Yes. It is also very expensive,” he replied. “The secret ingredient is frog ovaries.”

When he saw me spluttering and reaching for the water, the official looked concerned. “Don’t worry,” he consoled me. “I don’t mean little frog. It is from a big frog.”

(Later I discovered that the ingredient was actually the fallopian tubes of the snow frog, called hasma).

Less harrowing, but still flustering, was the habit in China for waiters to bring live fish, flapping in a plastic bag filled with water, to the table, every time one ordered a fish dish. The practice was intended to demonstrate to the customer that the fish they were about to consume was fresh. I would have taken them at their word had they asked, but they never did.

Steak in India on pain of death

And then there’s India, where these days you can face a lynch mob for eating a steak. The cow is widely believed to be sacred to Hindus. When and how this came to be, remains historically contested. Serious historians have shown that at the time of the oldest Hindu sacred text, the Rig Veda (c. 1500 B.C.), cow meat was consumed by Indians.

Over time, particularly from the fourth century B.C. on, vegetarianism began to spread among India’s Buddhists, Jains and some Hindus. It remained a largely upper caste practice, but later a trend known as Sanskritization developed, whereby lower castes gave up beef, and meat in general, when they wanted to move up the social ladder, as a way of gaining social mobility.

Hindu-Buddhist beliefs center on reincarnation, so that eating non-veg (as non-vegetarian food is shortened to in India) holds the possibility that one might be chomping on one’s grandma reincarnated as a chicken.

But more puritanical strains of Hinduism also advise practicing a lessening of attachments to this world, and developing a calm attitude to its vicissitudes, which apparently “exciting” foods like onions, garlic and chili are obstacles to.

As a result, the most prayer-minded advocate bland diets, comprising fruit, vegetables and grain.

Then you have the Jains, who are so concerned for hurting living beings that they even eschew root vegetables, because of the violence involved in uprooting potatoes, carrots etc. from the soil.

The Jain diet

I was a representative of the Confederation of Indian Industries in China, for many years and on occasion I had the unhappy task of trying to explain the requirements of the Jain diet. Saying that the Jain guests did not eat root vegetables was a bit like trying to explain to the Chinese that the Jains had four arms and fangs.

Watching their Indian guests sniff suspiciously at their food for traces of animal stock, harried Chinese trade officials would lean across to me and complain, “You Indians. You don’t eat anything.” A few minutes later, having been confronted by chicken feet for an appetizer, one of the Indian delegates would tap me on the shoulder and whisper in disgust, “These Chinese, they eat everything!”

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And let me know about the strangest thing you have ever eaten in the comments section 