Part 1. Food overview
Delivering products capable of satisfying customers is the main goal of any company. Regarding food or beverages, flavor adaptation is key in the search for this ambitious aim.
Nutrition is an important component of any society and it’s necessary to understand that it is a cultural process rather than a simple biological one. When people eat, the process is influenced by history, politics, economics and many other elements. Food also establishes relationships between people.
China is a particularly large country where the flavors of cuisine vary widely from one region to another. So I do not intend to cover their rich and varied gastronomy, let alone list all the local differences. I would like to express some interesting facts here and few ideas of how all this influences wine consumer’s behaviour which is already a fairly big challenge.
Let’s start with some general statements. For example, ever wondered why Chinese people look funny at you when you drink a glass of cold water? Or why you get boiled lettuce leaves when you ask for a salad? The answer comes with a better understanding of how digestion works from a Chinese perspective.
Traditional Chinese Medicine sees the human body as a unit, with its sense is based on the relationships between yin (阴) and yang (阳). The body’s organs can be classified according to yin-yang theory (阴阳哲学) based on their functions and location. Yin-yang disharmony is the cause of diseases and physiological disorders. When yin and yang are unbalanced means that one aspect is deficient and the other is in excess. Cold and dampness (湿) belong to yin while wind, dryness, summer heat, and fire (火) belong to yang. Trying to simplify it for a better understanding, health is a state of balance in which food choice is key.
So what happens during digestion? According to this theory, the stomach is like a cooking pot where the food needs to be cooked in order to extract the nutrients. Since a pot requires heat to cook food, Chinese Medicine recommends to avoid cold and raw foods. If excessive amounts of cold or raw foods are eaten, the body has to waste valuable energy raising the temperature to allow the digestive processes to work well. This is why the Chinese avoid drinking a big glass of cold water with or right after a meal. However, they ensure correct balance sipping tea or soup during a meal.
As food can have an innate warmth or coolness, you may want to eat dishes appropriate not only to yourself, as well as to the environment. This is why Chinese believe in the importance of eating seasonal food. For example, in summer yin foods like melons and cucumber and in winter high yang foods like garlic, onions and red peppers.
When it comes to regional differences, there are eight culinary traditions in China (中国的八大菜系 – zhōng guó de bā dà cài xì). These eight can be included into four main styles (四大菜系 – sì dà cài xì). A famous Chinese saying gives us the basic clues to differentiate regional styles: “South is sweet, North is salty, East is spicy and West is sour” (南甜, 北咸, 东辣, 西酸 – nán tián, běi xián, dōng là, xī suān). For simplicity’s sake I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining that in this case South means Shanghai/Suzhou/Wuxi instead of the real South area of the country. What is clear is that people from different regions have different taste. For example, it is known that in North China people tend to prefer salty food but which is the main reason behind this choice? Due to the cold in Northern China, in the past there were no fresh vegetables available in winter so they preserved vegetables by pickling them with lots of salt.
This affects the shopping patterns, not only in terms of varieties consumed but also the standards for measuring; resulting in two different standard measures if you are buying food in the South or in the North of the country. In the South it is 250 grams (半斤 – bànjīn) while in the North is 1 kilogram (公斤 – gōngjīn). The reason is simple: In the past, in the South due to the heat there wasn’t any way of keeping food edible for long time so Southerners are more used to live from hand to mouth than their fellows in the North.
Other interesting fact is related to bitterness, which is used in Chinese cuisine but rarely alone. According to the Chinese, slight bitterness can make a dish more fresh and delicious. But a strong bitter flavor is normally related to the taste of Chinese medicine herbs so is too often considered to be an unpleasant flavour. This is a very important point in wine business, we shall return to it later.
Chinese hardly waste any section of the animals they eat and have found different ways to cook nearly every part. Chinese culture believes using any part of the animal the same part of the human body can be strengthened. For example, bird nest (which is made by bird’s saliva) is served to increase appetite or tiger bones are reputed to be a remedy for arthritis.
Regarding to wine, while we know for sure that Chinese wine consumers differ widely from Western consumers in how they respond to wine attributes or how they understand wine descriptors, taste preferences for this huge and varied market are not clear. To get a more complete understanding of Chinese tastes we shall continue analysing these topics to outline some key clues. But a lot has already been said about this today, so it’s better to leave it for the next occasion.
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