A trip to Taishan

A visit to Sarite Li's family farm was a great day

Driving around in China it was not uncommon to see vegetables being grown on what could best be described as the nature strip. The Chinese love fresh food. With very little to no refrigeration food has to be prepared and eaten relatively quickly. You can order fish or chicken in a market and see the animal killed, prepared and cooked all in a matter of minutes. If you like scorpions you can get them still alive impaled on a skewer ready to cook - you don't get fresher than that! The food we ate in China from north to south was great; all sorts of things prepared in all sorts of ways. Markets proved to be fascinating with some of the most diverse produce observed on the trip. A walk through the Taishan wet markets was an eye opener with everything from pigs to fish and frogs to snakes for sale. There were many types of vegetables, nuts and fruit in any market we went to, some produce familiar, some not. A lot of melons are grown and used in cooking there but one of the most common vegetables used was eggplant. It was in a large proportion of everything we ate, prepared in all manner of ways and was beautiful to eat every time. It was nice to see tomatoes featuring on more than one occasion in some of the dishes as well.

Taishan wet market

Flying south from Hoh Hot to Taishan, we found ourselves in a totally different world of a lush green tropical environment with many rice fields. Taishan claims to be the home of the overseas Chinese. In the late eighties, seventy percent of Chinese Americans claimed ancestry to Taishan.

We were honoured to visit Sarite Li's family farm and village and see what rural life in this area is like. Sarite's father grows vegetables and melons for market. We learnt that most farms are only around one fifteenth of a hectare. No one owns land there and every 5 years farmers have to surrender their plots and are allocated new land through a ballot system. Rice plays a big part in farming there and it is common to see rice drying on the road, sometimes spread over half of it. Rain is common so drying a crop is problematic. The rice is gathered up at the end of every day. Until 2003, all farms paid a rice tax in rice. Now farmers are not forced to grow rice, opening up opportunities for them to grow other things to make an income.

A walk through some rice fields up to a local fish farm and piggery was an eye opening experience. Open effluent running into ponds full of fish had me questioning if I should order fish again for dinner but the fish seemed to be enjoying eating the stuff. I saw a lot of peanuts being stripped and laid out to dry there as well. We noticed a lot of very small rice harvesters (no longer than four metres) being moved around, tiny machines on tracks that most of the grain growers in the group found very interesting. Though I will not be rushing out to buy one, it was a good reflection of the scale of farming in the Taishan area.