Batgung

I recently read an interesting book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The author, Michael Pollan, traced the sources of all the food in four very different meals: a McDonald’s fast food lunch; a couple of organic dinners, one from ‘industrial’ organic sources, i.e. raised for the mass market, and one from a single eco-friendly farm; and an elaborate dinner he concocts from foods he’s either hunted (a wild pig) or gathered (mushrooms, etc.) himself.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is well-written and frequently provocative, and Pollan is ideologically quite restrained; the book’s far less polemical than similar tomes in recent years such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Greg Critser’s Fat Land.

Pollan does descend into prolonged introspection at points, especially when trying to decide if he’s capable of shooting the pig (I found myself thinking ‘Just pull the damn trigger, already) for about 30 pages. Overall, I’d certainly recommend the book.

And of course reading this book, as well as a couple of other books on food, has gotten me thinking about how the food in Hong Kong really gets on our tables. I have just begun trying to find some answers to this deceptively simple question, so bear with me. I promise I won’t go on at book length like Pollan does!

So, what do we know about the food we eat in Hong Kong?

The most obvious and salient factors are that the vast majority of Hong Kong’s food is imported, and that a high proportion of this imported food comes from mainland China. The rest of Hong Kong’s food comes from sources scattered all over the world. On a stroll down the aisles of any local supermarket you’ll see products from a number of Asian countries (e.g. Japanese snacks and Thai rice). You’ll also see lots of luxury foods from European sources; that’s to be expected – it’s going to be worth the costs of shipping to send over bars of high-quality chocolate or tins of pâté de foie gras.

But what’s surprising is how many non-luxury but seriously-shipped foods are on Hong Kong’s shelves. For example, China produces lots and lots of chickens, but the frozen ones in my local Park N Shop are from Brazil or the USA, and they’re actually far cheaper than the fresh ones trucked in from the mainland. Large proportions of the dairy products on sale are from Australia and New Zealand. Even bulky products such as paper towels and toilet paper are often shipped across the Pacific so they can be applied to Hong Kong’s spills and, um, let’s just move on.

According to Pollan, of course, all of this is a Very Bad Thing. Buying cheap imports not only exacerbates the environmental problems associated with long-range shipping, it encourages the factory-farming and intensive-processing practices that likely lie behind these products’ cheap prices.

It seems obvious, then, that if we environmentally-conscious types (which surely describes lots of expats in Hong Kong) want to do our best for the world we live in, we should buy fresh, and buy local. And since that, in practice, means ‘buy Chinese’, we have lots of choices: the local wet markets are cornucopias of shining produce, freshly-slaughtered meats, live seafood, and interesting dried, salted, and otherwise-preserved foodstuffs. And it’s likely most of this food comes from not that far away, as Guangdong province has a climate favorable for growing a wide range of food plants nearly year-round, and still lots of farmland and cheap labor.

But if this sounds so ideal, why are expats’ shopping carts at Great or CitySuper or even the nicer Park N Shops frequently so loaded down with imported fruit, meat, and just about everything else? (One note: I’m not looking to get judgmental here; I buy loads of imported stuff myself!)

Well, there’s of course the comfort factor, i.e. many of us would prefer to eat products we’re familiar with. And some expats may be uncomfortable with going to local markets, which can seem quite dirty and chaotic at first glance.

But I think many of us are also concerned about just the issues I’ve been outlining in this article, and that Pollan expands upon in his book: we’re looking for safe, organic produce and milk, and humanely-raised and slaughtered meat. We’ve no doubt heard the news reports about contaminated eggs and fish from the mainland, about all sorts of weird substances being used to stretch soy sauces, and so on. We’ve seen pictures of bear bile farms, and wonder, if bears are treated like that, how about chickens and pigs?

So what’s the best option? Is it better to ‘buy local’, thereby getting fresher, less-processed food that’s been travelled a minimal distance from farm to table. Or is it better to stick to products from overseas that are certified ‘organic’ or ‘humane’, but which must have preserved via freezing, refrigeration or other means, and then have travelled many thousands of petroleum-fueled miles just to get here?

I’ll make an admission here I don’t often make: I just don’t know.

I would be most interested in hearing what the rest of you know or think about this issue.

Some initial web searching did turn up some interesting facts about Hong Kong’s food supply. I’ll just list a few highlights for now.

Hong Kong’s Agriculture and Fisheries Department website is not big on information. It does tell us, for example, that each day Hong Kong people consume 5,600 pigs, and 420 tons of fish – but only 130 cattle.

From a paper prepared for the Legco Secretariat, I found out that in 2000, about 1.8 million live pigs were imported into Hong Kong, and about 450,000 were raised here for slaughter. (I wonder: where would you fit 450,000 pigs in Hong Kong?)

A 2004 report from the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service provided a view of the Hong Kong market from the perspective of someone trying to break into it with imports. This report yielded some interesting facts:

• In 2003, local production accounted for 5% of fresh vegetables, 31% of live poultry, and 23% of live pigs. Everything else is imported. (I’m frankly amazed the local production numbers are this high!)
• This report characterizes the HK food market as exhibiting ‘severe competiton’ for prospective importers.
• Frozen foods and organic foods are steadily growing in popularity. In 2001 there were just 200 organic products for sale in HK; in 2004 it was 2000. I’ll bet it’s far higher than that just two years later.
• Hong Kong people are the most impulsive food buyers in Asia.
• The single most popular snack food in Hong Kong: ice cream. (I’d never have guessed this.)
• Hong Kong consumers are not brand-loyal when cost differences are involved.
• Supermarket sales first exceeded wet market sales in 1998, and continue to grow.
• Here are some figures for the amounts of some selected products that were imported into Hong Kong, and consumed here, in 2003: oranges – 211,000 metric tons; apples – 134,000 metric tons; eggs – 1.548 million; fresh vegetables – 577,000 metric tons; wine – 10.2 million liters; beer – 116 million liters (much attributable to batgung consumption, of course); ice cream – 6,000 metric tons.
• The top ten food products in Hong Kong: Amoy dim sum, Coca-Cola, Doll dim sum, Dreyer’s ice cream, Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce, Mr Juicy orange juice [aaiiieee! –ed.], Nestle Dairy Farm fresh milk, Nissin instant noodles, Vitasoy soya milk and Yakult lactic drink.