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Posts Tagged ‘food’

Fruit and vegetables now defy the seasons … with one exception

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »

When I was a kid my mother was still in the habit of shopping daily. We had a fridge but it hadn’t really changed our eating habits yet. Most shops featured a counter, behind which the “assistant” would stand and fetch what you wanted.

Fruit and vegetables were different. These came from a specialised shop called the greengrocer’s, which was set up rather more like a Hong Kong wet market. The fruit and veg were out on shelves or in baskets so you could inspect and fondle the goods.

There was a big open space in the middle of the shop where the greengrocer performed, juggling fruit, chaffering with the customers (most of whom he knew by name) and weighing purchases on a large weighing machine.

There was, I noticed, a lot of variation in what was available. We were at the mercy of the climate. You ate salad in the summer because that was when lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes were “in season”. You had Brussels sprouts with your Christmas turkey because sprouts were the only green vegetable immune to frost. Strawberries were a treat at Wimbledon because they had been unobtainable for nine months before

Apart from bananas, which came from – I suppose – banana republics by refrigerated boat, and citrus fruits, imported from Spain, to every thing there was a season, as the song had it.

Well we have changed all that. Wandering my local supermarket I find that most of the fruits and vegetables are reassuringly consistent. They may come from different places at different times of the year but they are always there.

This is partly because food now frequently flies. So what is out of season in the northern hemisphere will be just coming into fruition in the southern one. Also a lot of food production is now conducted in entirely artificial environments. Confused plants can be persuaded that it is fruit time regardless of the calendar.

This is all well and good, and no doubt makes it easier to follow a healthy diet. But there is one exception. We have just passed, you may not have noticed, the end of the lychee season.

I was a fan of the lychee long before coming to Hong Kong. This is because Chinese restaurants in the UK, at least outside the big cities, sold a rather specialised foreigner-friendly version of Chinese food, and this did not include desserts.

If you really wanted a dessert there were only two possibilities: ice cream or tinned lychees. This was thoroughly misleading. When I came to Hong Kong I found whole restaurants devoted to Chinese sweet dishes, offering an intriguing range of soups, dumplings, fruits and variations on rice. There were no tinned lychees or, for that matter, ice cream.

In due course I was introduced to the real fresh lychee. In those days the Xinhua news agency office in Hong Kong was routinely described as China’s de facto embassy in the colony, but they did perform some press relations stuff. And so I was invited on a day trip to see the lychee harvest in Shenzhen, which in those days still had trees and farms.

I am not sure how the industrial scale picking is done but we were all issued with bags and urged to help ourselves. The lychee tree is a conveniently low tree.

But it seems somehow to have eluded the trend towards fruit and vegetable globalisation. You can get lychees when they are in season in Guangdong. Outside that time you can’t. This is surprising.

When kiwis were a New Zealand speciality they were seasonal. But the fruit – also known as the Chinese gooseberry – was long ago transplanted and copied. So now they come from a variety of places and you can get them all year round. Why has this not happened to the lychee?

Let me offer a free suggestion to any New Zealand farmer who thinks the kiwi business is getting a bit crowded these days. Buy, borrow or steal a lychee tree. In the summer – that is your summer, not ours – you will have the world to yourself.

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Eating outside: a must-try experience which is fading away

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Let us now praise legislator Judy Chan (New People’s Party; Electoral Committee constituency) for what appears to be an effort to make sense of the government’s policy on food served in the street or, as the official phraseology has it, “fixed-pitch and itinerant hawker stalls selling food with local characteristics.”

In this laudable pursuit Ms Chan put down a written question. Indeed she did not just put down a question, she composed a mega-question. Short story writers have managed with fewer words. After a little warm-up paragraph the question consists of ten sub-questions, some of them with multiple prongs and alternatives: is the government doing X and if so how many times in the last three years and if not why not?

This literary brick dropped into the lap of the Secretary for Environment and Ecology (cool new job title, if I may say so) Tse Chin-wan, a recycled environmental civil servant. Mr Tse’s equally lengthy reply exemplifies the rule in these matters: the longer the question the less you learn from the reply.

The problem here is that one of Hong Kong’s traditional attractions is the street restaurant, or dai pai dong, which offers tourists the alluring prospect of a local meal in the open air. Years ago you found them all over the place. Luard Road, Wanchai, for example, a much wider road than the traffic required then as it still is, was reduced to two lanes by a row of stalls on each side.

Over the years they have gradually disappeared. This does not appear to be the result of lack of custom. Most observers diagnose a classic case of official hostility. The official line, as articulated by Mr Tse, is that if there are any “suitable proposals which are supported by the relevant District Councils, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) will give consideration with an open mind.” He did warn that it is “very challenging to identify suitable sites.”

Many people who used to sell food in the street have been relocated to “cooked food centres” in municipal buildings. They are usually upstairs from the wet market (diners with delicate stomachs should avoid walking past the butchery horror show) and feature wet tiled floors, bare concrete walls and a lot of fans because there is no air conditioning.

In my experience the food in these places is OK but the ambience is not. The toilets often leave a lot to be desired too, though I must add in fairness that the facility in the Kennedy Town market is fragrant, floral and wins prizes.

A long time ago I joined a small group who met regularly on Friday nights at a place in Fotan which is probably not, in official terminology, a dai pai dong because it has a real kitchen with mains water and electricity. It gave you the flavour of the experience, though, because the tables extended gradually through the evening onto the territory of the adjacent bus station, so you would eat, weather permitting, sitting in an unused minibus stop.

This was a pleasant arrangement and gradually caught on with our friends, so that on some Fridays the group required two 16-people tables, to the great delight of the lady in charge of promoting the sale of Yan Jing beer. This is the state beer of China, though, in the opinion of many experts, not as good as Tsing Tao.

There was, though, constant trouble with the FEHD. A uniformed squad would arrive and terrify the operator of the establishment with threats of huge fines if a table wandered outside the area officially designated for dining. Their van would sit nearby, occupied by a driver who was sometimes spotted doing unmentionable things with his nose.

At knocking-off itme, which I think was eight o’clock, the uniforms would get in the van and go home. People who arrived earlier would often stand around waiting for the hour of liberation and amusing themselves by developing new insults for the FEHD, or Food Gestapo as we called them.

This was apparently standard procedure in many parts of Hong Kong. Many government departments have little foibles which do not really make sense. The Transport Department will not entertain speed bumps. The Police Force, though it has long abandoned the system under which retiring sergeants were expected to own large parts of Toronto, still has a thing about the ICAC, and so it goes on.

The FEHD is, for some reason, peculiarly hostile to dining in the open air. There are, of course, some potential problems with street food hawkers, involving things like noise, hygiene and rubbish, but this does not explain the department’s visceral hostility to people eating in the open air, even if the food is coming from a pefectly respectable restaurant and the space is not being used for anything else.

As a result Hong Kong has always been a problem area for open air dining, unless you get away to somewhere rural or an outlying island. And dai pai dong are an endangered species. There are only 17 left.

As tends to happen with endangered species they are now being eagerly touted to foreigners as an attraction. “Eating at a dai pai dong is a must-try Hong Kong experience and you can’t call yourself a real foodie if you haven’t dined at one,” chirps the Tourism Board on its social media.

Two of the Cooked Food Hawker Bazaars where the board suggests you can enjoy this experience are officially described as “temporary”. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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