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The Glorious Cuisine of Guangzhou
Appears in
By Ken Hom
Published 1990
The food of contemporary southern China is, in the opinion of many, the finest in the world. It combines quality, variety, and a nutritional effectiveness that allows it to sustain more people per acre than any other diet on earth. South China may well cultivate more crops, at least on a commercial scale, than any other comparable region. Certainly it is well endowed with native (or long-cultivated) crops and has also been quick to add new importations to its roster. To pick a recent example, Taiwan has taken up cultivation of asparagus and European mushrooms. In addition to cultivated plants and animals - from microscopic yeasts to giant palms, and from carp to water buffalo — wild plants (especially herbs) and wild animal life (especially aquatic, but also including game) contributed much to the diet. South China … has the most diverse flora of any region outside the wet tropics. A complexly faulted and folded landscape blessed with abundant rain and warmth encouraged tremendous diversity, and the human inhabitants of the region were not slow to make use of this. Indeed, they increased it, by borrowing every easily adaptable crop from every major region on earth. With animals, the borrowing was less extensive, but even so a large number of domesticated strains is found. ... the southern Chinese diet feeds more people, better, on less land, than any other diet on earth.
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