Chinese rice lovers are concerned over government plans to substitute local diets with more potatoes.
The government has announced their intention to reclassify potatoes to make them the fourth big staple food in China, alongside rice, wheat and corn. According to reports by Chinese media, by 2020 it is expected that 50 percent of potatoes will be used for the production of staple foods as opposed to an ingredient in small side dishes, as is currently the case.
Why the Potato Fad?
The issue of feeding China is a serious one, with the country having to supply food for one-fifth of the world’s population, working with only one-tenth of the globe’s arable land. Estimates suggest that due to population growth by 2030, it will be necessary to produce an additional 100 million tons of food per year to keep the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom from starving.
Trying to maintain a healthy level of self-sufficiency in a drastically overpopulated country is no small feat, yet the potato might help with this monstrous task due its many advantages over more sensitive crops such as rice. As spuds need less water to grow than other staple foods, they are the perfect solution for a country that faces increasingly sever water shortages; secondly, the European’s favourite staple yields more calories per acre than rice or wheat. Finally, they grow fast and furious in almost any location; even the hostile environments of Northern China. In the South, farmers can quickly grow a crop of potatoes in rice fields and paddies between rice planting season, showing that the potato is able to co-exist in peace with its neighbour kernel.
Hence the move of the government to redefine the potato as a staple food, as opposed to its current cultural and legal incarnation as a side dish. While it might be baffling, as to why the classification of a food receives such dramatic attention, it does bring with it a very real consequence; the promoted potatoes would receive preferential treatment in the domestic market.
That the government is serious about the move to spuds has become increasingly obvious for some time. As early as 2010, the Washington Post reported on an agreement signed in February that year between the government and the International Potato Center, a research organisation, for the launch of a major potato research center in Beijing. Here, Chinese potato scientists (yes, that is a real job) develop the “local spud”, i.e. different varieties adapted to all the varying environmental circumstances of China’s vast terrain; from the sandy West, to the freezing North and the humid South, that they might all go forth and multiply – and quickly too, please.
Some entrepreneurially minded (read ludicrous) comrades have even gone so far as to shoot potato seeds into space, where they grow in a zero gravity environment. Labeled as more nutritious, the astronomic Tuhao Tater comes at even more astronomic prices.
Potato Panic
The recent reports have elicited concerned reactions from parts of the Chinese population; especially those who have spent time abroad find themselves quickly feeling sick of the constant stream of potato infused nutrition, as Nanjing’s very own Channel 18 informs us in this week’s news report on the casus patata.
The good news is Friends of Rice (FoR) needn’t worry that in future they will be forced to ingest a bowl of potatoes with their Kong Pao chicken; the approach of introducing a more starchy diet to China is a more subtle one. The strategy is to include potato flour in a number of baked and steamed goods such as breads, buns and mantou, or even noodles, thereby less obviously infiltrating the Chinese culinary scene.
To us expats, the idea of a higher availability of potato in the local diet might be rather appealing; after all there is nothing tastier than a soft spud soaked full of garlicky soy sauce, as one taste of the North-Eastern Chinese dish Disanxian (aubergine, green peppers and potatoes, a recipe influenced by Russian cuisine) will prove to the open minded.
It seems the rise of the potato has begun…although rephrasing the German proverb “something as important as a sack rice tipping over in China” might be a little premature at this point. And with that…see you later, tater.
