Food that is fast

Fresh fast food may be a bit of an oxymoron in America but in China this is the norm. The fast food restaurant fare here consists of noodles and dumplings freshly prepared and rapidly cooked in boiling broth. Freshness is so important that ‘leftovers’ are a foreign concept and are rarely taken home after a meal, and that even complex foods are usually cooked when you order them rather than ahead of time and kept warm. The fish should be killed only when you are ready to eat it.

A weekend ago, a group of us headed out to nearby SongJiang by bus. Hungry when we arrived, we hit up the closest hole in the wall place we could find, and smell. A dark skinned man making magic with the dough in front of the store was enough to convince seven of us to crowd around a tiny table and take a chance with the non-English menu.



For 4 yuan a bowl, we each ordered a large bowl of vegetarian ‘la mein’ (pulled noodles). Pulled noodles are a specialty from western china (Gansu and Xinjiang Provinces), where a single piece of dough is pulled and folded over and over again to make one very long noodle. We watched in fascination as this man from XinJiang cut a block of dough and turned it into a perfectly uniform ball of noodles within seconds. Each noodle was then tossed into a boiling broth for less than a minute and served with fresh baby bok choi, cilantro and spring onion. So within five minutes, the seven of us each had our own bowl of noodles, each made from scratch. I guess Marco Polo really liked the noodles he discovered on the Silk Road, but didn’t quite manage to take the noodle making technique back to Italy.

Here is the noodle-y video on google: La Mein Noodle Making



So this is fast food. Nothing comes in a frozen package. Nothing is shoved in, smashed in, fried in or processed in a giant computerized industrial machine by an operator who knows nothing about cooking. Efficiency comes from the craftsmanship of the head noodle maker, and his supporting team managing the broth and the toppings. I don’t think I can ever look at Taco Bell and McDonald’s the same. How can fast food in America be more intimate like this? How can fast food in America be more experiential rather than something merely focusing on convenience?



Street food is equally tantalizing for the snack lover. Although weary of stomach troubles at first, Ela broke me into street food a month ago and it has been non-stop since. Our common street corner (Fuxing Lu and Shaanxi Lu) presents a new surprise every day – there’s the old man who sells sweet potatoes that he roasts on a 55 gallon drum, there’s the entrepreneur who discovered that the movie going crowd would enjoy the fresh caramel corn that he makes from back of his bicycle, and there’s the battle-worn woman who sets up a shack once or twice a week selling fried egg omlettes and tofu. Perhaps the simple fact that these street vendors need to set up and tear down their stations quickly means that they can’t make whatever they are making in bulk quantities and hence the resulting freshness of single batches. I have never tasted a fresh batch of caramel corn made specifically for me, from scratch with sweet butter and raw cane sugar, until now.

In the western world, I believe we have lost touch with where our food comes from, which is dangerous. I don’t know what is in my food or where it comes from because everything comes in neat tidy packages that resemble nothing of its original existence. A piece of fish isn’t supposed to look rectangular; a piece of chicken breast patty isn’t supposed to be perfectly round. If I order a fish dish and the fish comes with the head and the tail attached, I know I am getting a fish and not some processed piece of random mixed meat.

As much as I cringe when I go to open markets here and see live animals in cages, I get the sense that the Chinese have a much deeper understanding and respect for their food because everyone is exposed to the journey of raw material to meal regularly in daily life.

More food photographs from China: Food Photo Album