So, I was complaining about the “green fever†that’s sweeping Taiwan, and why it doesn’t make sense when implemented in a knee-jerk fashion or without the benefit of scientific inquiry.
The in-laws wanted us to eat more food at home. They feel it’s valuable family time. My wishes that I want to go try different places that I can’t get back in Arizona didn’t enter into their equation.
Fair enough, maybe it’s true that we needed more “family time.â€
I’m sure they get just as much out of “family time†with me as I do from them… which is nothing. Their Chinese is far beyond my comprehension, and their English is insufficient to hold a conversation with me. Having a dinner conversation with my wife as translator is not fun for either of us.
I don’t like my in-law’s cooking, either.
On the last night I ate at home with them, they insisted on having a meal at home and they prepared several dishes, plus, without really asking me one way or the other, a separate dish of pork chops just for me. (Never mind my fears about getting diseases passed on via toilet paper fed to pigs.) The problem is, while I love pork chops, or steak, or whatever type of “western†food my mother-in-law prepares… she doesn’t know how to cook it.
What I got was thin strips of shoe leather marinaded in turpentine.
Since I have no part to play in the dinner conversation, it takes an extra special effort not to show my… delight… at the special food made just for me.
[Hang with me, I haven’t really lost my train of environmentalism thought, we’re just taking a necessary detour.]
One alternative would be for me to cook for them. That would be fine, I enjoy cooking and I make many tasty dishes. I know they’d eat them and, even if they hated them, they’d smile and carry on… and they don’t have blogs to write about it in, either.
The problem is, you can’t get the ingredients here and they have no ovens to cook in.
Chinese cooking does not traditionally use an oven so it’s no surprise that homes aren’t equipped with them.
They do have a toaster oven. It may be older than I am, and has a cubic volume of about 10“X8â€X6“=480â€3 It’s hard enough to reheat pre-cooked bacon or toast a slice of bread in, let alone cook anything that requires heat.
It should go without saying that there’s no microwave. “Microwaves are unnatural and sneak out of the ovens and are dangerous. A friend told me that and they wouldn’t lie.†Never mind the fact that the physics of microwaves makes it impossible for them to “sneak out†of the oven enclosure. (I later learned that friend actually owns a microwave. I wonder what the word for “hypocrite†is in Chinese?)
So, after the dinner, I was talking to my wife about my shoe leather marinaded in turpentine. (Which, it turns out, my wife actually cooked, under her mother’s supervision.) Thoughtfully, she did at least sneak a little salt onto the chops. Her mother wouldn’t let her use it because, apparently, just a pinch of salt will kill you stone dead, instantly. (Let’s just ignore the facts that the elements of table salt are crucial for life and that they body contains approximately 7 tablespoons at all times or that it is particularly important to maintain salt intake when you’re in a hot, sweaty climate like Taiwan.)
But here’s where we get fully back on that environmental track. My wife did something before frying my pork chops that was unconscionable to my mother-in-law’s way of thinking: They had just used the same skillet to cook some of their food and my wife washed the skillet with soap before reusing it!
Yes. Using soap is a no-no. Apparently, they don’t wash their dishes with soap anymore. “All those detergents are bad for the environment.†They just wash ’em off with water and if they’re greasy, they use the rinse water from the family rice. “Starchy water has been proven to be the best thing to remove grease.†Yes, it is an old-time remedy to remove grease, but “best†is a comical use of the word.
So here’s what would be a typical evening: Sitting around the house, being eaten alive by malarial mosquitoes (despite your all-natural bug spray), eating all-natural pork that’s fed on human and animal waste, off all-naturally dirty dishes.
It’s an all-natural lifestyle that reminds me of a Monty Python skit, which goes something like this: “To study the penguins, his team spent six months in Antartica living like penguins… and consequently dying like penguins.â€
That’s how it feels here. They’re trying to take one big collective step into the stone age so we can live and die just like cavemen without the benefits of thousands of years of progress. “Natural†doesn’t always mean “goodâ€. Malaria, Cholera and Typhoid are “all-natural,†too.
I unashamedly proclaim that the history of western science and technology is characterized by the word “progress.â€
It hasn’t achieved utopia, and it isn’t without its tradeoffs, but we don’t die on average under the age of 30 anymore or live our lives malnourished and struggling all our lives just to get food and survive.
Progress brings new problems and new challenges, but this almost new-age nonsense to chuck it all and live the simple, natural life is a deluded ideal that completely disregards the weight of history. The “good old days†generally sucked.
I can’t say for certain that my in-laws behavior is “typicalâ€, but based on commercials, the products on the market and interactions with other people, this mentality is being ingrained in the popular culture.
Not coincidentally, that was the last meal I would eat in my in-laws house on this trip.
(It’s also a pity on the first week or so I didn’t know about the rice water for cleaning the dishes, which they collected in a pot in the sink. Naturally, I saw it as dirty water in a dirty pot in need of washing in the sink with the rest of the dirty dishes, and would rise soda bottles out and dump the rinse water in it, and sometimes even place my dirty plates in it. I didn’t know.)