Less meat, please!

By Gong Yidong

BEIJING, March 1 (Xinhua) -- The concept of hyperlipidemia -- high blood cholesterol -- would have been an alien and inconceivable concept to lean-waisted Wang Yan in her youth.

Like millions of other Chinese who suffered through decades of food shortages, Wang, currently weighing below 50 kilograms, is struggling to accept that life in modern China, with its plentiful food and well-stocked supermarkets, could be bad for her health.

But the threat is approaching. "I used to have one egg everyday, but I've cut back to three eggs a week to prevent high cholesterol," says Wang, whose father was diagnosed as having diabetes in 2000, followed by her older brother in 2007.

Born in southeast China's Fujian Province in 1964, Wang sees the last 40 years through memories of food, or more often the lack of it. She remembers the Chinese staple made up a large portion of the family's diet when she was a child. "When mum went to the rice shop, she always dragged back a 15-kilogram gunny sack."

Compared to her fellow countrymen, Wang was lucky because her father, who worked in a foreign-export company, sometimes brought back luncheon beef. He then requested the canteen to make a tray of streamed buns with minced meat. "All of my family members, especially my elder and younger brothers, seemed to have gigantic stomachs, we could eat so many buns," she says.

When Wang's parents worked as farmers in southern Fujian in the late 1960s as part of a campaign initiated by Chairman Mao to dispatch intellectuals to the countryside, Wang and her brothers were so hungry that they used to sneak slivers of meat off slaughtered pigs and cook them. "The meat was so delicious that I forgot the temporary hunger."

In the 1970s, all the staple and non-staple foods were rationed with coupons. "One of my happiest memories was a spring festival when each household in the courtyard was given a duck. Father stewed the duck, without any vegetables, and he was ecstatic."

The shortage of food lasted till the mid-1980s. Wang, who then was a journalist with International Business Daily, received a batch of yellow croaker fish from the newspaper office as New Year gifts. "They were so large that I made them into dry minced fish for an occasional good meal throughout the spring"

By the end of the 1980s, Wang's family had an ample supply of non-staple goods and the markets were booming. "Father made a variety of meat dishes, such as stewed spareribs, steamed pork and meat balls. His Chinese birth sign was the tiger, and he always said it was unimaginable for a tiger to live without meat. Actually, he lived with a shortage of meat for more than half a century."

The consumption of meat in Wang's family increased, while the eating of rice declined sharply. For dinner, Wang and her two daughters eat two steamed buns between them. One year, a five-kilogram bag of Thai fragrant rice lasted five months.