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��Home>>China Observer
Beijing's local snacks disappearing fast
www.chinanews.cn 2006-04-21 09:36:17
Chinanews, Apr.20 - The Qianmen Hutong (narrow lane) is being dismantled.
With more and more hutongs disappearing, the "habitat" where Beijing's
leisurely local snacks can be found is shrinking by the day.
In the food family, snacks are the most casual and undoubtedly worth
waiting for. If dinner is compared to an adult, snack can be regarded as
a child, something consumed in a small quantity between meals. People eat
snacks not only to fill their stomachs but also to fulfill the quest for
unique flavors in an unrestrained environment. When one grows up, one has
many opportunities to gobble banquet-like meals. Sometimes, one remembers
snacks and tries for a chance to savor familiar flavors once again. This
is similar to the boredom that comes with being stuck in the same posture
for a long time that can be best dispelled by dashing outside and
sprinting in the wild.
Innocence can be found in snacks. Tastes always take shape in the period
from infancy to childhood. Snacks often accompany one's growing-up
memories; and are a type of time tunnel made up of taste buds. No matter
how old one is, if only he tastes his childhood favorite snacks, he will
feel that time has run backwards and he has returned to the past. Just
like a stick of sugar-coated fruits, a roasted sweet potato or a sip of
bean milk with fried dough rings will bring a typical Beijinger back to
his past.
Any place has its own specially cultivated product nurtured by the local
natural environment. People call food processed by local residents in a
unique way "flavor," spoken of in the same breath as lifestyle and
custom. If an out-of-towner, such as a traveler, arrives at a place and
wants to learn about the natural conditions and social customs of this
place, his experience of local food will be crucial. Generally speaking,
if one is not used to and does not like the local food, he is inclined to
dislike local life and customs as well. This is a visit and exchange of
taste buds.
Different from visible buildings such as a house and a street, flavor is
intangible and invariably fades away without much notice. For instance,
the disappearance of Beijing's snacks has not drawn much attention like
the dismantlement of courtyard houses in the city.
Hutongs are the roots of snacks. Without them, Beijing snacks will become
homeless. Snacks were originally a product of hutongs and a community
where people knew each other. At that time, people lived on ground
floors. Neighbors, both adults and children, would greet each other and
hang out around snack booths in hutongs. Nowadays, people closely pack
different floors on skyscrapers, high above flat earth. Stacked up one
atop the other, these high-rise residents, whether on high or low floors,
run into each other daily as they ascend or descent, but they hardly know
their neighbors. Without Beijing's hutongs, snacks will be scattered from
supermarkets to malls to night markets on major thoroughfares.
Consequently the city will gradually lose its source of nutrition and
become coarse, like a beauty missing her moist and pink skin.
Beijing is the capital, and the capital city's liberalization determined
that Beijing's snacks would be transformed faster than snacks in other
cities. The snacking customs of other places, from far north to down
south, have brought new flavors to Beijing. The pursuit of fashion and
novelty is human nature, and applies to what people eat. Beijing's snacks
have become more varied but also more like snacks of other places.
Currently, hand-pulled noodles, steamed dumpling in soup, lamb kabobs,
chocolate, ice cream, hamburgers and potato chips, seen everywhere in
Beijing, might become the memory of taste for this new generation
children.
Those indescribable flavors might never reappear. In the past, life was
harsh and snacks were not consumed at will. Nonetheless, whenever one
snacked, one tasted real flavor and the natural colors, smell and taste
would linger in one's memory. Nowadays, snacking is no longer a big deal,
but people can never savor that combination of color, smell and taste.
Chemical fertilizers, steroids, pesticides, whiteners, pigments and
reclaimed oil turn street snacks from standards of tastes into objects of
suspicious origins.
If the changes accompanying this era is a symphony, a snack is no more
than a ballad, but this ballad echoes the innermost, warmest and softest
sentiments of one's heart and its invisibility and silence add a tinge of
melancholy to the melody.
For Beijing's residents, hutongs with snack booths and stable
neighborhoods are not the only things fading away. They also witness
something else taking place beyond recall in front of their eyes -
age-old Beijing flavors are becoming mere memories day by day.
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