Dairying in China

by CHRISTOPHER RAND

ONE of the oddest of many post-war American good-will missions to China, and one that turned out even worse than the others, consisted of some three thousand dairy cows that began arriving at Shanghai early in 1947. The cows, which were under the management of UNRRA, included all the standard varieties—Holsteins, Guernseys, Jerseys, Ayrshires, Brown Swiss, and so forth. Many of them were the private gifts of American farmers, who wanted to help China get back on her feet, and who were undoubtedly influenced by a like project that had been carried out in Europe.

Almost a quarter of the whole cowmigration to China died in the first year. I visited some of the survivors last spring at a government station near Peiping. There were a few dozen cows there, principally Guernseys and Jerseys, which were fed nothing but old dry grass and were said to be giving only fifty pounds of milk a day among them.

During the war I was stationed for some time in the South China hinterland, and there I came to realize that dairy cows have almost no place in Chinese life. The peasants around me made their living by intensive hand fanning, really gardening, on small rice paddies. They were constantly having children, and their whole idea was to feed as many mouths from each paddy as they could. To this end they lived almost entirely on rice, with a sprinkling of vegetables and with a few bits of meat on feast days.

There were always ducks and chickens around and inside the houses, and often dogs and pigs, because these could be fed on household waste. But animals that would compete with humans for the soil’s direct increase were scarce. A few of the richer villages had water buffaloes, which helped to till the fields and turn the grain mills, but I gathered that they were tolerated because, as energy converters, they were more efficient than men they could deliver more horsepower per unit of food consumed. The presence in this system of dairy cows — which did no work, and which put out fewer calories than they took in — was unthinkable.

Anything that conflicted with this style of life was thought barbarous or immoral. The peasants’ main ambition, outside of keeping them selves alive, was to worship their ancestors properly. When I walked through the countryside on feast days I would come on scene after sence in ehich some poor farmer and his wife, thoroughly scrubbled and dressed in their best cotton clothing, would be laying out gifts — really expensive things like roast chockens and pewter pots of wine — at the family graves. Part of their duty was to have sons who would carry on the worshiping, and for this reason they got married when they were scarcely more than children.

Milk is available now in the big Westernized cities along the coast, but the idea is strictly an importation. The dairies were started under foreign control and management, and the customers are still either Westerners or Chinese indoctrinated in Western ways. The business hasn’t spread inland, and the more traditional Chinese neither like milk, which is classed with urine in some parts of the country, nor know how to handle it.

The Chinese officials who lived near me during the war used to go to extreme lengths to make me comfortable, because of their innate thoughtfulness and because I was a guest from an allied nation. There happened to be a few government-owned cows in our neighborhood, a hangover from some previous stage of Western-inspired innovation, which were lingering on as a sort of governmenta1 window-dressing despite the apathy of the people all around, and it was arranged that I should get a small daily milk ration. But the milk was usually sour by the time it reached me, since there were no facilities for cooling it in that hot climate, and no realization that speed in delivery was important. When it wasn’t sour, keeping it sterile was such a chore that the whole project soon fizzled out.

A Chinese neighbor who was a celebrated epicure used to entertain me and other Americans at meals that drew on the best of the local cuisine as well as that of his distant native province. How to return this hospitality was a great problem. We had the local restaurants prepare feasts, but in these we could express ourselves only by spending a lot of money, not by contributing any personal skill or knowledge. The results were flat and vulgar.

Finally, at great effort, we got hold of a sevenpound can of American Army cheese. At an afternoon reception for our neighbor and some other Chinese friends we piled the cheese, which to us was a rare delicacy, in several heaping plates on a long table. But not even our guests’ politeness, which was very great, could compel them to do more than taste it. They acted as if it were poison, and they would have gone away emply if we hadn’t luckily dressed the table up with some secondary offerings of rather mediocre local cakes and cookies.

It may be, as some experts claim, that milk and meat are necessities in any human diet, and that their absence leaves an intolerable vacuum. Indeed, this claim is borne out by the Chinese themselves, for they have taken a seemingly most unlikely object, the soybean, and from it have worked out a series of foods that duplicate, to an amazing extent, what cows give us. By grinding soybeans in small, primitive mills they make a white fluid called tou Chang, that tastes somewhat like milk, that looks like it except for being on the bluish side, and that is said to have much the same food value, minus the butterfat. This is a popular morning drink. It is sold, warm and usually sweelened, at stands near bus stations and the like, and if you wish, you can usually have an egg beaten up in it. It is one of the most cheerful things about travel in China, where each day’s trip generally begins at dawn.

From this same grinding process the Chinese also make a white bean curd, tou fu, of a consistency somewhat tougher than junket, which is often cured into a brown and more leathery substance called tou fu lean. Either way it is cooked into soups and stews as if it were meat. It has about the same protein content, and of course it is much more in line with the Chinese emphasis on the vegetable kingdom. The poor can eat it relatively often. It has a religious use among Chinese Buddhists, who are vegetarians. Some Buddhist temples operate restaurants where the idea is to imitate all sorts of meat dishes with bean curd. The imitation is very realistic, and things like pork chops and drumsticks are copied exactly. Bean curd is even sometimes pickled until it becomes a cheese-like substance, called ton fu ju. You can’t say it tastes like Roquefort or Liederkranz or Camembert, but it is the same general order of thing. Some American cheese fanciers have become very fond of it.