Safely in Hong Kong
Your faithful correspondent slaving away
As those who follow me on Twitter know, MD and I made it safely to Hong Kong. We have in enormously busy schedule while we’re here, so I’ll put up smaller posts as we go along interspersed with some larger ones as I have time. As you can see from the above photo, I’m hard at it, ensconced in our hotel room overlooking the harbor with the Hong Kong skyline in the background. Below is another photo from our hotel room window. Our hotel (for one night) is on Kowloon across from Hong Kong Island, which is the skyline you see. Actually, it’s only a small part of the skyline. Hong Kong is New York on steroids. An amazing place.
We flew over on Cathay Pacific business class, which, if you’ve got to make a 15 hour flight, is the only way to go. Great seats that make into beds, great service and spectacular food. The only wierd thing about the whole experience is the realization of how seriously the Chinese and the Honk Kong-ese take the swine flu. All the cabin attendants on the plane wore masks. We had to fill out a health declaration to enter Hong Kong and another when we got to our hotel. I would estimate that about a fifth of the people walking around are wearing masks.
But, masked or not, the folks at Cathay Pacific put out some good food. Good low-carb food, at that. Below is a photo of my breakfast on the plane. Lightly scrambled eggs with salmon, terrific wobbly bacon, sausage, broiled tomato and some hash browns (that went uneaten).
Cathay Pacific breakfast
Last night we ate in a restaurant not too far from our hotel. We asked our guide (the guy we’re working with who is a Brit, but lives here about half the time) for a traditional restaurant, not a tourist restaurant. The restaurant he chose was capacious; I would bet there were at least 200 people dining there. And we were the only non-Asians.
We sat at a large round table with a lazy susan in the middle. The waiters kept bringing food and putting on the lazy susan; we rotated the dishes and served ourselves from them with chopsticks. Our host apologized because he said the restaurant wouldn’t be serving rice like we were used to in Chinese restaurants in the US. He said the notion that people ate a lot of rice over here is not true – at least not in Hong Kong and the parts of China to which he travels often. (Our host doesn’t know what MD and I do – we are here on a totally different matter that has nothing directly to do with low-carbing.)
We had numerous dishes, all of which were some kind of meat. The favorite of the table was crispy beef, which is shown below. Absolutely delicious.
We ate mountains of various kinds of meat and fish and ended up with a giant plate of Peking duck, which we were almost (but not quite) too 
full to eat. During this entire feast, the servers brought only one vegetable dish to the table. It’s pictured at the right. Sauteed, not steamed, broccoli. Delicious. Not a single grain of rice did we see. A few noodles, but not even many of them. And no bread. And, sadly, no napkins. There was a box of what we would call facial tissues on the table that we used as napkins. But that was it. Oh, in looking at the picture above of the crispy beef, I noticed one other vegetable dish that I had forgotten about because I hadn’t photographed it specifically. It is the Chinese cole slaw to the upper right of the beef. All cabbage that is tangy, crisp, spicy and delicious. They must have brought us a dozen of these little dishes of it.
I looked around at as many of the other 200 patrons as I could see from our table and as we walked in and out. All were eating the same things we were. Meat, meat, meat. Of the 200 patrons and dozens of servers I saw, there wasn’t a single obese person. My observation of Hong Kong as a whole is that there aren’t really any obese people here, at least by US standards. There is some chubby, but not much obese. At least not that I’ve seen.
We are heading via ferry and car to mainland China today to go to an industrial city with a population of 60 million. You read that correctly. 60 million. The factory we are working with is there, and I’m keen to see it. We will stay there tonight, then be back to Hong Kong tomorrow.
@ Rick
“Your phrase …seems to imply that there’s some easily measurable physical or chemical correlate of yin-yang. Is that assumption correct? If so, it offers a lot of hope for integrating Chinese medicine with western.”
Not correct. This way of categorizing foods (hot-warm-neutral-cool-cold) occurs, to my knowledge, in all “primitive” cultures, and is far from an exact science. Some Chinese researchers have suggested that pro-oxidation equals yang, and anti-oxidation equals yin, but this does not pan out correctly.
We determine a food’s thermal effect by direct experience…that is, when you eat it, do you feel warmer or cooler or no change; and, how does it feel to the tongue/mouth?
In some cases, we can find in the food (e.g. cayenne) some compound(s) that exert the thermal effect (e.g. capsaicin), in others (e.g. lamb), to my knowledge, we have not identified any single chemical that makes it heating. In all cases we are actually dealing with the effect of the whole food, not just one component. I think most people can “intuitively” sense that e.g. watermelon is cold, based on experience that eating watermelon feels really satisfying when the body feels hot. This is where Chinese science, medicine and nutrition differ from the reductionistic trend of Western sciences. Chinese thought focuses on the direct sensory experience and the context of the experience for information, whereas Western medicine tries to isolate a single chemical responsible for an action.
Regarding cinnamon and ginger, they exemplify why we have difficulty identifying direct correlations between yin-yang and western categories like “antioxidant.” Since oxidation resembles burning, you might think an antioxidant “quenches fire” so would be classified as yin. But in direct experience cinnamon and ginger feel hot, generate circulation, etc, so Chinese science classifies them as hot. Again, Chinese science deals with wholes (ginger), not parts (e.g. only the antioxidant capacity).
I don’t know of any book accessible to the layman that deals with these nutrition topics with any attempt to integrate them with Western science. The Dao of Chinese Medicine: Understanding an Ancient Healing Art by Donald Edward Kendall does discuss the scientific basis of Chinese medicine but is really suited only to practitioners.
I do have a blog; clicking on my name takes you to it.
Don
I’m a bit late – I didn’t know the Drs Eades were in Hong Kong which I where I live. But…
A belated welcome to Hong Kong, Drs Eades!
Although Dr Eades says he didn’t see many obese Hong Kong people, I can say that over the twenty-some years I have lived here the numbers of overweight have really risen. Back in the 1980s it was rare to see an obese people. But nowadays it’s very common. And we have tourists coming from the Mainland who are also very obese.
And Dr Eades is correct about rice eating. It isn’t eaten as much – or in such large quantites – as people might think. If eaten, it is in a quite small bowl that fits in a cupped hand. But folks do like their noodles and wonton.
Glad you enjoyed the food!
Thanks, Don, for pointing out what should have been obvious as regards clicking on your name! Thanks also for the tip about the Kendall book. I’ve just read the quite generous selection of pages that Amazon provides, and have learned that much of what I “know” about Chinese medicine may be a product of mistranslations from centuries ago. The book seems eminently readable, so I’ve gone right ahead and ordered it.
I moved to Hong Kong from Canada 3 years ago, and believe me, HK people eat a LOT of rice. And noodles, and bread/pastries. If you stay in the wealthier areas, you will see less of it. But get into middle-class Kowloon and the eastern side of the island, and you will have a better idea of what the general population is like.
I see obese people every day. Of course, obese Asians are typically smaller than obese Westerners, due to smaller frames, but there are still plenty of them. Most men over 40 have the bulbous abdominal obesity that you often see with carb junkies.
And if you eat in a middle-class or budget restaurant, EVERYTHING is based on rice or noodles, with a side of meat. Vegetables are extremely rare. When I go out, I try to order the dishes with the most meat, and order a side of veggies (they are usually served steamed or sauteed). Occasionally, the waitress is unaware of the fact that they even serve veggies by themselves. One time at a ‘cha chan teng’ (HK style western cafe), a waitress displayed a shocking look on her face when we asked for vegetables! She couldn’t believe that we didn’t just want to order huge piles of fried noodles or rice!
I’m sorry, but if you think HK (and China) people do not eat large amounts of rice, you have a skewed perspective, perhaps based on only going to fancy expensive restaurants where they serve dozens of tiny dishes. Go to a normal, every-day restaurant, and you will see people eating piles (literally, piled onto their plates) of fried rice, fried noodles, or huge bowls of noodles in soup.
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Hong Kong also has some pretty good snacks, the most famous among ethnic Chinese tourists being a sweet pastry known as Sweetheart Cakes (老婆餅 lo po peng) and the most famous shop selling this is Hang Heung (恒香), located at Yuen Long (元朗) in the New Territories, though there are branches located throughout all of Hong Kong.
For those who wish to eat Hong Kong’s famous seafood, there are different locations in Hong Kong’s coastal areas where freshly caught seafood is cooked and served. Places like Sai Kung, Po Doi O, Lei Yu Mun, Lau Fau Shan are good places to find restaurants specialized in seafood. These restaurants have different tanks to keep the seafood alive and will present live seafood specimens to their patrons for them to choose before cooking. Raw fish, known as yee sang (魚生) in Hong Kong, is a relatively popular dish and is prepared differently from Japanese sashimi.
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