The Great Wall, Terracotta Soldiers, red lanterns and Peking Opera maybe the first things you think about China, so you must be surprised if I tell you there are desert, grassland and glacier in my hometown, Xinjiang, China.
Xinjiang is the geographic centre of Eurasia, the Talimu Basin and Zhungaer Basin are the most far places from the ocean which are separated by Tian Mountain (7435m high). Local people here, such as Uyghur, Kazak and Tajik are minorities in China compared with Han People, they live on grazing and oasis farming.
Sheep and hours are the most important support in native life and economy. People feed them, eat their meat, drink their milk, use their skin and fur to sew cloths and shoes, make their tails into musical instruments, and people love their animals, their fellows.
Mutton in other places has dudur and is really not smell good, but saline-alkali soil in northwest China makes water and grass here alkaline, and it can neutralize the acid in mutton and remove the odour.
Climate in Xinjiang is too dry for agriculture, indigenous people can only cultivate some drought-enduring plants, they have very few choices. Having Meat and milk (especially toasted) year by year cannot support all nutrition human body needs, and such diet with high protein, fat and calories can cause hypertension and hyperlipidemia and other angiocardiopathy, but a survey shows that native people fed on meat and milk whole life have less cholesterol, triglyceride and lipoprotein than immigrated Han people who cook much more vegetables and eat more “scientifically”. Why??
Indigenous people in Xinjiang of course have their traditional environmental knowledge, too. They found these kinds of treasure in such a poor land environment: onions and carrots, they also have thorough technique to ferment milk. It’s their secret.
Onions with rich vitamins and mineral can provide organosulfur compound to keep out cancer and kill germs, and it’s the only vegetable with prostaglandin A that can help to enlarge vessels, reduce blood viscosity and promote sodium salt excretion, thus can definitely prevent thrombus and hyperlipidemia. Besides, onions are good to bone density and selenium in onions can keep people younger. The carotene in carrots is a strong antioxidant that can strengthen phagocyte, and carrot has an all-sided structure of nutrition. Xinjiang people almost have these two food everyday so that they can keep healthy.
Diet structure based on meat can cause indigestion, so native people created diverse raised dairy products. After fermented, milk has more free amino acid and lactobacillus, and less lactose, it can promote gastrointestinal peristalsis, protect other vitamins, help absorbing.
Traditional knowledge is just amazing, local people all around the world know how to survive and live better in different environments, generation by generation.
——Zhang Yin
Zhang Yin-
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post...thank you for sharing about your hometown!
--Melissa
This is a really nice example. It shows how the "science" in the Western, empirical sense of the word wasn't an important factor in their diet. The foods they eat are based on which foods they know about that will keep them healthy and strong. While it is good to know fermented milk has more lactobacillus than unfermented milk, what mattered to these people is not that single fact, but the fact that they know fermenting milk is what promotes their physical health. It wasn't the science that determined their diet, it was their diet that was backed up by science later on.
ReplyDelete-Rachel