Last August, the BBC reported that 'China's growing love of dairy products is threatening to push UK prices up'. Like many people who have travelled to China, I was startled: isn't lactose intolerance the norm among the Han Chinese, who form 92 per cent of China's population? Though you could sip an American ice-cream soda in Hong Kong, I never saw any dairy produce at all during my trips to mainland China in the 1980s, with the single exception of 'fried milk' in a restaurant in Guangzhou.
We now hear there are milk bars in Beijing, while the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says China's consumption of milk has gone from 26 kilocalories per person per day in 2002 to 43 in 2005. Is it coincidental that in 2006 Chinese children were reported to be an average 6cm taller than they were 30 years ago? The answer, of course, is that this is the result of increased calorie consumption from all food sources, just what you'd expect in a booming economy.
Milk aside, there's no doubt that visitors to the Olympics will experience very different food to what was on offer until comparitively recently. The most notable change is the existence of restaurants serving non-Chinese cuisines. If you go to Shanghai, as did chef Kylie Kwong for My China Cookbook: Stories and Recipes From my Homeland (Collins £30), you can eat world-class cosmopolitan food in her friend Michelle Garnaut's M on the Bund. Elsewhere, Kwong, a fourth-generation Chinese-Australian, engagingly admits to having eaten some terrible MSG-laden meals and justifiably rails that the 'inevitable pollution ... affects every part of the food chain'. There's a breathless, whistlestop aspect to her travels, but Simon Griffiths's photographs are often as moving as Kwong finding her family in Guangdong, and the resulting book is beautifully produced. Many of her recipes call for fillet of beef, brown rice vinegar or brown sugar, but I trust her palate.
A good deal more sophisticated, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China (Artisan £30) by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, a Canadian couple who travel, write and take terrific photographs, is a collection of recipes from the other 8 per cent of China's population - its 125 million members of China's official 55 non-Han minority peoples, most of whom live outside the Great Wall. Duguid first went to China in 1980, and her recollections, especially of 'Chinese regional food prepared by gifted chefs in banquet style, which meant there were many refined dishes and very little rice', exactly match my own. But despite the good writing and intrinsically interesting subject, you'd be hard pressed to love these recipes.
The Olympics, though, are bound to raise our Chinese food awareness. What classic Chinese cookery books might I recommend? The British cherish the Chinese-American Ken Hom (below) even more than his compatriots do. Any of his books will serve, but the one I like best is A Taste of China (1990, Pavilion). The late Yan-Kit So was a deeply scholarly person and you can rely on her recipes. I favour her Classic Chinese Cookbook (1984, Dorling Kindersley)and her Classic Food of China (1992, Macmillan). The undisputed champion currently writing about China is Fuchsia Dunlop; perhaps her Hunanese book, The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (2006, Ebury). A specialised, out-of-the-way book on my favourite meal is Dim Sum (1985, Macdonald) by Margaret Leeming and May Huang Man-Hui, with dozens of dumpling recipes.
