safe to eat

The United States has states. China has provinces. And both of these geographical building blocks, with their hard-defined borders and softer-to-sell regional specialities, help their residents carve a personal identity out of the country as a whole.

We live in Sichuan province where food is spicy and complex. Life is lived slowly and fully. And the girls are so pretty that a young man who comes here may never leave. Or so I’m told.

I say these things because they are what I’ve heard and because they make sense based on my brief life here. But if you asked me to start walking and say when I’d stepped out of Sichuan and into neighboring Yunnan, I couldn't do it.

I couldn't identify an unmarked state border in the United States either. That’s why we have all of those cordial highway signs welcoming you to Illinois after bidding you a fond farewell from Wisconsin. Even in our own backyards we need the little white fence to remind us when we’ve wandered onto the neighbor’s side of the yard.

This lack of footing is more drastic when you're abroad. And it's why I’m focused on building a beginner’s grasp of all of the little parts that make up the whole.

It’s about collecting the clues and cultural threads you run past in daily life until that collection of odds and ends becomes a definition, a familiarity, a sense. It's slow-coming and only blooms with travel, and conversation, and mistakes made into opportunities.

In mid-August I went to Yunnan province and staked my first understanding of that part of the whole. So what I have now, when I think of Yunnan, is a very personal definition that comes from four days of cross-country travel and many hours in a car. It comes from walking on Kunming’s dusty and constructing city streets and then later weaving through tall grasses in the shadow of Lijiang’s mountains.

I have seen Yunnan’s famous mix of peoples who live together in a vibrant mix. The mood is warm and colorful and pulsating, and the people are open and friendly. They also sell and eat a lot of mushrooms.

Lots and lots of mushrooms.

 

They're sold at the markets in long stretches along the street, laid on tarps and sheets with the dirt still clinging to these freshest of funguses. Mushrooms are on most restaurant menus and the best are displayed out front the way a bakery lures its audience with rows of pastries.

So naturally, when you’re in Yunnan, you’re supposed to indulge in this local speciality. We obliged and at most meals ate at least one mushroom dish. And from my newbie perspective, they were good.

However, at one point I was clearly too much of a newbie to appreciate the local delicacy that was before me.

We were having dinner in a small town outside of Lijiang and there was an incredible spread of food. Everything looked fantastic and I sampled almost every dish with one important exception: the plate of fresh mushrooms.

This was one of the most appetizing dishes of the group but when I looked closely it was obvious that the mushrooms hadn’t been cooked. They were raw, and this broke one of my only rules for eating on the road: do not eat raw foods that cannot be peeled.
 

And the real kicker was that when I looked terribly closely at the mushrooms -- because I was tempted by the dish and really hoped to find an excuse to eat it -- I saw there were tiny delicate worms on the mushrooms. Yes, slender little worms were walking and waving on our food. Thinking I had to be mistaken, I asked my colleague if I was seeing things.

But she saw them too. And being from Sichuan, and not from Yunnan, she also wondered whether the worms were supposed to be there. She pointed them out to the waitress who wasted no time in making it painfully obvious that she thought my colleague and I, and our collective concern about the worms, were a little misplaced.

With both nonchalance and impatience in her voice she huffed, "Of course there are worms on the mushrooms… Everybody knows that the worms are how you know the mushrooms are safe to eat."

The worms are how you know the mushrooms are safe to eat.

How does this not become a substantial chunk of my Yunnan understanding? Especially when the remaining five people at our table, all from Yunnan, agreed enthusiastically with the waitress and were more than happy to eat the Sichuan folks' share of the mushrooms.

(To her credit, my colleague was very polite and ate a few pieces of mushroom that she swears had no worms.)

I had several colleagues with me at the meal and they all ate the mushrooms. And I suppose I shouldn’t wait any longer to mention that when we got back from the trip they all got varying levels of terribly sick. In trying to figure out what happened we discovered that the only real difference between my diet on the trip and theirs’ was that they had all eaten those raw mushrooms, along with a smattering of raw lettuce in the mountains.

This is not meant to besmirch the mushrooms of Yunnan. The mushrooms are obviously among the freshest that are to be gotten in China. I for one will never forget this. And I would hate to leave everyone thinking that my Yunnan knowledge will start and end with mushrooms. Far from it.

 

Thanks to Yunnan I now know a little something about minority traditions in China and about the unique challenges of eco-tourism in the area. I know that in Yunnan you can drive above the clouds for miles. I also know that there are places here with skies as blue and crystal clear as any other part of the world, with green valleys and wildflowers and lakes filled with melted mountain snow.

I know there’s a lady outside of Lijiang who makes fantastic cheesecake and that deep-fried Yunnan cheese tastes more like phyllo dough than a dairy product. I know that if you eat vegetables that are washed in the creek you will be ok.

I know these things because I went to Yunnan. And I will keep them close and add them to the build-up of knowledge that one day, hopefully and maybe, will make up a greater understanding of this very diverse country.

A country where even worms on the food mean something different depending on where you are.