Memory of hunger the sauce for China's well-fed

Letter from Beijing: If you order a roast duck in a restaurant in China, a roast duck is exactly what you will get. All of it. The head, the wings and the feet will be placed on the table alongside the carved breast meat. The giblets won't actually be served but they will be used to make a soup that will follow the meat.

And the remaining bones will be scooped into a styrofoam box, wrapped in a bag and handed to you on your way out as ingredients for more soup. The doggie bag is a part of almost every Chinese meal, even in a fancy restaurant. What you don't eat, you take home. Wasting food is an unforgivable sin. All those 1950s Irish mothers would be proud.

The awareness of food as a blessing that is not to be taken for granted is all the more striking because it is, even in Chinese terms, relatively cheap. Every Chinese city is well endowed with restaurants for the simple reason that most people can afford to eat out, however simply. A dish of fried rice laced with egg, shrimp and peas makes a very filling lunch and an adequate dinner. Even in Beijing or Shanghai it will cost no more than €1.20, and in smaller towns it may cost half that. And a pot of green tea comes free. There are no tips expected, no service charges and no extras.

Recently in a small city near the North Korean border, two of us had a large bowl of chow mein (noodles with meat) each. We ordered extra meat and a pot of flower tea. The bill was exactly €1 - or 50 cent each. Even a very good restaurant in a big city offers excellent value. A significant feast with, say, roast duck, chicken, pork, mushrooms, broccoli, rice and five beers can be had for about €30.

Home cooking is, of course, even cheaper. The ingredients for a standard weekday dinner for a working-class family of four - rice, a fresh vegetable, some pieces of pork or chicken, soy sauce, garlic, ginger and some eggs and tomatoes for a thin soup - won't cost more than about €2, even in a big city. This may not be superb fare, but it is well-balanced, filling and nutritious. Even on small Chinese salaries, this food is affordable. And as market gardening replaces grain in the agricultural economies of the hinterlands of the big cities, little luxuries like nuts and fresh fruit are readily available and reasonably inexpensive.

Yet even with the relative abundance and easy availability of food for most Chinese people, the attitude to eating is still marked by a necessity to "seize the day". Food is still a communal experience - you very seldom see a Chinese person eating alone - and a public one that spills out on to the streets, where vendors barbecue kebabs or steam dumplings on every second corner. Construction workers sit or squat on the pavement during their lunch breaks, devouring rice. Lines of lorry drivers stop on the highways at lunch hour and, if its sunny, they sit on the back of the truck and suck up their noodles.

None of it seems merely functional. The relish and gusto make the act of eating the simplest meal seem like a celebration of survival.

This is not mysterious. Most Chinese were severely malnourished for much of their history, lacking especially in protein and minerals. As recently as the early 1960s a devastating famine, largely caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward, afflicted the country. Even today, while obesity is becoming a serious health problem in the cities, two-thirds of the population of the poorest rural areas - amounting to 20 million people - is undernourished. Almost one in 10 rural children under the age of five is underweight. Mineral deficiencies still cause significant levels of birth defects and of mental disability in some provinces. The memory and persistence of such hunger is a great sauce for the well-fed majority.

The huge enthusiasm for food also owes much to the fact that a variety of cuisine is, historically, a new experience for most families. Even in the 1980s, the diet of most Chinese people still consisted primarily of coarse grains, with meat consumed in small quantities and dairy products hardly at all. The popularity of various kinds of tripe and offal which persists among older Chinese people harks back to the time when these were luxurious fare.

Only with the break-up of collective farms and the gradual rise in incomes as a result of economic reform did chicken, pork, beef and duck become normal parts of the diet. Supermarkets and fast-food joints (Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's and Pizza Hut are ubiquitous) encouraged the taste for processed foods and succulent cholesterol.

The problem, of course, is that zeal for food in an era of market abundance makes for obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes - diseases that were once unimaginable for the Chinese masses. It is hard to tell people haunted by hunger that there is such a thing as too much food.