BEIJING—It may have been during our visit to the Laoshe Teahouse, a glitzy tourist trap off Tiananmen Square, that I realized how hard our Chinese hosts were trying to please us. It wasn't just the floor show—two country boys imitating jet planes, a tubby dancer "balancing porcelaneous flower jug on head and throw it in the ambience of the evening," and of course the fabulous "face smearing of the Sichuan opera also called blow facing!"
No, the really thoughtful touch was the chow waiting for us as we entered the restaurant: bags of congealed KFC french fries, with ketchup. Lots and lots of ketchup, in little foil-wrapped Heinz packets. There was a good reason for all that seasoning. I was with 44 other foreigners, most of them tomato farmers, canners, and food processors, who had come to China on a tour with the World Processing Tomato Council.
China, it turns out, now grows more tomatoes for processing—the kind that get turned into ketchup, pasta sauce, salsa—than any place in the world besides California, and maybe Italy. The precipitous rise of the country's tomato industry, which scarcely existed a decade ago, is wreaking some havoc. The Senegalese claim that cheap Chinese tomato paste is driving farmers off the land. Turks, Aussies, and Russians have similar complaints. The Italians are especially unhappy: The Silk Road over which Marco Polo brought home the pasta has turned into a pipeline of cheap tomato paste. "The phenomenon of Chinese tomato paste is grave and preoccupying," Calabrian newspaper Gazzetta del Sud opined recently |
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