Al Jazeera Net - Beijing
With the expansion of the land and the multiplicity of nationalities to which 1.4 billion people belong, Chinese cuisine has become one of the most diverse and interesting around the world.
According to the prevailing Chinese culture, there are no restrictions on the choice of food, but this opened wide doors for "culture of tastes".
Traditional Chinese habits are mainly dependent on plant foods. The main food is cereals, and complementary foods are vegetables, as well as a small amount of meat.
Six hundred kinds of vegetables
Although the Chinese eat more than six hundred vegetables, according to the "Soho" website quoted a survey conducted by Western botanists, they often pay attention to the color, smell and taste of food.
The most worrisome, internally and externally, is the fact that some Chinese seek to experiment with soups of wild animals and eat some of them based on food habits that prevailed during the royal dynasties in the Old Testament, which prompted the competent authorities in China to adopt a decision prohibiting trade and consumption of wild animals, in order to protect biological safety And environmental and public health risk prevention, as the decision entered into force at the end of February.
Nationalities and customs
The Chinese people belong to 56 nationalities, each with a vision of eating habits and controls, some of which are governed by their beliefs, and others linked to cultures that determine this.
Ten Muslim nationalities - most prominent of them Hui and Uighurs - include about 30 million people based on Islamic law, which shows what is forbidden and analyzed.
Buddhism, which is embraced by about 120 million people, is forbidden to eat all kinds of meat because of its belief in reincarnation, and its belief that its souls may have been inhabited in the bodies of other human beings.
As for the Tibet region - whose children believe in Tibetan Buddhism - it is forbidden to eat fish and birds based on the heavenly and water burial customs, and the belief that they eat the remains of the deceased.
For its part, the Nationalism of Man prohibits the eating of dog meat because one of them saved the life of a king from nationalism, who ordered the prevention of hitting that animal and its slaughter, but rather stressed the necessity of burying it after death as an expression of respect.
And Shui Wei, a specialist in tourism journalism, points out that a large number of Chinese - the majority of whom belong to the Han nationality, which constitutes 92% - are friends with dogs and cats, while a large segment of Internet users support the procedures of the competent authorities in preventing and dealing with wild animals.
She adds in an interview with Al-Jazeera Net that some people eat wild animal meat linked to traditional Chinese cultures indicating in their content that these animals are beneficial to health "although this has no scientific basis", in addition to these animals "were rare dishes especially for the families of emperors in the Qing Dynasty Hundreds of years ago, which became a symbol of social standing. "
The Yulin County in south China's Guangxi Province is holding what is known as the "dog meat" festival despite the presence of voices opposing it. During the past years, quarrels took place between the owners of stalls and activists while trying to save the dogs before they were slaughtered.
At the beginning of last April, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture issued new guidelines to reclassify dogs as pets, not pets, to prevent eating them.
And the Chinese research giant "Baidu" is organizing an awareness campaign to protect wild animals and prevent their trade and eating, as it works to block any information about the way they are sold and the places of trade in them, in addition to messages that appear to the browser calling for the necessity of protecting them, "they do not belong to the dining table."
Gaps
in law In some provinces, law enforcement authorities have launched inspection campaigns to ensure that there is no food in restaurants, market sales, or any transactions and advertisements on Internet platforms related to wild animals.
But the emergency team to respond to the Covid-19 epidemic in China published a research paper beginning last April on the history of the intertwining of wild animals and the state of the epidemic in China, in which he stressed that many difficulties and problems - in more than one aspect - are facing relevant laws and regulations imposed by China to prevent Wild animal trade.
The team added that the epidemic has revealed a "gray area" in the wild animal trade, as many companies are suspected of being illegal and lacking supervision, and monitoring of protected non-major animals is relatively loose.
The research paper recommended the necessity of strictly limiting industrial breeding for protected national wild animals of the first degree, and preventing their entry into the popular trade markets as food ingredients.
Some local governments, according to the researchers, turn a blind eye to illegal trade operations in order to boost economic development, and play a positive role in increasing income and enriching farmers in some areas, but they stressed that continuing this meant the possibility of new waves of future epidemics.