[Chinese story-3] Why Chinese people prefer noodles rather than bread?

In addition to the four great inventions of ancient China – the compass, papermaking, movable type printing press and gunpowder, some people believe that there are also another four inventions of China – zhou (including various categories of porridge, congee, and gruel) , fen (vermicelli made from rice, bean, or sweet potato starch), Mian(noodles), fan (steamed rice).

In the docmentary of Noodles Road, it put noodles into the grand social context of culture communication between the east and the west and concludes that even though they are ordinary enough, noodles did play a crucial influence on humans’ lives, especially in China.

Throughout the weatern world, except for Italy, nearly all other countries have chosen bread – another kind of food made from wheat flour, as their traditional staple food, while Chinese people have a special preference for noodles.

What are the reasons behind these two different selections? Only because westerners and chinese people have different taste preferences?

As we known, the development of food choice is always restricted to special social conditions, and the evolution of food cooking also follows some certain path. Hence, it is necessary to go back to the remote antiquity and analyze the transitions in agricultural society to see whether it was a contigent historical circumstance.

The raw material of both noodles and bread is flour. To make flour, wheat and stone mill are two indispensable elements, but both of which are considered to originate from the middle east, where people tended to bake wheaten food into bread, or clay oven rolls over a fire or in stoves.

When ancient Chinese people started to plant wheat, pottery and bronze ware were all highly developed. As people could not grind the wheat into powder without stone mill, they had to boil or steam wheats with water in pottery cooking utensils.

The difference in the begining lead to a series of differences afterwards. Generally speaking, hunting nomads prefer to bake food, while agricultural people tend to boil food.

Firstly, pottery played a significant role in the eating habits and ways of cooking in China, and in terms of processing food, Chinese people steam and boil food pervasively. Thus, after stone mill was introduced into China, naturally people would put water into the flour and boil it. At first, noodles were made into sheet-shape, and gradually developed into long and thin strips, because it would be easy to be cooked.

Secondly, the dietary structure of chinese people is based on more vegetables and less meat and those leaves, stems, and berries are not suitable to be baked. Obviously, only a bowl of noodles are not that tasty, various vegetables are perfect match for noodles.

Thirdly, Chinese people have the habit to eat soup, which is also not suitable for bake.

Fourly, as Chinese people use chopsticks as the main table utensils from very early times, which are very convenient to eat noodles. However, only until the sixteenth century, most western countries started to use forks, before that only Italian people used forks, and this can explain why only Italian people take pasta (another kind of noodles) as their staple food. Without forks or chopsticks, it was definitely inconvenient to eat noodles. In terms of bread, as the typical representative of western food, hamburgers can be described as the varietas of bread, and usually people eat them with hands.

Throughout the world, only Chinese people adopt four different cooking types: boil (cook with water), steam (cook with gas), bake (cook with fire), fry (cook with oil). Apart from that, Chinse people aslo use other methods to cook food, including braise, stew, roast, decoct, simmer, etc. But beyond all doubt, boiling is the oldest and longest used cook mehod, which was originated from the pre-Qin period, and has lasted for nearly 3000 years. This is why wheat flour was made into noodles rather than bread. Besides, steamed bun, dumplings, steamed stuffed bun, etc, are also good case in point. 

Looking back into history, if Chinese people chose bread instead of noodles, probably hundreds of bread would appear, but there would not be 1200 various kinds of noodles in the world.