Chapter 22 flower to eat

Flowers are for viewing, not for eating.This is a common everyday experience and a basic aesthetic principle. Of course, these things are not unchangeable. From planting and picking flowers to appreciating, cherishing and destroying flowers, we have finally stepped up to a new level of "eating flowers" and entered the "Mood for Love" of eating. According to the newspaper, eating flowers, that is, humans have a "delicious relationship" with flowers, has "gradually become the latest landscape of urban catering consumption today." "Let the flowers bloom on the dining table, and truly realize the beauty and delicacy on the dining table."

Reason: eating flowers is good for health; evidence: flowers are rich in vitamins.It is said that during the Second World War, there was a severe shortage of fruits and vegetables in Britain, and many women and children suffered from scurvy due to a severe lack of vitamin C.In order to solve this crisis, the British collected local roses and extracted vitamin C from them to meet the urgent needs. In 1943, the United Kingdom extracted and produced 2.5 million bottles of rose jam, which effectively alleviated the rapid spread of the bad luck. Blood disease development momentum, and finally make scurvy be cured.

I believe that the nutrients in cow dung will definitely not lose to English roses, but whether something that contains certain nutrients must be eaten is another question.Experience tells us that the reason why food becomes food depends largely on factors such as good taste, economy, and efficiency in addition to nutrition, and is also influenced by customs and culture.I am not saying that flowers cannot be eaten, what I mean is that flowers cannot be eaten. My question is that the nature of flowers and the character they are endowed with make them face great obstacles in eating. There is a famous theorem in the textbooks of aesthetics and sociology, and the location is inappropriate.That is to say, if a person sees a cockroach infesting a ditch on the street, although he may not be elated, he will not be upset. If a cockroach appears on the dining table, people will be frightened and even angry.The same goes for flowers, in turn.

According to Li Shizhen, eating flowers has a history of more than two thousand years in our country.During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, people in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and the Jianghuai Chu area had the custom of eating flowers. Advocates of eating flowers still have an ironclad evidence in black and white, that is, "drinking magnolias in the morning and falling dew, eating autumn chrysanthemums in the evening" in "Li Sao".Qu Yuan didn’t eat flowers like this from morning to night, only he knew, anyway, I don’t believe it, I even think, apart from Mulan/Qiu Ju and Zhui Lu/Luo Ying, which are neat in terms of confrontation, “Li Sao” as a whole Not too believable.It is true that we eat zongzi every year for Qu Yuan.

Whether you ate it in the past is not important. What matters is whether you ate it later. In the primitive society, cannibalism was still popular.In any case, people must have a reasonable reason to eat flowers, and they cannot eat flowers without flowers.For example, ethnic minorities in Yunnan have a tradition of eating flowers. This is because where they live there are many flowers. There are more than 2,500 kinds of flowers in the mountains and plains. The varieties they usually eat are kapok, orchid, jasmine, rhododendron and magnolia, etc. , are readily available.In addition, once so many flowers fall with the wind, there must be corpses all over the field, which will inevitably give birth to the vulgar idea of ​​"putting an end to waste" when people are sad. Therefore, ethnic minorities in Yunnan often sing folk songs while The reason for picking the edible flowers that are about to bloom back to my home is that I can't bear it.

Apart from being reasonable, the rest is the fiction of the literati: Princess Xiangxiang in the novel loves to chew flowers by nature, so her body exudes a burst of fragrance that is "not the fragrance of powder, nor any flower fragrance in the world", which inverts all living beings.According to her self-report to Chen Jialuo, the leader of the Red Flower Club: "There are many beautiful flowers that bloom on the grass... I would rather not eat cattle and sheep, but also eat flowers. I think it is because I love to eat flowers, so I have been sick since I was a child." There's a smell, don't you like it?" At this time, Chen Jialuo was sitting next to her, "I just felt a burst of faint fragrance seeping out of her body, it was obviously not the fragrance of snow lotus, nor any flower fragrance in the world, I just felt elegant and quiet, Unspeakably sweet."

After all, it's a novelist's words, if you can eat flowers like this, it's not a human, it's a bug. Flowers are not inedible, in fact, they can be seen all the time on our daily food list today. According to "Qunfangpu": "All the products of Qiju and chrysanthemum can be used as vegetables, porridge, preserved, and powder..." Even in Cantonese-style teahouses, we can casually say more than two kinds. flower name.The "five-flower tea" that Cantonese drink for dehumidification is made of honeysuckle, white chrysanthemum, kapok, frangipani, and Sophora japonica.In addition, there are too many flowers to be used in wine and medicine (for example, using Datura flowers to make Mongolian medicine).Hangzhou people dry their "Sanqiu Guizi" to make tea and porridge, or hide them in bottles and sprinkle sugar to make "Osmanthus dew", which is used to make lotus root powder, which tastes great.

When it comes to osmanthus, the ancients once regarded the osmanthus tree as "the best of all medicines".Said: "Osmanthus is edible, so cut it." "Book of Rites" said: "Osmanthus, what the king eats is also a delicacy." Lily is also an edible flower. It is usually used to make syrup with mung beans. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that it has the effects of moistening the lungs, relieving cough, clearing away heat and calming the nerves.As for the taste, Yi Shu said that it is "sweet and astringent, I don't know what it symbolizes in the world".

In fact, although lilies can be eaten, they are edible and have a "bite head". Unfortunately, the "lilies" on the dinner table are only the stems of lilies. It's not "wild lilies also have spring", but "wild lilies also have today". Therefore, most of the so-called "eating flowers" we see are not really eaten, but are used for proper seasoning or decoration (many spices are also inseparable from the mixing of flowers).In short, flowers can be mixed into vegetables, but flowers are not vegetables.The flowers are nice and fragrant, but this kind of fragrance is not the kind of fragrance we require for the dish, but it has a strong astringent taste.Let's classify flowers as a kind of "vegetables", but that kind of texture is not the texture of "vegetables" that we can accept.

Flowers have not been included in the official list of vegetables, because people generally only eat the roots, stems, leaves, fruits or seeds of plants, but have no appetite for flowers as their reproductive organs. Although shrewd housewives in Guangzhou I have the habit of buying flowers in the vegetable market. The newspaper said: "The upsurge of Hong Kong people eating fresh flowers is in the ascendant, and it is gradually spreading. It is said that there have also appeared research institutions in Hong Kong that specially introduce how to eat fresh flowers, and publish some promotional pictures from time to time, which has attracted more and more people. people join the ranks of eating flowers."

I checked the information and found that a large part of the so-called "eating flowers craze" in the media is based on Hong Kong's "said": "There are many flower feasts in Hong Kong, almost all of which have a strong fragrance, and Hong Kong people eat them." There are many varieties of flowers, roses, jasmine, chrysanthemums, lotus, rhododendron, sweet-scented osmanthus, flowers of various vegetables and fruits, and even dandelions, etc., are all tea in the cup and delicacy in the plate." Although the name is "Xiang", except for a small group of radical environmentalists, Hong Kong people did not eat flowers crazily because of this. To prove this, I found the sensational "Flower Banquet" once launched by the Kowloon Hotel in Hong Kong. "The menu includes 26 dishes, representing 17 kinds of famous Chinese flowers, including the "Wang Peony Series": the grouper is meat, rolled and then fried, and it is built into a peony shape when served on a plate.Boiled geoduck in the original cup, that is, the sashimi of Canadian geoduck that has been manipulated into the shape of a white peony. "Fugui Apricot Peony": In fact, it is sea mantis and mantis shrimp, so named because of its peony-like tail.In addition, there are "Four Gentlemen Series", including "Chrysanthemum Dongli", that is, chrysanthemum mandarin fish, "Bamboo Forest Double Ten", double bamboo stewed mustard green bean sprouts, "Treading Dew to Find Plum", steamed bamboo fungus with preserved vegetables and cheese Yuba.Even the "salted sakura," borrowed from Japanese cuisine, is nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle of sakura patterns made of pickled ginger and cucumber slices. In short, the twenty-six dishes are called "Flower Banquet". In fact, except for the fine-painted flowers and shapes on the wall worth more than ten million Hong Kong dollars, and the "borrow" in the name, there is not a single flower. .The reason why I want to make these so-called "cauliflower styles" public here is nothing more than to illustrate two problems: First, Hong Kong is indeed a "fancy world", but this "flower" has nothing to do with that "flower" 2. Although the IQ of Hong Kong people is average in general, they are not stupid enough to eat flowers, except of course broccoli and cauliflower. After talking for a long time, I actually don't quite understand what kind of market factors and cultural psychology are behind the advocacy of eating flowers.I just vaguely felt that someone must think that there are too many flowers in this world, so I came up with the idea of ​​eating flowers.Of course, these people may also be deeply worried about the future of human beings. The resources on the earth, including food, are shrinking day by day, but the population and population are both increasing. When the meat, food and vegetables are finished, when they arrive there One day, what do we live on?That's right, trying to eat flowers now is a way to prepare for a rainy day, maybe you won't even have to eat flowers by then.What are those pitiful "standards of taste" hidden in the mouth and "cultural psychology" in spirituality compared with this possible bleak prospect?We have always regarded bamboo as a symbol of "integrity" and "goodness", but who hasn't chewed "integrity" and "goodness" in the bud?It's exactly: People who eat flowers today laugh like crazy, but who do you know who eat flowers in other years? What flowers can be eaten and what flowers can't be eaten is actually more like a book of confused accounts.I only know that there is a kind of flower on the dining table that is edible but absolutely inedible.This is the garnish that chefs carve from radishes or fruits. Since it is carved out of melons and fruits, and since it blatantly appears in the dish we bought with money, even if you don't eat it, what reason do you have against us eating it?Anyone who has worked in a Chinese restaurant will tell you the same answer: this flower must not be eaten, let alone be played with.In order to carve this flower, the chefs have spent a lot of effort, and it is intended to be recycled, that is to say, when the dish is removed, it is best to return the original flower without any damage, and the chefs will soak it. In the water, save it for the next time and let it meet guests "shuilingling".If the chef sees the flower disappearing from the withdrawn plate or showing any defects, it is inevitable to yell at him. What a countryman, who has never seen the world, what a starving ghost, what an uneducated person ... After all, the difference is just the degree of viciousness of the words used.Who does he scold?Of course it won't be the colleague on the floor, it's you, the flower destroyer.