Hequan Village (河泉村)
And now for something completely different. I've left you in the partially in the dark so far, because our trip to China actually had two goals from the start. Besides looking into soil erosion on the Loess Plateau, we were also researching sweet potatoes for Charles' next book (a sequel to his bestseller 1491).
We spent a day or so in Beijing interviewing historians and scientists, learning about the sweet potato in China in both the past and present. We also visited the National Library and searched through texts from as early as the 17th century, which was pretty exciting since as much as I enjoy reading old texts, I haven't had much of a reason to do so since I stopped writing a couple years ago.
In Beijing we acquired quite a collection of texts and journal papers, and throughout the trip spare moments were occupied by translation of key sections (crazily enough, this continued in the taxi on the way to the airport on our last day, and even in the airport!). The extra work after work made this trip even more exhausting than normal, but these trips are hectic no matter what since there's always something other than sleep and relaxation to occupy our time. Actually, there was also translation of documents and books related to desertification. I left home with a half-empty backpack, and it came back with me full and heavy.
Back to the point. Our purpose in Xuzhou was to interview scientists at the Xuzhou Sweet Potato Research Center, the largest in China.
But interviews aren't very photogenic, so we'll skip that part.
After lunch with the scientists (I ate a cicada larva to make Peter, my step dad, happy), they took us to Hequan village, about 30 km east of the city, to see a sweet potato-growing area and meet farmers who were just then harvesting them.
Sweet potatoes are a great crop because they grow well where almost nothing else will grow at all. They also have a variety of uses, and are good for flour, snacks, noodles, biofuel, and, of course, Chinese medicine. In addition to selecting and breeding varieties resistant to diseases and identifying those suitable for different purposes, another goal of the research center is to promote new uses for the crop (they are currently working on uses for mashed sweet potatoes).
Hequan's farmland is on a gradual, rocky slope at the base of a hill unsuitable for most other crops; the locals say that even their corn harvests aren't very bountiful, and corn is generally not too picky about where you plant it. Despite the incredibly rocky, shallow soil (10-20 cm), they've got plenty of sweet potatoes.
Three kinds of sweet potatoes are grown there, one for high starch content (the larger red ones), and two others for food.
This farmer (following picture), standing in front of a plot of unharvested sweet potatoes, used only 25% of his fields for sweet potatoes this year, but claimed he's going 100% next year because the crop grows (and sells) so well; he said his neighbors would be following suit. (We were also told of plans to build a 50-acre, 200,000-ton biofuel factory run partially on sweet potato starch, another good reason to switch over.)
Uniquely shaped baskets are used to collect the vines and leaves, which are fed to animals.
First the vines are cut and gathered using the hand scythe pictured here,
then the sweet potatoes are dug up, gathered into piles, and bagged.
Sweet potato can be eaten many ways. Some kinds, sweet and crunchy, can be eaten raw.
(This kid was unsatisfied with the small size of his sweet potato and only took one bite, insisting that his mom let him eat the big one he was holding in the earlier picture; but that kind isn't meant to be eaten.)
Many people are also unaware (including in China) that the leaves of the sweet potato plant can be quite tasty, as well. It's actually a common green here in Taiwan.
But my favorite is roasted, the way you can find them sold by vendors on city streets, a common sight in cities across China during colder months.
