Original Yaohua Species Calendar
In the all-round dead-end music loop of "Congratulations, Congratulations, Congratulations," the New Year goods of major supermarkets are draped in red and grandly debuted. In terms of paying attention to the auspicious harmonics of Chinese New Year food, China's Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao regions are the well-deserved first. Thousands of years of heavy business style has made the Cantonese cultural circle pay great attention to the auspicious "meaning", so in this cultural radiation circle, the most common is the dish related to "fortune":
"Fat vegetable pig hand" harmonic pronunciation "fortune on the hand"; "fat vegetable oyster sauce" harmonic sound "fortune good market", sometimes add a mouth strip (pig tongue) in it to simmer together, but the tongue and "eclipse" pronunciation is similar, called up may have an unlucky "erosion" worry, so changed to "pork ribs", this dish has become "fortune good market profit".
Pig Hand | wikimedia commons
Is it the harmonic pronunciation of "hair vegetable shiitake mushroom" that "wants to cry when you get rich"? Of course not, this dish has to be similar to its shape, alias "fortune money". In short, this black "dish" that resembles a strand of hair has long occupied the "c position" of Cantonese Chinese New Year's Eve rice.
It looks like seaweed, but comes from the Great Northwest
Because the shape and taste of the hair dish are somewhat similar to seaweed, and it is popular in China's Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao regions, and Southeast Asia, many people take it for granted that it is a tropical aquatic plant, but in fact it comes from semi-arid areas with little precipitation. Although the vegetable is included in the "List of Wild Plants under National Key Protection (First Batch)" that prohibits export, strictly speaking, it cannot be regarded as a plant.
Nostoc flagelliforme, officially known as "candida", belongs to the cyanobacteria phylum, cyanobacteria, segmented organisms, candidae, candidae, candidae, is a terrestrial cyanobacteria, and the same genus of candida (n. commune), Ge Xianmi (n. sphaeroides) is a close relative. Although it can achieve autotrophicity by photosynthesis, it is a prokaryote without a molded nucleus.
A close relative of the hair dish, also known as the ground fungus | wikimedia commons
Each "hair", the original plant of hair vegetables, is a "colloidal composite group", many cells are lined up in a single string to form a candy-shaped strip of algal filaments, wrapped in a thick and uneven colloidal sheath, forming a slender black-brown algae body of 30 to 50 cm long and no more than 0.25 cm in diameter. The algal filaments are not "twisted into a rope", but are arranged roughly parallel and longitudinally inside the rubber sheath, and many algal filaments in the same hair dish do not grow and develop at the same time, but multiple stages of development coexist simultaneously. The main components of the algal filament are vegetative cells with photosynthetic functions, as well as heterogeneous cells with nitrogen fixation ability.
The beaded cells of the genus candida are shown in a beaded pattern | stephen skinner et al. / telopea (2002)
Overall, the appearance of the original plant is indeed very similar to human hair, appearing curly and split when dry, and smooth after soaking enough water. In some protoplasts, there is also a "knotted" situation, that is, slightly expanded relative to other positions, commonly known as "hair root", which may be the initial structure when the cells divide to form new algae. Some hair vegetables have the phenomenon of "seeding", but in fact, the surface of the gelatinous coating the seeds of other plants.
Although it is distributed in Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, it is only China that really eats it, and the history of consumption is not as long as imagined. In China, hair vegetables are mainly distributed in the desert grassland areas of Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Xinjiang and other western provinces, growing close to the ground or tangled with each other into a messy clump, also known as "ground hair".
The internal cellular structure of the ground vegetable (labeled nc) and the hair vegetable (labeled nf) | marina aboal et al. / journal for nature conservation (2016)
The growth rate of hair vegetables is extremely slow, although in its place of origin, it is generally believed that hair vegetables are like mushrooms, growing fast after the summer rains, but in fact, it is only because the volume of water absorption has expanded. Field observation studies have shown that under the condition of artificial watering and guaranteed light, the hair menu root protoplasm grows by an average of only 1.5 cm a month, and wild hair vegetables are far from reaching this level. To this day, it is still impossible to achieve large-scale artificial cultivation.
How expensive is it to eat hair vegetables
Qing Dynasty Li Yu's "Idle Love Occasional Mail" first mentioned the hair dish, Li Yu is not only good at writing a variety of indescribable bridges, but also has a good study of food, recording the "hair dish" he saw in Shaanxi, thinking that it was a roll of messy hair that fell when the maid combed her hair, almost thrown away, listening to the locals to explain that this thing can actually be eaten: "Soaked in boiling water, mixed with ginger vinegar, its delicious times as lotus silk, antlers and other dishes." Then the hair dish gradually went to the table in the field, tang Lusun from the late Qing dynasty aristocracy was known for knowing how to eat, according to his description, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the hair dish was already an important part of the vegetarian assortment, and one of the famous dishes of the "Xiangji garden" in Beijing during the Republic of China was "shiitake mushroom grilled hair dish", alias "Dharma futon", which is also very image.
Daqingshan, Inner Mongolia, the Four Sons Wang Banner in the northern foothills was once one of the main producers of vegetables | pixabay
Large-scale mining of wild hair vegetables began in the late 1970s, and with the continuous expansion of market demand, by the 1990s, it had tended to "cut grass and remove roots". Hair vegetables can not be harvested mechanically, only with a rake to root out the grass and hair vegetables on the ground, and then separate the hair vegetables and grass. According to the locals' recollections, when there is a large amount of hair vegetables, you only need to pick them up with your bare hands to separate the hair vegetables from the weeds, and after the 1980s, you had to use the method of "rinsing" to let the hair vegetables float out through water washing, and the quality of the hair dishes obtained was much worse.
If 100 grams of hair vegetables are collected, the price paid is to cut the grass on the ground of 16 football fields, which not only makes the hair vegetables almost rare in the wild, but also brings immeasurable damage to the ecological environment and vegetation. According to statistics in 2000, the collection of vegetables led to the complete destruction of 600 million mu of grassland in Inner Mongolia into a desert, and 160 million mu of grassland was in the process of desertification, accounting for 18% of the total area of inner Mongolia grassland. It is said that some of the regions with the highest consumption of hair vegetables have called for the replacement of hair vegetables with lettuce (raw money), but with little success.
In the desert of Yinchuan, the slow growth of recovered hair vegetables | xiang gao et al. / environments (2016)
In addition, eating hair vegetables also has certain risks to personal health. Some people believe that eating hair vegetables will "complement the shape" and make the hair more dense, but if you really eat it as noodles, it is likely to be counterproductive. In the process of amino acid metabolism, the vegetables will synthesize methylamino-l-alanine (bmaa), which is a neurotoxin, and eating too much will affect the normal function of nerve cells, and may even lead to Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
In 2000, the State Council issued the Notice of the State Council on Prohibiting the Collection and Sale of Hair Vegetables and Stopping the Indiscriminate Mining of Licorice and Ephedra Grass, and in August 2001, the Ministry of Agriculture and the State Forestry Administration issued Order No. 53, adjusting the protection level of hair vegetables to the national level, and since then, hair vegetables have no longer been allowed to be collected, purchased, processed, sold and exported. With the gradual improvement of the ecological environment in the western region, in the "Directory of Wild Plants under National Key Protection (Draft for Comments)" jointly formed by the two departments of forestry and grassland and agriculture and rural areas in July 2020, the protection level of hair vegetables has been quietly "downgraded" to the second level.
The "hair dish" of split hair
Since the collection and processing of hair vegetables has been banned, where do the hair vegetable products on the table come from now? There are even "mud carp balls" in the hot pot, which makes people feel that they become extralegals after eating a bite.
"Wigs" made from seaweed instead of hair vegetables make food | wikimedia common
In fact, excluding the corn whiskers, starch products, horsetail hair blackened and then disguised as hair vegetables counterfeit products, a large part of the hair dishes on the market now are sargassum fusiforme, which is also recorded as "hair vegetables" in the "Botanical Names and Facts", or the Japanese called "water clouds" and "sea clouds" of the sopranogae family Okamura okanus, usually called brown algae.
Okamura branch pipe algae | wikimedia commons
Thankfully, these seaweed alternatives are not harmful to health. Compared with hair vegetables, the biggest feature of seaweed plants is that there are more branches stretching out on each branch, which makes the "hair" too frizzy, and the overall thickness is several times thicker than that of real hair vegetables. Merchants generally hide from Haiti and call it "haifa dish".
Original title: "Eat hair vegetables in the New Year? Destroy the land without getting rich"