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Beijing duck restaurant offers Braille menus

The famed Beijing roast duck restaurant chain Quanjude began offering menus in Braille on Thursday to better serve visually impaired customers during the Paralympic Games, which start later this week.
Such menus, printed in Chinese and English versions, can be found at Quanjude’s oldest outlet in Qianmen Street south of Tian’anmen Square in downtown Beijing.
“We invited Braille teachers to render 120 classic dishes into Braille so as to let guests who are visually impaired freely choose their favorite dishes,” said Wang Xiaoshan, vice general manager of the Qianmen outlet.
As a designated restaurant chain for the Paralympic athletes, the 134-year-old Quanjude has improved disabled-access facilities in all of its outlets. Its waiters and waitresses have been trained to use sign language to explain how to eat roast duck and describe its nutritional value.
The menus are only available at the Qianmen outlet.
Beijing roast duck is usually sliced and dipped in a sweet plumsauce before being wrapped into a thin pancake along with slices of onion and cucumber.
The duck, probably the most famous Chinese dish in the world, was a top favorite for global athletes competing at the Aug. 8-24 Beijing Olympics, said Deng Yaping, spokeswoman of the Olympic Village.
About 4,500 athletes and coaches from 148 countries and territories will take part in the Beijing Paralympics from Sept. 6 to 17.

Clones’ offspring may be in U.S. food chain

Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products.
 (File Photo)
Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe as products from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring.
While the FDA evaluated the safety of food from clones and their offspring, the U.S. Agriculture Department was in charge of managing the transition of these animals into the food supply.
“It is theoretically possible” offspring from clones are in the food supply, said Siobhan DeLancey, an FDA spokeswoman.
Cloning animals involves taking the nuclei of cells from adults and fusing them into egg cells that are implanted into a surrogate mother. There are an estimated 600 cloned animals in the United States.
Proponents, including the Biotechnology Industry Organization, say cloning is a way to create more disease-resistant animals that produce more milk and better meat. The cloning industry and the FDA say cloned animals and their offspring are as safe as their traditional counterparts.
Critics contend not enough is known about the technology to ensure it is safe, and they also say the FDA needs to address concerns over animal cruelty and ethical issues.
“It worries me that this technology is out of control in so many ways,” said Charles Margulis, a spokesman with the Center for Environmental Health.

Stone version of the “Banquet of 108 Courses”

A stone collector serves up the famous “Manhanquanxi”, a full, formal banquet, combining Manchurian and Chinese delicacies, with his stones in Yinchuan, northwest China, on August 23, 2008. [Photo: Xinhua]
A stone collector has stunned visitors to a festival of stones by creating the famous “Manhanquanxi”-a full, formal banquet, combining Manchurian and Chinese delicacies-with using only stones.
Xinhua News Agency reports that 108 dishes were created by the stone collector, who is from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and are so vivid that they actually look like the real dishes.
Tourists gathered at the 6th Stone-viewing Festival held in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

A spoonful of honey can work wonders

It’s one of nature’s healthiest foods and a favorite in traditional Chinese medicine, writes Zhang Qian
For many Chinese people, it’s become a habit to add honey to milk, spread it on bread, or just simply stir some into a cup of warm water for breakfast every morning.
It’s not just for the sweet taste but more for its rich nutrition and special function in traditional Chinese medicine, such as dispelling toxins and pathogenic heat, relieving pain and nourishing yin (cold) energy.
Honey, composed of various micro-elements such as vitamins, iron, calcium and copper as well as various enzymes, is a great nutritious supplement. And with about 80 percent of it easily assimilated glucose and fructose, honey is suitable for almost everyone, especially for elderly people with a weak digestive system.
Apart from its widely recognized nutritional value, honey is also Chinese people’s favorite as a “neutral” food with medicinal properties. In the “Compendium of Materia Medica,” the TCM classic by pharmacist Li Shizhen in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), honey can help dispel pathogenic heat, clear away toxins, relieve pain and combat dehydration.
Eating honey often can help nourish yin energy and strengthen the spleen, resulted in clear sight and rosy cheeks. Have honey every morning can help prevent constipation and it is also a good choice for those who suffer chronic coughing.
Taking water with honey can help as a hangover cure as well as protect the liver. Spreading honey on a burn can help relieve pain as well as prevent infection and accelerate healing. And recent research also shows that having a spoon of honey before bed can aid sleep and a cup of water and honey at morning and at night can help relieve high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries and other related diseases.
Honey made from different flower pollen can have different health properties. Honey made from flowers of coptis, loquat, chaste tree, Chinese scholar tree and Chinese milk vetch can help dispel pathogenic heat most effectively. Those of the common vetch, wild rose and motherwort can help you achieve beautiful skin and rosy cheeks. Those of wolfberry, orange and loquat can help moisten the lungs. Those of cassia, shizandra, jujube, orange and sesame are good for stomach.
If you suffer sleeplessness, try honey made from flours of longan, shizandra, jujube and apple. And any kind of honey can help relieve and prevent constipation.
Stirring honey into warm water is the most convenient way to eat it but use water cooler than 40 degrees Celsius.
For those with stomach problem, choosing the right time to eat honey is crucial. Having honey one and a half hours before a meal can help limit the gastric acid secretion having honey right before a meal usually results in a great amount of gastric acid in the stomach.
Warm honey water can dilute gastric acid while cold honey water will stimulate the stomach to secrete more acid and accelerate the intestine movement, resulting in light diarrhea. Therefore, those with excessive gastric acid, hypertrophic gastritis, stomach ulcers or duodenum ulcers are advised to have warm honey water one and half hours before a meal while those with insufficient gastric acid or atrophic gastritis are advised to have cold honey water right before a meal.
Though honey is good, it is not suitable for diabetes mellitus patients and baby less than one year old.
Of course, you can also have honey together with many other foods such as milk, bread, juice or congee. But remember, never eat it together with soybean curd, onion, leek, garlic and uncooked scallion and this can cause sickness.

Fruit juice: friend or foe?

Grapefruit, orange and apple juices can harm the body’s ability to absorb certain medications and make the drugs less effective, said a Canadian study released last week in the United States.
The research showed that these juices can decrease the effectiveness of certain drugs used to treat heart disease, cancer, organ-transplant rejection and infection, “potentially wiping out their beneficial effects,” it said.
David Bailey, a professor of clinical pharmacology with the University of Western Ontario and leader of the study, was the first researcher to identify grapefruit juice’s potential to increase the absorption of certain drugs two decades ago, possibly turning some doses toxic.
The new findings came as part of his continuing research on the subject, and were presented at the 236th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society on Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“Recently, we discovered that grapefruit and these other fruit juices substantially decrease the oral absorption of certain drugs undergoing intestinal uptake transport,” AFP quoted Bailey as saying.
“The concern is loss of benefit of medications essential for the treatment of serious medical conditions.”
Healthy volunteers took fexofenadine, an antihistamine used to fight allergies, along with either a glass of grapefruit juice, a glass of water with naringin (which gives the bitter taste to grapefruit juice), or plain water.
Those who drank the grapefruit juice absorbed only half the amount of fexofenadine, compared to those who drank plain water.
Researchers said the water with naringin served to block “a key drug uptake transporter, called OATP1A2, involved in shuttling drugs from the small intestine to the bloodstream.”
Among the drugs affected by consumption of grapefruit, orange and apple juices are: etoposide, an anticancer agent; beta blockers (atenolol, celiprolol, talinolol) used to treat high blood pressure and prevent heart attacks; and certain antibiotics (ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin, itraconazole).
The drug-lowering interaction also affected cyclosporine, a drug taken to prevent rejection of transplanted organs, and more drugs were expected to be added to the list as the research continued.
Bailey said patients should consult with a doctor about taking medications with juice, and stick to plain water when taking most medications.

Peking duck flies off plates of athletes

Beijing’s most famous dish is proving to be a hit with athletes in the Olympic Village, who do not even have to step out of the area to enjoy the treat.
“I like the Peking Duck,” said Cyrille Gombrowicz, a badminton coach from France, in the village cafeteria last week.
“It’s very special.”
Dipped in sweet plum sauce and wrapped with spring onion in a thin pancake, the succulent slices of roast duck is now a must-have on most plates in the village.

Athletes take supper at the dining hall in the Olympic village. [File photo]
A special kitchen in the village cafeteria makes sure the dish is served adequately.
“Asian food is always popular,” said Matthew Moss, operations director of Olympic caterer Aramark.
“We couldn’t have had a station without Peking duck.”
The kitchen serves 300 ducks daily, he said. The fowl are so popular stocks are out by 8 pm.
Aramark has hired chefs from Quanjude, the 136-year-old Peking duck chain, to ensure authenticity of the dish.
“We adapted our kitchen to make sure everything is prepared as it would be in the traditional duck restaurant,” Moss said.
“From the oven to the racks and hooks, things are exactly as what the Chinese do.”
The caterer has also hired 800 top chefs, as well as 124 executive chefs from 11 countries, to satisfy every palate.
Moss said the Chinese chefs whip up all kinds of dishes and have a particularly good grasp of Asian flavors.
The company has also prepared about 900 recipes, the result of two years of testing and being involved in 14 Olympic Games.
Preserving local flavors goes hand in hand with maintaining a high standard, he said.
“Our local partners help educate us on special flavors needed for making authentic Chinese food,” Moss said.
The caterer churns out about 35,000 meals in the village a day, said Doug Bradley, Aramark’s Olympic project culinary director.

Study: Kids’ popular fast foods dangerous

Letting kids eat at popular fast-food and chain restaurants can be downright dangerous because the servings are far too high in calories, said a report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) on Monday.
The center, a U.S. consumer group, examined the menus at 13 popular restaurants that promote children’s meals.
It found in most chain restaurants more than 90 percent of the kid’s menu meals packed way more than the recommended 430 calories per meal.
“Nearly every single possible combination of the children’s meals at KFC, Taco Bell, Sonic, Jack in the Box, and Chick-fil-A is too high in calories,” the group said in a statement.
More than 90 percent of meals offered at hamburger chains would fill virtually all of a child’s calorie needs for the day, CSPI said.
The findings showed that overall 45 percent of the meals are too high in saturated (animal) and trans fat and 86 percent too high in sodium.
CSPI nutrition policy director Margo Wootan said that most of these kids’ meals appear to be designed to put America’s children on the fast track to obesity, disability, heart attack, or diabetes.

Chef: Sorry for suggesting poison plant in salad

A British celebrity chef says he’s sorry for mistakenly recommending a deadly plant as a tasty salad ingredient.
Anthony Worrall Thompson says he meant to suggest using the weed fat hen, a member of the spinach family whose leaves are edible. He instead told Healthy and Organic Living magazine for its July edition that henbane could be used in salads.
Henbane, whose name means “killer of hens,” is a toxic plant that can cause hallucinations, drowsiness and disorientation if ingested. Large doses can kill.
The magazine issued a correction Monday on its Web site. Worrall Thompson told reporters he’s sorry for the mix-up, which he called “a bit embarrassing.”

Beijing bars offer a cocktail of new sounds

Dressed in tight tops and slinky black pants, the four members of the Chinese Britpop band Super VCon stage at Beijing’s Yugong Yishan club performed their hit songs to a large crowd moving hands and bodies to the beat.
The band threw theatrical rock-star poses and the audience — mostly hip young Chinese in their 20s and a mixed crowd of seemingly more mature foreigners — loved it. In the end, the vocalist took off his T-shirt and the girls in the audience screamed in joy.
Yugong Yishan club, a mainstay of Beijing’s music scene, is named after a Chinese proverb which means a foolish man succeeded in removing a mountain stone by stone.
An unlikely location in the heart of Beijing for a Chinese rock music club, the historic west courtyard of the government of Duan Qirui, the warlord who was the provisional chief executive of China between 1924 and 1926, Yugong Yishan attracts a crowd for almost every live performance.
With chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, the space between the stage and the bar counter has no seats and can hold up to 1,000 people for a live performance, according to bar owner Lui Zhiqiang.
“The music scene in Beijing is quite vibrant and a lot of interesting things are happening here,” says Chris Hawke, a Canadian who teaches journalism in a university in Beijing.
About three blocks north of Yugong Yishan, M.A.O. Live house, located right across from the northern entrance of Nanluoguxiang, an old Beijing alleyway that has evolved into a favorite destination for backpackers and the chic set, makes a statement with its iconic logo and the iron-riveted facade.
Backed by the Japanese independent music label Bad News Records, who signed Beijing’s famous punk band Brain Failure, M.A.O.’s stage is sectioned off from the bar and lounge, just like Yugong Yishan.
“I like M.A.O. It’s smaller and more intimate to the stage,” says Mikael Salomonsson, a Swedish musician living and playing his music in Beijing.
The cost of each concert — 20 to 200 yuan (2.9 to 29.4 dollars) for a visiting foreign band and a 20-yuan (2.9 dollars) beer — are nothing compared with Europe, Mikael says.
Through a hazy mixture of smoke and sweat and raw energy, the Autumn Insects, or officially called Fall InSex in English, an old school flash rock band going back a few years, performed with their exaggerated blond wigs and bloody gothic make-up In M.A.O. on a recent weekend. The audience raised their hands in tribute.
“The music venues in Beijing has changed drastically,” says Niu Ben, guitarist of Fall InSex, who formed the band with the vocalist Ying Zi in 1998.
From the stage, to the lighting to the sound system, big changes have taken place, he says.
Music lovers in Beijing today enjoy a wider variety of music than in the past. In its heyday in 2000, Happy Paradise, among the very few venues for live rock music, in Wudaokou, was packed at weekends, according to Yan Jun, a Chinese rock music critic.
With almost no seats and no decoration, the audience simply sat on the edge of the stage when they got tired. In the dark, some were drinking, some were sleeping on the ground in this former roller skating rink when bands played late into early mornings, Yan Jun wrote.
Back then, most rock bands lived in Shucun Village, including Fall InSex, about 40 minutes bus ride from Wudaokou, where the cheap rents gave them a place to stay. Some survived and thrived and even became big names.
“The few music venues at that time had a lot of enthusiasm in supporting Chinese rock music but they lacked the professional equipment and experience,” said Niu Ben, the guitarist.
Mikael, the Swedish musician, and his friends who frequent rock clubs in Beijing said the top four venues for local rock music would be Yugong Yishan, M.A.O. Livehouse, 2 Kolegas on the Third Ring Road and D-22 in the university area in Haidian District.
In addition to local bands, big or small, world famous musicians have also played in Beijing’s live music houses, including names such as Yann Tiersen, the Go! Team and Keren Ann. This year, the French electronic music duo Air is scheduled to perform in Yugong Yishan in September, according to the band’s tour dates on its official website.
“The crowd who comes to see a live band today is quite different from the past,” says Li Jie, a veteran gig goer of 12 years experience.
With the Internet, today’s bands certainly have more resources such as Myspace where they can upload their music and share it with people all over the world, says Li, admitting he goes to fewer concerts.
“But when there are good bands performing in Beijing, I will definitely go,” Li says. “The feeling you get from a live performance is absolutely different from hearing it on the stereo.”

Canada’s Athabasca to sell oilsand stake to PetroChina

Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sands Corp announced on Monday that it plans to sell a 60-percent working interest in its two oilsand projects to PetroChina, a Chinese energy giant.
PetroChina will pay 1.9 billion Canadian dollars (1.7 billion U.S. dollars) for the MacKay River and Dover oilsand projects. The agreements also provide for certain financing arrangements for Athabasca.
The projects are located in the center of Athabasca region in northeastern Alberta, an oil-rich province in western Canada. The company says they contain approximately five billion barrels of bitumen, which can be refined into conventional oil.
“Oilsands projects are very capital-intensive long-term investments and difficult to fully finance in the traditional equity market,” Athabasca Chairman Bill Gallacher said in a press release.
“These strategic joint venture arrangements with PetroChina, one of the world’s largest energy companies, can ensure that the MacKay River and Dover projects will be developed in (a) timely manner, which is excellent news for Alberta and the rest of Canada,” Gallacher added.
Athabasca is focused on the sustainable development of oilsand resources in northern Alberta with net working interest in over 1.3 million acres.