Culture

Daughter of nature

By Meng Jing (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-14 10:20

Clockwise from above left: Zhang Yinghui only buys shoes made from natural materials; Zhang prefers to use environmentally friendly furniture; Steamed bread is another favorite; Zhang makes green beverages at home.[Photos by Wang Jing / China Daily]

If you are lucky enough to visit Zhang Yinghui's home, you will likely find yourself sitting in an organic woolen couch, eating homemade cookies made from organic flour and drinking organic tea with water purified by Zhang.

Like any typical full-time housewife, Zhang does grocery shopping, prepares dinner for her family and keeps everything tidy and clean in her apartment.

But unlike the majority of housewives in Beijing, the vegetables in Zhang's home are carefully selected from three local organic farms. She cooks every dish from scratch.

The diligent housewife uses tea seed powder instead of liquid detergent to keep her glasses shining and clean.

She even recently bought a kilogram of earthworms to help process her compost.

"They like the leftovers," she said.

The earthworms, in ideal conditions, can eat their own weight in leftovers, which they then turn into nutrient rich fertilizer. A kilogram of earthworms can produce half a kilogram of such soil relatively quickly.

Zhang's persistence in her organic lifestyle has made her more than a successful housewife. She writes a column titled "Son of Nature" and is regarded as an authority on organic products.

Some in Beijing's emerging organic consumer culture call her "Master Zhang".

She said she never intended to pursue an organic lifestyle.

But being born in Beidahuang in Heilongjiang province in the 1960s seems to have ingrained a preference for a natural lifestyle in her.

"My family grew everything we ate when I was growing up. We didn't use chemical fertilizers or pesticides because we didn't worry about the output. We just needed to grow enough food for ourselves," she said.

For Zhang, the ideal lifestyle she grew up with has sadly disappeared in modern society.

"Plastic bags didn't exist when I was a child and we ate fresh and seasonal vegetables," she said, adding her family also farmed pigs.

These days, people are able to eat whatever they want whenever they like, which is against nature in Zhang's opinion.

"Take strawberries as an example. The season for strawberry is from May to June. But now we can find them at the market from November to January with the help of greenhouses," she said.

Zhang said her childhood experiences make her favor natural products.

Zhang keeps a kilogram of earthworms to help process her compost. [China Daily]

Although she left her hometown for further education in the 1980s and traveled across the ocean with her Italian husband, she said she never forgets the taste of home-grown vegetables and tried her best to live as naturally as possible.

Despite understanding the concept of a natural lifestyle, Zhang said she did not "formally go organic" until her first child was born in Italy in 2001.

Some sales offered Zhang mashed carrots as baby food after she gave birth.

"I tried it first and it tasted awful," she said, adding that she thinks things put in a can for six months should not be regarded as food.

That was the moment Zhang decided to cook only natural food for her family, a vow she kept when she and her family moved back to Beijing in 2007.

Her two little boys never eat fast food, she said.

But it was a piece of seaweed that propelled Zhang from, as she says, simply being a responsible mother to being what she calls a responsible citizen who actively advocates for the organic lifestyle.

She popped a piece of dried laver (a type of seaweed) in her mouth one day and was startled by its strong flavor.

Surely, it couldn't be organic and have such an overpowering taste, she thought.

She then called the producer of the dried laver, who told her that the laver was indeed organic but the seasoning was not.

That was when she started making a point of calling companies to find out just how organic their supposedly natural products really are.

As her knowledge in the area accumulated, she decided to start writing columns to share what she knew.

In late May, she organized Beijing's first organic farmers' market.

Organic food fans rushed to the market and bought out almost everything from food to household goods.

Many of the sellers at the mall were relatively unknown and benefited from the exposure, said Zhang.