When Natalie Wheen cooks, the resulting dishes - steamed fish, stir-fried meat and vegetables, soup and stir-fried rice with vegetables and eggs - would be familiar in any Chinese kitchen. But one thing sets her Chinese food apart: It all starts with a little olive oil in the bottom of the pan.

"Good olive oil would naturally go well with Chinese food, because the Chinese people put so much care into making food that is fresh and flavorsome," says the Shanghai-born Wheen, who runs an upscale, organic olive-oil business in London. After a successful career as a radio commentator in the UK, she's now on a mission to convince the Chinese market that olive oil is tasty, healthy and can bring out the best in Chinese food.

That's a challenge, because olive oil is fairly new on the mainland's grocery shelves, and the limited supply has been mostly mass-market brands.

Wheen has always been captivated by the Chinese food she grew up eating, but she's had few chances to visit the country since her family moved to Britain in 1957. With China's economy going, however, the country has become a key market as she develops an international brand.

Wheen's family connection with China stretches over generations, starting from her great-grandfather Edward Wheen, who arrived in Shanghai in 1874 as a businessman, focusing mostly on imports. Her family on her mother's side came from Russia, and an uncle, Colonel Alexander Tatarinoff, came to Beijing as military attache to the Russian embassy in 1917. He spent the rest of his life in China.

Her parents married in Qingdao in 1937, and Wheen was born in Shanghai in 1949. Two years later Wheen's family moved to Hong Kong, where they stayed until 1957. Little Natalie learned to love Chinese food thanks to her nanny.

"She would always prepare some Chinese food for me to have with her," says Wheen, who particularly liked chicken soup with spinach and lettuce. "So my No 1 comfort food has always been Chinese cooking."

Such childhood memories gave her a sense of belonging to the country, and when her family moved to the UK she initially felt sad. She has kept many objects at home to remind her of China, including silk fabrics, cushions, a jade tree with green stones as leaves, and a long Chinese-style table made of dark wood.

In 1997, Wheen made her first return visit to China to work on a documentary about Chinese food.

"I was immediately at home, in spite of the extraordinary changes," she says.

"What I discovered is the love for fresh food in China, because in China people buy food in the wet markets. If you want a fresh chicken, you can watch it being killed just before you buy it, and you know it is absolutely fresh," she says. "A good Chinese housewife would buy some food to cook for breakfast, and then she would later go to the market again to buy some food to prepare for lunch, and then the same for supper."

Pursuit of the freshest ingredients is in keeping with the philosophy of her latest venture, Avlaki, which makes olive oil by pressing the olives the day after they are harvested, and then bottles the oil a few weeks later.

The business was almost an accident. It started in 1996, when Wheen and her painter friend Deborah MacMillan pooled resources to buy a small ruin in Greece by the sea as an escape from the stress of their professional lives.

They found themselves sitting on a plot of land with about 800 olive trees, and inspiration struck.

They realized that these naturally growing trees were different from nearby olive-oil farms where trees are treated with pesticides and damaged by aggressive machine-harvesting.

"We took control of every aspect of production, harvesting the olives by hand, removing the blemished fruits and taking the rest to a clean mill in shallow crates to avoid bruising," Wheen says. The farm is strictly organic: Today the fields are abloom with lots of wildflowers and teem with wildlife, she says.

Recently, Avlaki started overseas distribution in Europe and the Middle East, and now exports account for about half of its sales.

Wheen made a homecoming trip to Shanghai last year to exhibit the olive oil at the Food and Hospitality China show for 10 days, as a part of a trade mission organized by UK Trade and Investment and the China Britain Business Council. Avlaki has also established a partnership with Shanghai based Mao Xi Trading, so Mao Xi will help to distribute its olive oil in China.

Discerning Chinese are very aware of the quality and safety of food, Wheen says. For her, it's also a chance to bring something good back to the country that gave her an appreciation for good food.

cecily.liu@mail.chinadailyuk.com

(China Daily 10/09/2015 page19)