For homemaker Lin Fu-yu (林富玉), preparing teatime snacks for the family is no piece of cake. Her two children are easy to please; they like the chocolate chip cookies from the two neighborhood Western-style bakeries or the hot dogs available twenty-four hours a day at the corner 7-Eleven. But pleasing her father in-law is more difficult. He prefers traditional Chinese rice snacks, especially tsai-pao (rice-flour buns filled with bamboo shoots and meat), which are only available in the early morning street markets. Lin must buy them before 7:30 AM, otherwise the vendors are sold out. And she can only buy a day’s worth at a time. The buns cannot be frozen and will harden if refrigerated.
Picking up a supply of rice treats has always required extra effort, but in the past there were few other choices. Today, many urbanites opt instead for more convenient alternatives at the large bakeries, corner groceries, and supermarkets. Such convenience has led to a growing appetite for ready-to-eat Western items such as croissants and sandwiches, chocolate cake, and raisin bread. Traditional Chinese foods, especially rice snacks, are losing out to the new foreign competition.
For 50-year old rice and fruit farmer Huang Chung-sheng (黃崇盛), this shift in consumer tastes brought the end of a family business. “Fifty years ago, rice was king,” he says. His grandfather and father operated a highly profitable rice snacks factory, and he grew up believing he would inherit the family business. “But when it came time for me and my brother to take over,” he says, “rice snacks had lost the market to wheat snacks.”
Overall, Taiwan’s rice consumption has dropped dramatically in recent decades, falling from an annual two hundred kilograms per person in the 1940s to fifty kilograms today. In addition to the boom in wheaten foods, the primary reason for the decline is increased wealth and, correspondingly, a diet that is higher in proteins and lower in carbohydrates.
All this has brought hard times to the island’s rice farmers and rice product manufacturers. An oversupply of the grain has become one of the most visible problems facing Taiwan’s agricultural sector. Surplus rice is heavily subsidized and protected by the Council of Agriculture (COA). In fiscal year 1993, rice farmers were a major recipient of the US$655 million the COA spent supporting farming industries through subsidies, price supports, low utility rates, preferential loans, and land conversion payments. These expenditures place a heavy financial burden on taxpayers and are increasingly criticized as perpetuating a vicious cycle of overproduction.
International trade partners are also pressuring the government to replace these measures with more market-oriented policies. The guaranteed-price purchasing system for rice and other crops has become a bone of contention in Taiwan’s negotiations to enter the World Trade Organization (WTO, formerly GATT) because it runs counter to the paring down of agricultural price subsidies approved in the December 1993 Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. The government is therefore encouraging farmers to shift production to more competitive and profitable crops such as sorghum, soybeans, and corn, and to decrease rice production to a level that just meets local demand.
But some farmers are taking a more active approach in order to tackle the oversupply of rice. A group of rice farmers in the small northern town of Chutung has decided to boost consumption rather than to passively reduce production. “People say Taiwan farmers produce too much rice, but this is not really the situation,” says Liang Shih-nan (梁時男), president of the Chutung District Farmers’ Association. “The real problem is that rice consumption has declined. It’s a pity that our rice farmers work so hard, yet their rice sometimes ends up as livestock feed. So instead of selling surplus rice to feed chickens and ducks, we thought we’d produce rice snacks for supermarkets.”
The idea came about by accident. In 1990, a group of officials from the provincial government’s Department of Agriculture and Forestry (DAF) were visiting the farmers’ association. To show their hospitality, the farmers offered some homemade rice-flour buns and steamed rice cakes. “We were talking about what the farmers would do after Taiwan joins GATT,” says Liang. “Most of them said they’d just try to survive from day to day. Then one official complimented us on our rice snacks and asked why we didn’t try manufacturing rice products. Our farmers took the opportunity to ask for their support.”
Heartened by the DAF’s enthusiasm, the farmers’ association began working on a formal proposal. First they attracted nine investors from within the association who were willing to fund and operate a factory producing traditional rice snacks. Next, the association agreed to rent out one of its factories, a two-story, 1,400-square-meter building formerly used to produce soymilk products, to the investors for US$1,100 a month. With the groundwork laid, the association sent a proposal to the COA. The council approved the plan in 1992, and the Hakka Fine Food Center was born.
From the start, the factory was to be more than a means of maintaining the livelihood of Chutung farmers—it would help preserve their lifestyle and cultural identity as well. The term Hakka was included in the name because most farmers in the association are members of this ethnic Chinese minority group, and because most of the snacks were to be made according to traditional Hakka recipes.
“In China, food and culture are intermixed, and much of the culture focuses on rice foods,” says Yang Ken-lu (楊根祿), an administrator for the Chutung District Farmers’ Association. For instance, ang-gu-guei, red-colored, soft rice-flour cakes stamped with religious symbols, add significance to meals on religious holidays. Yang says that Hakka rice snacks also reveal much about the nature of this group, which traditionally inhabited areas with poor quality soil and thus had to struggle to survive. “Hakka rice snacks show the lifestyle and hardworking nature of this ethnic group,” Yang says. He explains that many of the snacks were developed with convenience in mind. For example, the “nine-layer cakes” (steamed rice squares comprised of sweet and salty layers) can be held in one hand and eaten while in the midst of farming. “I think promoting rice foods not only has a practical side—they offer a healthier choice than many modem snacks—but also helps preserve Chinese culture,” Yang says.
Half of the initial funding of US$1.5 million for the Hakka Fine Food Center came from the COA, the DAF, and local agricultural agencies, along with the farmer’s association. The nine investors paid the remainder. The COA also designated US$18,500 toward consulting and educational fees to upgrade the center’s management and technology, and agreed to provide partial funding for future expenses such as new equipment and research. If budgets are approved, the COA and DAF will cover 70 percent, the county government 15 percent, and the town administration office and farmers’ association will each finance 7.5 percent.
The Hakka Fine Food Center began operating in October 1992, headed by farmer Huang Chung-sheng. Initially, the business was modeled closely on the Huang family rice-products factory. Although the new factory replaced most traditional hand-operated equipment with automated machinery, all operational procedures were drawn up from Huang’s memory. But in April 1993, he was called upon to attend the thrice-weekly COA-sponsored management courses for local food product manufacturers. Huang dreaded going, but attendance was required under the council’s funding agreement.
“When I showed up at the classroom, I didn’t expect to learn anything from those young lecturers dressed up in suits and ties,” Huang says. “And when they started talking about bookkeeping, environmental protection, posting a daily schedule, and painting the walls different colors, I said to myself, ‘This is all bullshit.’” When he finally finished the three-month course, he was so disgusted that he told his colleagues the next time the courses were held, someone else would have to go in his place. Then he went back to work and forgot all about them.
But then COA officials and the course consultant showed up to check on him. “I was really annoyed,” Huang says. “To get rid of them, I had to do what they asked. So I painted the outside walls orange. I wasn’t convinced that changing the color of the walls from green to orange was going to reduce our costs.” But he was in for a surprise. “I couldn’t believe what I saw afterwards: the flies stopped coming into the building,” he says.
After that, Huang struggled to remember what had been covered in the course. After he painted lines on the factory floor to designate work areas and show the production flow from station to station, work efficiency improved. He then painted lines to indicate parking spaces in the parking lot, and the daily traffic jams caused by delivery trucks quickly ceased. Today, everyone who enters the food production area must wear shoe covers and a cap. Workers are required to wear uniforms and gloves and they must wash their hands at the entrance. Orders, deliveries, and inventory are all computerized, and inside the stock area, the rice flour and other dry goods are neatly labeled and shelved. Supplies are used on a first-in, first-out basis. When a new shipment arrives, workers label each with the expiration date; when supplies are removed, they check whether stocks need refilling.
“These small changes have been very beneficial,” Huang says. “We don’t have to overstock, which saves us money and space. And we use what came in first, so nothing expires unnoticed. This guarantees the quality of our materials.” Although Huang still draws on his family experience in many areas, he admits that the introduction of modern management has been key to the factory’s steady growth. Within three years, monthly revenues have zoomed upward from US$3,850 to nearly US$40,000.
The center uses one ton of rice a day, and its twenty-odd employees produce more than twenty types of rice snacks. Mainstay products include tsung-tzu (rice dumplings steamed with meat and mushrooms in bamboo leaves), salty or sweet rice-flour balls used in soups or desserts, sweet popped-rice or sticky-rice squares flavored with nuts and raisins, packaged rice noodles, tsai-pao, and nine-layer cakes. Throughout the year, the center produces special holiday foods such as puffy “plump cake” and ang-gu-guei for the lunar New Year holidays. Occasionally, the center accepts orders for rice wedding cakes or hundred-layer birthday cakes (round-shaped, enlarged versions of the nine-layer cake). Most products are made with Hakka-style recipes that have been passed on through the families of the investors.
The center is also developing a line of products made of moxa, a green paste made of a dense, leafy plant popular for coloring. Taiwan has long sold dried moxa to Japan as a raw material, but the center is now exporting finished moxa products to Japan, including noodles, showering gel, and food coloring. Huang expects the line to expand into medicinal products as well because moxa is believed to contain health-enhancing properties.
The center’s farmers-turned-manufacturers take great pride in their products because the snacks are made only of natural ingredients with no artificial flavorings, colorings, or preservatives. They also point out that the products are of higher quality than some mass-produced varieties. For example, their rice noodles are made of 90 percent rice and 10 percent cornstarch, while many other noodles consist of 90 percent cornstarch and 10 percent rice. Huang praises rice snacks as great Chinese inventions for their convenience, taste, and special nutritional properties. For example, he points out that the tradition of eating tsung-tzu during the spring Dragon Boat Festival benefits health because the alkaline oils in the bamboo leaves can balance acidity in the stomach.
Huang is frustrated that rice snacks are now found only in traditional markets and are only produced by a few small-scale family manufacturers. Aside from packaged rice noodles, frozen rice-flour balls, and frozen tsung-tzu, all Chinese rice snacks are made and sold fresh by individual street vendors—or are made at home. “The special nutritional properties and convenience of rice snacks still fit with today’s industrialized society. We shouldn’t allow these recipes to disappear,” Huang says. “We’ve got to preserve and promote these products ourselves.”
The Hakka Fine Food Center has yet to make money, but Huang Chung-sheng, who contributed 60 percent of the farmers’ investment, vows to persist. “Of course, I hope to make money out of this factory, but as long as I don’t lose money, I’ll keep at it,” he says. “I want to do something to promote and preserve rice culture.” The center eventually plans to expand to a bigger factory, and to set up a Hakka rice food museum. “It will offer a place where young people can see the development of Hakka rice culture here in Taiwan,” Huang says. The farmers’ association has already collected some antiques for the museum, including pastry stamps made of porcelain, wood, and metal.
To date, the center is the only factory focusing solely on producing and promoting Chinese rice snacks. The COA began a rice food promotion plan in 1988 and has helped a farmers’ association in the east coast city of Hualien to set up a foodprocessing factory, which produces rice snacks as well as other foods. But the factory operates on a small scale with only five employees. The council has also assisted fifteen other farmers’ associations in producing and selling rice snacks, among other products, to association owned supermarkets.
The most pressing need in the effort to revive rice snacks is the development of preservation technology. Wheaten foods can be frozen or preserved chemically—and are thus more convenient for restaurants, bakeries, and consumers—but the preservation problem for rice products has not yet been solved. Most rice products cannot be frozen and only stay fresh about twenty-four hours. Although preservatives can be added to prevent spoilage, these additives cannot maintain the soft texture of most rice snacks. This has kept rice food production on a very small scale, has limited distribution opportunities, and has made these products less accessible and less convenient for consumers.
Only a handful of universities plus two local research centers, the Food Industry Research and Development Institute (FIRDI) and the Crops Research Institute, have undertaken rice studies. According to Wu Ching-yang (吳景楊), a research fellow at FIRDI who volunteers his services at the Hakka Fine Food Center, scientists have not made significant progress in developing preservation technology for rice foods in the past few decades. “In the West, wheat technology is definitely much more developed than rice, and when our rice researchers study abroad, many end up studying wheat,” he says. “Japan is highly developed in rice food technology, but most of their achievements are not applicable to traditional Chinese rice foods. It wouldn’t be fair to say the government doesn’t care, but we still lack significant developments.”
Huang Chung-sheng believes the cause is worth extra effort. “Rice snacks are not out-of-date,” he says. “In fact, based on our market surveys, people still really love them. The reason they aren’t as popular as they were is because they are not as available as bread. But if we overcome the technological difficulties—if government research institutes can make some breakthroughs in these studies—rice just might rise again.”