Shanghai Street View: Mooncake Musing
Mid-Autumn Festival is fast approaching, and that means time for all the usual scandals and other negative news surrounding mooncakes, the ultra-heavy treat that suddenly becomes a fixture in city life during this time. I’ll touch on some of those stories in a moment, including one headline on the plunging black market for mooncake vouchers and another on how unhealthy mooncakes really are.
But this year I want to focus on a more positive mooncake story, and one that’s quite personal. That story saw my university unexpectedly resume its practice of giving out mooncakes to employees this year, ending a two year ban of a tradition that dates back at least for the last few decades.
The resumption did come with a number of changes, mostly designed to discourage waste and which I’ll detail shortly.
The big background to this personal mooncake story is Beijing’s 3-year-old frugality campaign, which has touched many of us here in Shanghai and around China in one way or another. None of the change is that spectacular, at least not for me. Most noticeable are little things, like getting invited to far fewer banquets, and being toasted far less frequently with expensive liquors like Moutai at raucous gatherings filled with company and government officials.
Another little thing has been a decrease in official gift-giving on holidays. At my university we still got the big red boxes filled with various dried goodies for Chinese New Year, which seems to be untouchable even during the frugality campaign. But other treats like mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival and cake vouchers on our individual birthdays all mysteriously disappeared over the last two years.
The loss of mooncakes certainly didn’t bother me too much, since I seldom ate them and often gave them to friends who would then give them to their friends. The birthday cake loss was a bit more painful, since that’s something I actually enjoy. But the bigger effect of cancelling all these little perks was a feeling that somehow it was improper to celebrate even little things, to the point where it almost began to feel like being festive or having fun was somehow wrong or forbidden.
So I was quite surprised when I strolled into our administrative building this week and the guard motioned that he had something to give me. That something turned out to be a pink slip that was a voucher for mooncakes.
New and Improved
When I picked up the actual gift, I discovered the new product was slightly different from the past. Instead of the usual box containing around 8 or 10 mooncakes, each of this year’s gifts contained a far more frugal 2 mooncakes. And whereas boxes in previous years were decorated with generic Mid-Autumn Festival greetings, this year’s also included greetings for annual Teachers Day that falls on September 10, five days before the Mid-Autumn Festival.
The message seemed to be that less mooncake was better, and that putting the Teachers Day greeting on boxes might encourage people to actually consume the treats themselves and discourage giving them to others for re-gifting. My initial reaction was that these kinds of changes seemed a bit petty. But on further thought, the resumption of giving out mooncakes seemed more important, and these little modifications did serve a very real purpose aimed at preventing waste.
One of the more traditional mooncake headlines I read this week noted that trading in mooncake vouchers by black marketeers has dropped sharply since the frugality campaign began, since many companies and government entities were no longer issuing the vouchers. I don’t know if other companies are resuming the practice in scaled-down form, similar to what my university is doing now. But I’m fairly certain there would be little or no black market for the vouchers we received this year, due both to the small size of the boxes and also the Teachers Day message.
One of the other headlines I read quoted the Hong Kong government warning that mooncakes were very calorific and unhealthy, and encouraging locals to limit their consumption during the holiday. Among other things, the government’s food safety watchdog pointed out that some mooncakes were almost a third sugar, and just one of the treats could contain nearly half the recommended daily calorie intake for women, and a third for men.
One person did point out to me that the new 2-cake boxes would hardly be enough for the typical Chinese family that often includes parents, grandparents and children. Perhaps that’s the case, though it does seem like individual mooncakes are often cut into pieces for many people to share because they’re too heavy for one person to eat alone. And at the end of the day, it does seem like the important message is that it’s ok to be festive and enjoy the Mid-Autumn Holiday once again with these traditional treats, even if this slightly modified tradition is tempered just a bit with a new air of pragmatism.
