At the end of "The Restaurant Owner", Huang Xiaoqiang is depicted making chaoshou. Not with a machine or an army of workers slaving away in a factory but with his own two hands and a chopstick. This brought to mind an episode I saw of "Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations", a cultural food show in which Bourdain travels the world, sampling various regional dishes and delicacies. In this particular episode, Bourdain travels to China and witnesses a quickly fading art: the creation of noodles. Like Huang Xiaoqiang, the man making the noodles uses no modern technology. With his bare hands, he creates a slab of dough with flour and duck eggs then uses a giant bamboo pole as a sort of rolling pin to flatten the dough so that he can form the stringy substance. Just as his father taught him and just as his father's father taught him, and so on for as long as the family had been making noodles.
These two instances really got me thinking. There really aren't too many things nowadays that can honestly bear the title of being "homemade". Because now, no one makes apple pie from scratch. Who does that? That's what Marie Calendar's and Baker's Square are for. But this is also a sad reality. The fact that these traditions are slowly but surely being erased from our world. The fact that there will definitely come a time when we rely solely on machines or on others to create what would once be considered as "homemade". The fact that we are basically loosing our ability to create something that has been passed on from generation to generation.
And that just makes me sad. Because I love homemade lumpia as do many other people, I'm sure. And if I'm the only one who can make them in some 30 odd years (because my mom made sure that I can make them), that won't be too much fun.
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