Mutton’s Not Just a Winter Delicacy Anymore

Winter is often deemed the best season to eat mutton, but that is not the case in Shanghai.

The annual mutton festival began today in Zhuanghang Town, Fengxian District,     1     highlight of the city’s summer rural tourism market.

Running until August 22, the festival features tasting and cooking events     2     agriculture-related activities.

The history of eating mutton in sanfu,     3     (hot) period of summer, in Zhuanghang dates back to the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368). The Zhuanghang goat is both delicious and nutritious.

Mutton braised in soy sauce and plain boiled mutton are popular in Zhuanghang during the festival. A must-have accompaniment to mutton is shaojiu (a Chinese rice spirit); the tradition of tasting mutton with shaojiu is listed as an intangible cultural heritage of Shanghai.

Mutton has a reputation for its tender taste, marbled texture, rich flavors and thick soup. According to the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, goat meat, like beef and lamb, is considered a “hot” food and thus     4     (avoid) or taken in smaller quantities on hot sweltering days of summer.

But for hundreds of years, the people of Zhuanghang town in Fengxian district     5     (eat) goat meat during the summer. They eat locally produced goat meat     6     they sip homemade shaojiu or huangjiu (yellow rice wine). This hearty mix of alcohol and goat meat promotes sweating,     7     some traditional medicine practitioners believe helps the body expel toxins and prevent illnesses in the forthcoming winter. Goat meat is also believed to be an excellent way of building up “energy” in the body that will last through the winter season. That’s why eateries in Zhuanghang are usually packed with diners during summer.

Li Yingchun, boss of a local goat meat restaurant in Zhuanghang, claims that his restaurant receives 8,000 to 10,000 customers on average every weekday. The number     8     reach as high as 12,000 on weekends, according to a daily report.

The Fengxian District Culture and Tourism Bureau said it is with the help of the traditional festival which caters to the travel, dining, entertaining and leisure demand of tourists     9     rural revitalization will be achieved.

    10     Zhuanghang, Zhangze Town in Songjiang District also has the tradition of eating mutton in sanfu. Its own mutton festival kicks off on Saturday and runs until October.

5 . Lily

Studying abroad is an area that is becoming increasingly interesting for researchers, as more students are choosing to do a semester, a year or even a degree in another country. In my research, I set out to establish whether young people attending a course abroad acquire more global awareness than students enrolled on similar courses in their home country, Using a comparative study of 50 Canadian undergraduates, half of whom studied abroad for varying lengths of time, there were shown to be considering gains in global awareness and these were not only noted by the students themselves but also their tutors.

Thomas

My research project asked ten students starting a year of study abroad to keep a daily record of their experiences. Having begun the diary a month before leaving home they continued it for a month after they returned. The primary reason for studying abroad in all cases was to polish their language skill. The students were allowed to write as freely as they wished by were asked to include comments on their language learning experience as well as on the strategies they used to cope with living in a new culture. Analysing the diaries, we found remarkably similar patterns. All the participants demonstrate a gradual recognition and acceptance of difference in other cultures and a new objectivity about their own culture as a result of their experience.

Jasmine

This paper reports on some research carried out last year into why students choose a period of study abroad, their reasons for selecting a specific destination, their behaviour when abroad and the extent to which the experience matches their expectations. Having administered a questionnaire to 1,000 international students studying at a number of universities in Australia, we got 696 responses. An initial analysis of the responses has revealed some interesting data suggesting that the key factor affecting all the areas we were investigating was the individual's personality and study interests. Country of origin and 'gender proved less significant than expected.

Jimmy

This research looked at the career paths of 35 young business people who had spent part of their university course at a foreign educational institution in order to ascertain whether those people had acquired greater cross-cultural perspectives through their experience of study abroad. Concerned about the lack of cultural awareness of their staff, a group of US business corporations proposed the research. The results are less conclusive than expected, but they do suggest that a period of study in a foreign country may help students to develop the cross-cultural awareness that US employers currently seek.

6 . People around the world participate in various ritualized celebrations. New Year activities included fireworks, and resolutions-as well as some practices unique to specific cultures, such as cooking black-eyed peas and greens in the southeastern United States.

All human cultures have their rituals-typically repetitive, symbolic behaviors that a group of people experience as purposeful; though people generally can’t explain how they are supposed to work. And their diversity can also cause clashes between peoples, particularly when the valued rituals of one culture strike another as strange.

Most scientists who study rituals consider their mysterious origins to be one of their defining characteristics. But recently, researchers have come to realize that before rituals become purely social and highly peculiar, many have started out as attempts to avoid disasters.

Ritualized ways of preparing food or cleaning the body, for example, have emerged as ways to prevent disease. Many rituals also provide psychological comfort during times of hardship. Today, humans are adopting new behaviors although it’s too early to tell whether any of these behaviors will become truly ritualized. It will only be the case when the social significance of the behavior takes precedence over its practical use. This is what sets rituals apart from other cultural practices, such as cooking.

Not all rituals are effective because we don’t always understand what is producing the risk we are trying to control. But some do work. In the Indian state of Bihar, where maternal and infant death rate at birth remains high, 269 rituals are associated with pregnancy and birth. A significant proportion of these rituals, such as preparing the nutritious food, are perfectly in accord with modern medical advice. Many others are likely neutral while the ones, such as bathing the infant immediately after birth, are viewed as risky just because of practical limitations such as a lack of clean water.

The relationship between medicine and rituals is also interesting. “It is important to keep in mind that to most people, the mechanisms of modern medicine are just as opaque as rituals are,” says Legare, an expert. The practices of modern medicine are relatively new. “When a doctor tells you, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do for you, that may be true, but it is very discouraging as well,” Legare says. “Therefore relevant rituals are firmly valued seemingly out of no reasons.”