成都：麻是每秒五十次

Chengdu is famous for two things: pandas and málà.

Today I found out that these two things are about the same thing.

This morning I went to the Chengdu panda base.

One panda sat there eating bamboo.

I watched for a long time, and he kept on eating.

I asked a staff member: how long does he eat each day?

She said: twelve to fourteen hours.

I said: why so long?

She said: because bamboo gives very little energy.

She said: of the bamboo a panda eats, his body can only use 17 per cent.

She said: so he has to eat 12 to 38 kilos a day.

I said: what was the panda supposed to eat?

She said: a panda's body is a meat-eater's body.

She said: even today, his gut is still a meat-eater's gut.

I said: then why does he eat bamboo?

She said: about 4.2 million years ago, the part of his body in charge of the meat flavour broke.

She said: from then on, he could eat meat and not taste any meat flavour.

I said: so he went off to eat bamboo?

She said: yes.

She said: this base was built in 1987.

She said: back then there were only six pandas, all rescued from the mountains.

I said: how many are left in the wild now?

She said: 1,864.

She said: that was counted in 2013.

She said: in 2016, the panda went from "endangered" to "vulnerable".

In the afternoon I went to eat.

The first mouthful went in and my mouth went numb.

I asked the owner: is this the chilli?

She said: no, this is the numbness.

She said: the numbness is Sichuan pepper, the heat is chilli, two different things.

I said: what's the difference?

She said: chilli fools the part of you that handles heat.

She said: so you feel burnt, but the food isn't burning you.

She said: Sichuan pepper fools a different part.

She said: Sichuan pepper fools the part that handles touch.

I said: touch?

She said: yes.

She said: someone ran an experiment and had people compare.

She said: people said the closest thing was a shake fifty times a second.

I said: fifty times a second?

She said: yes, your mouth thinks something is shaking, and nothing is.

I said: is Sichuan pepper Chinese?

She said: Sichuan pepper is Chinese, eaten here for over 2,000 years.

I said: and chilli?

She said: chilli came from the Americas, four hundred-odd years ago.

She said: in 1591, a Chinese book wrote about it for the first time.

She said: that book said its flowers were white, its fruit red, and it was good to look at.

I said: so nobody ate it back then?

She said: no, back then it was planted in courtyards to look at.

She said: so Sichuan people were numb for two thousand years before they were ever hot.

In the evening I thought: the panda lost one part, and now has to eat fourteen hours a day.

We fooled one extra part, and got a whole cuisine.

How much of the flavour you taste do you think is real?