Meet Hannah Che. We had the pleasure of talking with Hannah about food, traditions, stories, and her new cookbook The Vegan Chinese Kitchen. Read the interview, and try her delicious recipe for millet congee.

 

In your experience, how have you found food to tell a story and shape culture?
Coming from an immigrant family, food is the language we use when words don’t suffice. I can learn so much about someone by watching them cook and seeing who they cook for, asking about certain dishes that are special to them, or learning about the people who cooked for them while they were growing up. Food is mundane and ordinary, but eating is something we do three times a day. Just by nature of its universality and frequency, it reveals so much about us. Also, the best conversations I’ve had have been over a meal. Sharing food opens people up like nothing else.

How do you educate people about the intersection of food, history, health, activism, and culture?
I always try to include the story behind the recipes I share—either my own personal connection to a specific dish or the origins or traditions that inform my understanding of an ingredient. It’s easy to just present a dish with no context, but having to actually do the work and learn about something you might be unfamiliar with enriches both your knowledge and the experience of the person reading about or eating the food.

What are some plant-based ingredients and vegan dishes you would like to highlight as traditional to your culture?
Traditional Chinese home-cooking actually contains very little meat and is centered around vegetables, especially fresh leafy greens. It’s hard to name a single dish because they’re all so delicious, so I want to highlight tofu in particular. Tofu originated in China and served as the main plant-based protein source for the population. It’s considered a common, wholesome ingredient in China, not a vegetarian “meat substitute.” It solved a major food issue: Soybeans were cheap to grow but hard to digest when eaten whole, but soaking and grinding them into soymilk, then curdling the milk into a soft curd produced a supremely digestible and complete protein that could be steamed, boiled, fried, braised, dried, and used in all sorts of delicious ways. Tofu often gets a bad rap in the West, but it’s really an ingenious food and, in my opinion, one of the best inventions in food history.

Do these foods or dishes have any significant meaning or history?
There is a whole subset of Chinese cuisine called zhai cai that originated in vegetarian palace cooking and Buddhist temples, where monks fashioned imitation meats using vegetarian ingredients like tofu and tofu skins, mountain yam, gluten or seitan, and grains. It’s an old and highly developed tradition that existed long before modern mock meat brands, and, even today, if you visit Chinese restaurants in the United States or Asia, you’ll find roast duck, pork, and chicken dishes made entirely with vegetarian ingredients.

As a chef, what do you envision as the way forward to encourage people to include more fruits and vegetables into their diets?
I’ve found people are really open about trying out new types of food, and the increasing diversity in mainstream food culture is great because every culture cooks vegetables differently and brings its own sets of spices, aromatics, seasonings, and methods you can learn from. In my personal experience, eating plant-based not only hasn’t limited my options, but it’s actually opened up new realms to explore. If you aren’t a fan of a certain vegetable, try it in a different dish, using a different preparation—you’d be surprised with what you end up liking. And hit up the farmers’ markets. Don’t just stick with boring grocery store green cabbage when you can try savoy, napa cabbage, pointed white cabbage, or Taiwanese flat-head. Go for the shallots, that gorgeous purple cauliflower, the heirloom tomatoes, kabocha squash, little shishito peppers, and anything else that gets you excited to cook and eat.

Please tell us a little bit about your work and career.
My career as a chef began when I moved to China in 2019 to train at culinary school. Initially, my plan was to do research on the cuisine for my cookbook, but I fell in love with professional cooking and have been working in restaurant kitchens since then. I joke that I’m a musician gone astray. I have two degrees in piano performance, but I’ve always been interested in food, too, and found the way that cooking combines practice and craft with creativity, personal expression, and bringing people together in a tactile, memorable, and communal experience to be very similar to performing music.

Please tell us a little bit about your new book.
My debut cookbook,The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, contains stories both from my travels and culinary school experience, as well as growing up in a Chinese-American family. It features more than a hundred recipes from the subset of Chinese cuisine traditionally centered around simple and delicious ways to prepare vegetables, fruits, and grains. I organized the recipes by ingredient types, so each chapter will contain recipes specifically for leafy greens, fruits like peppers and gourds, root vegetables, grains, tofu, yuba, and seitan, for example. I hope it serves as a practical book to cook from and a reference guide, as well as a source of inspiration. I wrote The Vegan Chinese Kitchen while living in China and Taiwan, but I tested and shot all of the recipes in my parents’ home. They live in a rural area of the United States, an hour away from the nearest Asian grocery, so I know all of the dishes are totally doable and accessible for home cooks in the West!

Millet congee

Xiaomi zhou 小米粥 
SERVES 4 TO 6

Since millet is coarse and dry, it’s most often cooked into congee in northern China. The hard yellow grains break down into soft and creamy flecks, and the satiny skin-like layer that develops on the surface of the bowl of congee is considered the most nutritious part. In traditional Chinese medicine, millet is said to support digestion, improve appetite, nourish qi, and prevent blood deficiencies. My mom likes to use northeast-style millet, a variety that’s larger and stickier. It can be found in the dried goods section of Asian supermarkets. This can be a plain congee to accompany savory dishes or steamed buns, or you can add some diced sweet potato, kabocha squash, and jujube dates or goji berries for natural sweetness.

½ cup (100 g) millet  4 cups (960 mL) water 1 cup diced and peeled sweet potato, kabocha squash, or pumpkin (optional)  Handful of jujube dates or goji berries (optional) STOVETOP: Place the millet in a sieve and rinse it thoroughly under running water until the water runs clear. In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, bring the water to a boil over high heat, then add the drained millet and sweet potato or squash (if using). Reduce the heat to maintain a slow simmer, partially cover, and cook for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. The porridge is done when the millet is tender and the grains have “bloomed.” At this point, you can either serve it immediately or cook it for another 10 minutes for a thicker, creamier consistency. Top with jujube dates or goji berries (if using).

PRESSURE COOKER: Place the millet in a sieve and rinse thoroughly under running water until the water runs clear. Place the drained millet and water in the inner pot. Program to cook on the manual setting on high pressure for 15 minutes, and set the pressure valve to seal. After the timer beeps, allow the pressure to release naturally for about 15 minutes. (Do not quick release the pressure as the starchy liquid will clog the valve.)

Che, Hannah. The Vegan Chinese Kitchen (p. 291). Clarkson Potter.

You can find Hannah at theplantbasedwok.com, on Instagram and TikTok @hannah.che, and on Youtube: Hannah Che.

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How do we explain dairy consumption’s association with increased risk of prostate cancer but decreased risk of colon cancer? 

Studies comparing country-by-country cancer rates “have shown up to a 70-fold variation in the incidence of prostate cancer worldwide with low rates in parts of Asia and Africa and high rates in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Northern Europe.” Below and at 0:23 in my video Friday Favorites: Dairy and Cancer, you can see a map of prostate cancer mortality. Could dairy consumption play a role? Northern Europeans, Americans, and Australians drink a lot of milk, whereas most non-Caucasians in the world are lactose-intolerant. But, just because a country drinks a lot of milk and has a lot of cancer doesn’t mean its residents who are drinking the milk are getting the cancer. That’s why we need cohort studies, where you find out how much milk people drink, follow those individuals over time, and see if those who drink more milk get more cancer. 

There have been dozens such studies. If you put them all together, intakes of total dairy products, including low-fat milk, were indeed associated with increased prostate cancer risk. Why is this the case? Maybe it’s all of the calcium. As you can see in the graph below and at 1:17 in my video, the investigators found the more calcium people consumed, the higher their risk of prostate cancer. This may be true, but most people get their calcium from dairy, so how do we know this isn’t just a dairy effect? Before we start worrying about kale and other non-dairy sources of calcium, it would be nice to see dairy calcium teased out from non-dairy calcium intakes—and that’s exactly what the researchers did. Their findings? Indeed, the more calcium from dairy sources, the higher the risk of cancer, but non-dairy sources of calcium were found to be protective. So, it wasn’t a calcium effect; it was a dairy effect. This suggests other components of dairy may be to blame. 

The results suggest it’s the animal protein, which boosts the levels of a cancer-promoting growth hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). Below in the graph and at 2:08 in my video, you can see an albatross plot showing the findings from 28 studies involving nearly 28,000 people. There is a clear link between higher IGF-1 levels and consumption of dairy products, milk specifically, or dairy protein. 

This could also explain why plant-based diets can be so protective. Put watch-and-wait prostate cancer patients on a whole food, plant-based diet for a year, without chemotherapy or radiation, just lifestyle changes, and we see a significant reduction in PSA levels. This is indicative of tumor shrinkage, with their bloodstream becoming nearly eight times better at suppressing the growth of cancer cells. As you can see below and at 2:59 in my video, biopsies show changes in gene expression. This downregulation of critical cancer genes effectively switches off cancer growth genes at a genetic level. Conversely, if you eat a lot of dairy after a prostate cancer diagnosis, you may suffer a 76 percent higher risk of death overall and a 141 percent increased risk of dying specifically from your cancer. 

Even without IGF-1, the milk protein casein appears to be a cancer cell proliferation-promoting factor, increasing the growth of prostate cancer cells (at least in a petri dish, as you can see below and at 3:30 in my video). The same is true for whey, the other major animal protein in dairy. Nearly 100 percent of advanced prostate cancers thrive by upregulating a growth enzyme called TOR. Dairy protein boosts TOR signaling even higher, which only makes sense. Calves have to grow 40 times faster than human babies, so cow’s milk has to be packed with growth promoters, not to mention the hormones—especially from cows who are typically already impregnated again on the dairy farm. 

“Commercialized milk production by pregnant cows releases uncontrolled amounts of bovine steroids [hormones] into the human food chain.” As such, the combination may well “explain the observed association between high dairy consumption and increased risk” of prostate cancer. 

“From an evolutionary perspective…the persistent ‘abuse’ of the growth-promoting signaling system of bovine milk by humans over their entire life span”—not drinking milk only during infancy—“maintains the most important hallmark of cancer biology, i.e., sustained proliferative signaling” to grow, grow, grow. So, there’s interest in trying “to define safe upper limits for long-term milk and dairy intake for the prevention of the most common dairy-promoted cancer in men.” But if you look at diet and cancer guideline recommendations, milk may increase risk of prostate cancer, “however, no recommendation was provided for [cutting down on] calcium and dairy intakes because the evidence for prostate cancer conflicted with decreased risk of colorectal cancer with high milk intake.” High dairy intake is associated with increased prostate cancer risk, but decreased colon cancer risk. So, it’s like how alcohol may be an “intoxicating carcinogen,” but “policymakers hesitate to introduce effective alcohol policies, or even to support the addition of cancer warning labels on alcohol containers, for fear they might undermine or contradict possible health benefits of alcohol use.” Is dairy really protective against colon cancer? 

If you put all the cohort studies together, where researchers measured dairy consumption and then followed people for years to see who got cancer, milk and total dairy consumption was indeed associated with a reduction in risk of colorectal cancer, one of our deadliest cancers. Now, people who drink more milk tend to exercise more, smoke less, drink less, and eat less meat, which could explain some of the association. However, many of the studies adjusted for these kinds of confounding factors. More likely it was the protective effects of the calcium, which may bind up pro-inflammatory bile acids in the gut, though high-fat dairy products like cheese may actually increase bile acids, explaining why cheese appeared to cancel out the calcium benefit. So, might we be able to get the best of both worlds by consuming non-dairy calcium sources? 

As you can see below and at 6:44 in my video, if you randomize people to calcium supplements, you can get a significant reduction in recurring colon polyps, which can otherwise turn into cancer, but calcium pills have been associated with adverse cardiovascular effects. So, in the best of all worlds, if you want to take a precautionary approach in terms of nutrition and cancer, you should obtain calcium through low-oxalate, dark-green leafy vegetables, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils, or, if necessary, calcium-fortified foods such as soy or almond milk. 

 

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