The centrepiece of every Lunar New Year meal at my family table is something called Lo Han Jai, or Buddha’s Delight. At its simplest it is a big pot of simmering vegetables, fungi and bean curd in a broth. Each household will have their own version of the dish: some add mung bean noodles for heft, others add baby corn for crunch, and omnivore households like mine add shrimp, dried oysters and pigs’ feet.

A traditional ingredient is fat choy (black moss in English), a type of edible, land-dwelling algae related to spirulina that resembles long strands of black hair. It’s sold dried then reconstituted and cooked in a dried shiitake-based sauce or broth yielding slightly chewy threads with a faint seaweed taste, though its value is more in name than in taste and texture. As its name suggests, it puts the “fat choy” (achieving prosperity and riches) in Gung Hay Fat Choy, and is considered an auspicious delicacy to have on the holiday, especially in Cantonese-speaking communities, dating back to the Jin Dynasty in 300AD.

While eating it, my dad would offer this bit of info: the harvesting of fat choy is causing desertification in parts of China to a point where the government banned it. But it can easily be found in the GTA during the holiday (assuming it’s the real deal). As climate change becomes ever-pressing and we’re all trying to be more ethical consumers, it’s time to reckon with fat choy.

Fat choy grows in arid plains and is mostly found on the plateau of Inner Mongolia and the northwestern provinces of Qinghai and Gansu in China, writes Rico Wong, deputy chief executive of the Hong Kong-based Conservancy Association, in an email. The problem, he continues, is that in order to harvest 19g of fat choy, the amount typically used for a small family’s meal, about 1,250 square metres of land have to be dug up, up to three metres deep, equivalent to one sixth of a soccer field. It’s the harvesting that causes the environmental impact since the disturbed land destroys other vegetation and makes it unable to grow anything else, causing soil erosion and sand to blow over communities in the area. A 2012 Al Jazeera story about desertification in China says that 3,600 square kilometres of land turns into desert each year, affecting 400 million people.

While the harvesting of fat choy isn’t solely to blame for the country’s expanding deserts, the Chinese government banned the sale and harvest of fat choy in 2000. The Conservancy Association subsequently launched campaigns to educate the Hong Kong public about the environmental impact of fat choy, suggesting home cooks and restaurant chefs replace it with lettuce, which also sounds like prosperity in Cantonese (sang choy). In 2013, the Hong Kong government announced it will stop serving fat choy, along with shark fin and bluefin tuna, at official functions. Around the same time, the Chinese University of Hong Kong also said it banned fat choy from academic events.

Currently, there is no ban on the import or sale of fat choy in Canada. It can still easily be found in stores and restaurants throughout the GTA where there isn’t as much knowledge about fat choy and its environmental impact. Wong believes the stuff being found in stores two decades after the ban is likely illegally harvested in China. “There are still people ignoring the environmental impact as well as the law and going for the ‘getting rich’ meaning of fat choy,” he writes. The other possibility is that it’s fake fat choy made of starch that’s been dyed black.

“It’s sold dried and when you rehydrate it and put it in a sauce, it acts like a bit of a thickener and gives it a seaweed, briny flavour,” says Nick Liu, chef and owner of modern Chinese restaurant DaiLo on College St. He’s been eating fat choy as part of the Lo Han Jai his family makes since he could remember, and his restaurant has served it in previous years as part of a Chinese New Year dinner, but this year he opted not to add it to his menu.

“We used to recycle a few dishes ‘cause we only did it once a year, but this year we wanted to highlight other traditional ingredients like wintermelon. I love the texture and how it soaks up all the juices it’s cooked in. We cut it into little rectangle pieces and cook them sous vide with a stock and top it with bacon, crab and mushrooms.”

In the past, Liu fried the fat choy to serve as a crispy garnish that added height and texture to a dish (“I find the traditional Chinese way it’s cooked is kind of slimy and stringy,” he says). He didn’t know about the ban, but says he won’t use it again and would warn his parents about it as they still use it, out of tradition.

I had no trouble buying what appears to be fat choy in Toronto’s downtown Chinatown. It’s sold in small baggies that look like clippings from the floor of a barbershop. Two supermarkets I stopped into sold sealed bags weighing about 30g for $4 each. One Chinese medicine shop sold them in larger bags by weight (I got the smallest one available for $12). Another shop sold two types: one that I was told was “old stock,” fat choy harvested before the Chinese government implemented the ban in 2000 ($18) and a cultivated variety that was less harmful to the environment ($10). The man at the counter told me the stuff that grew in the wild tasted better.

It’s unlikely that fat choy can be cultivated because it grows too slowly to make it an economically viable crop, writes Wong. He is also skeptical there is still old stock available 20 years after China’s ban. (My parents tell me our grandma stockpiled a bunch of dried fat choy before the ban and that we’re rationing it until it runs out).

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Out of curiosity, I took the fat choy I purchased to chef Nick Liu at his DaiLo restaurant for inspection. He takes three packets: one $4 packet from the supermarket, the $10 bag that supposedly contained cultivated fat choy and the $18 bag that I was told contained old stock of wild fat choy. Online guides say that real fat choy is dark green in colour while the fake stuff is pure black. It’s hard to tell just by looking at the dried stuff so Liu reconstituted them in bowls of hot water. Surprisingly, the $18 and $10 fat choy turned dark green and had the familiar seaweed smell and flavour we were both familiar with. The water turned a slightly muddy brown, as if the fat choy was dug from the ground. The $4 fat choy simply stayed black and did not have any smell or flavour. The ingredients simply listed “dried black moss” and that it was imported from China.

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“Someone should just make fake fat choy and say that on the package if we know the real stuff is bad for the environment,” says Liu. “I think people would still buy the fake stuff as long as we know what’s in it and that it’s safe to eat.”

Studies have also found that certain varieties of cyanobacteria, which includes fat choy, produce an amino acid known as beta-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) that is also a neurotoxin that researchers believe is linked Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But for now, the link between BMAA and the human brain still needs further research.

Despite its easy availability (real or fake), Wong writes he’s optimistic that consumption of fat choy has gone down in Hong Kong as government officials stopped promoting it, and he’s seen restaurants and home cooks make the swap for lettuce. Still, Wong would like to see fat choy being banned beyond China to have more of a lasting impact.

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