Pandas don't need to boil their bamboo

When I was in China earlier this year, a guest of Chenshan Botanical Garden in Shanghai (before travelling to Beijing Botanical Garden), I ate bamboo shoots. Not sliced and canned then added to a stir fry like carrots, but fresh, served like an artichoke.

I also ate pre-peeled shoots in various dishes, again fresh rather than canned because April is the season in China for bamboo shoots. The best dish was at a banquet with Professor Honghong Hu (Director of Chenshan Botanical Garden) and Gilles Vincent, with Professor Hu contemplating a peeled and unpeeled bamboo shoot on his dish. I was watching to pick up tips about how to tackle mine.

Of the nearly 1600 species of bamboo, it's said 110 have edible shoots. After careful preparation... That's because bamboo shoots contain cyanide. But so do apricots, almonds and cassava.

Luckily, the form of cyanide in bamboo, taxiphyllin, breaks down into harmless chemicals quickly in boiling water. So all bamboo we consume have been cooked in some way - 20 minutes at 98 degrees C removes about 70% of the toxic chemical, and further heating or higher temperatures will eliminate up to 96%.

In China quite a few species are harvested and consumed in commercial quantities. The Giant Bamboo (Dendrocalamus giganteus) is one, and it grow near Shanghai. As you'd expect, the shoots are large - they can weigh up to two kilograms. Although harvested in spring, they are know as 'winter bamboo shoots'.

Although the species pictured above in Chenshan Botanical Garden, and the one served at our dinner in April, were both large, I don't think either is the Giant Bamboo. More likely Phyllostachys edulis, Moso Banboo, with a fringe of hairs on the dark-brown, overlapping sheaths.

Slimmer bamboos are used further south, in Yunnan Province, including what are known locally as Green Bamboo and Speckled Bamboo. One that apparently sends up shoots during spring thunderstorms is called Thunder Shoots. Another is called Hairy Shoots, although the outer hairy leaves are removed before eating.

Spring is peak bamboo harvesting season, and the regions around Shanghai produce most of China's bamboo shoots, harvested early in the mornings and often cooked and eaten soon after.

They are taste good, very much like an artichoke heart. And fun to eat.

If however you prefer your bamboos to contemplate rather than consume, the translated words of the 11th century Chinese poet Su Shi may be helpful:

I must have bamboo in my life; I would rather go without meat. 

One might become emaciated when not eating meat, 

but one might become vulgar when living without bamboo. 

A thin person can become fatter, but there is no cure for vulgarity.

I take it the cure for vulgarity is to be among and with bamboo, rather than eat it. These lines of poetry were reproduced alongside this beautiful 2014 painting of bamboo by Wang Naizhuang, hanging in The Historical Expression of Chinese Art Exhibition, at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, in July.

As to pandas, bamboo makes up about 99% of their diet. Due to the low nutritional value of bamboo, they need to consume 23-40 kilograms every day. Pandas eat roots and leaves, but prefer young shoots. So in in spring and summer they eat mostly shoots, in autumn leaves, and in winter roots.

Pandas don't eat as many different species as humans, only about 20 or so, including Arrow Bamboo (Pseudosasa japonica) and Black Bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra). None, though, in cans.