The National Palace Museum in Taiwan showcases a variety of ancient artifacts, from scrolls of calligraphy to bejewelled hairpins. Two sculptures serve as the museum’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, showcase pieces that draw in the tour buses. One is a brilliant piece of white and green jade carved into the shape of a cabbage with a grasshopper in it. The other is a stone carved into a piece of fatty, stewed pork.

A South Korean friend, returning from his first visit to Taiwan, found this hilarious. “In Korea, we like to go drink at night. In Taiwan, you go eat dinner, eat snacks, then eat midnight snacks! Even the museum is obsessed with food!”

I’m not sure how much you can tell about a country from its prized pieces. The Mona Lisa is intriguing for her mystique: the woman’s ability to furtively follow you with her eyes, her enigmatic smile, and the questions they raise. The statue of David in Italy is admired for its idealisation of the perfect male form, for his hero’s victory stance, for being a marble embodiment of divine creation. Enthusiasts crowd around the Rosetta Stone in the UK for its role in unlocking some of the greatest secrets of ancient Egypt, or because it looks like something out of an Indiana Jones film, or just maybe because of the way it was snatched from the clutches of the French.

At any rate, the stewed pork sculpture in Taiwan is admired for its likeness to the real thing. When you walk past the exhibit, you’ll hear exclamations of, “Wah, it looks so real! I could just eat it!”

Then, should the two exhibits make you hungry for some meat or a bit of veg, out you go, with one of the world’s most snack-centric cultures at your doorstep. Go home and turn on the television, and you’ll encounter several shows, one of them probably in Japanese, on where to find the best fried tofu street stalls in Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. Open a fashion magazine, and you’ll find a multipage spread about the best strawberry cake shops in Taipei, the national capital. Walk through the metro station, and you’ll smell freshly baked bread from the bakery next to the newspaper stand. Visit any home prepared to be stuffed to the gullet with cut-up fruit, small cookies, jellied snacks, and so on. The story of Din Tai Fung, one of the most famous dumpling chains in the world, gets its own television drama on Hakka TV1.

All of it makes complete sense. For a small island nation, the variety of tasty things on offer and the convenience with which they can be obtained in Taiwan is staggering. Glutinous and fried things covered in sauce form a common theme. Starchy items boiled in ice sugar form another. Curious combinations, like fried dough sticks inside fried bread, become breakfast essentials. The whole country munches and nibbles and chomps its way through the alleyways, the temples, the night markets, the metro and the piers.

A one-track mind is contagious. After a while, you can’t help but give into the collective obsession. After lunch, you start daydreaming about where to go for your afternoon pearl tea break. After dinner, you wonder if the shaved ice place near the National Taiwan University will be too crowded; maybe it’d be best to go for a custard puff instead. Eating your way around Taiwan is perhaps one of the best ways to get to know the country and its people. And then, if you have time, head over to the National Palace Museum. You may or may not be awed by the jade cabbage and its grasshopper, but at the very least, you won’t be hungry.

Vicky’s future columns will focus on her travels and meals in Taiwan.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 9:34 am and is filed under Taipei, travel.