Secret Recipe

Everytime I vsited Taiwan, I was always amazed to see "secret recipe" all over the places. Ancient secret recipe, palacial secret recipe, or family secret recipe, and so forth. Not that other countries don't have secret recipes, but they seem so ubiquitous in Taiwan (I assume China is the same though I have never been to China). The most famous secret recipe is probably the recipe of Coca Cola which is even insured.

A secret recipe must have started with a good product (a unique food, drink, medicine, etc.) which the proprietor claimed to have been made with secret recipe. As the product gained recognition or commercial success, competitors began to copy; and before long the marketplace would be flooded with similar products with their own secret recipes - real or not. Here is an example. In late 2000 I was in Puli to see my family and the damage caused by the earthquake the year before. I found so many little store fronts selling salty crispy chicken (yien-su-tzi) and each claimed to have prepared the chicken with old family secret recipe. I didn't think there was such food even 30 years ago, so any such recipe couldn't have been old. It turned out, a lot of people had lost their jobs after the earthquake. To make a little extra income, many people whose home had a street front would set up a small stand with a big wok for frying the chicken. And to compete, the minimum culinary credit would be the secret family recipe. Just in downtown Puli, there were no less than 30 of them. There is little doubt that none of the stores actually has its own secret family recipe. It just shows the marketing magic of "old" and "secret" in our society.

Anything with secrecy attracts attention, for curiosity is a human nature. Sometimes, secrecy even commands superiority. It is not unusual in China for a teacher to keep one or two key knowledge from his pupils. This is understandable if someday the teacher and his pupils would become competitors - another case of survival tactics. But withholding knowledge is a costly drawback to the advancement of civilization.

We have heard often about "ancient Chinese secrets" which Chinese people are generally quite proud of, and are often envied by people around the world. Here the problem is "ancient". It implies that since the ancient time, we Chinese have been incapable of doing better; all we have been doing is following the recipes from long time ago. For generations we have been just a bunch of pharmacists grabbing herbs according to an Rx written hundreds of years ago by some doctor; as in Chinese "Tsao Fuang Zwa Yau". It is hard to believe that through generations, no one has raised the questions such as why the recipe works so well, or what happens if one of the ingrients becomes unavailable. But I have never seen any claim like "modern improved Chinese secret" anywhere. It is also quite embarrassing to keep being proud of our "ancient stuff", to which we contributed nothing, without having anything of our own generation to speak of. Are we really so inferior to our ancestors? And for so long?

Some may say that by attaching "ancient" and "secret", you imply it has been proven for a long time and is not publicly available, thus jacking up its scarcity and value. But since it is not publicly known, how can we know it will do us no harm? Or how can we know it will do us wonder?

Since we are at it, I will throw another one in here. We often hear people say, "my father used to say ....", or "my grandfather used to say..." or "my mother used to say...". As if any saying by elders automatically commands credibility. Well, how do we know his/her elders actually said it? And it gets quite entertaining when a middle aged man says, "when I was a kid, my mother used to say so and so." Now, when he was a kid, his mother probably was younger than he is now. This means that after accumulating more years of life experiences than his mother had then, he is still not confident enough to assert his own so and so.

Cheers.