Eating Zongzi

During the recent Dragon Boat Festival, more than a billion Chinese people got together with family to eat zongzi (sounds like tsong-zuh). As most Chinese holidays have a traditional food and legend to go with it, zongzi is the food for Dragon Boat Festival.

The short version of the legend goes that when a well-loved Chinese poet threw himself into the river and drowned after being exiled, the people in that village were devastated. They wanted to keep his body from being eaten by the fish in the river, so they began to throw rice, wrapped in bamboo leaves, into the river to feed the fish. This way the fish would be too full to nibble on anything else.

Today, people still eat zongzi to commemorate his death. The zongzi includes seasoned rice wrapped around meat of nuts and then wrapped in bamboo leaves to boil.

One of my former students brought me some zongzi back from her family's celebration a while back, and we tried them today. Not bad.