The rate of urbanization in 2002 is 39.09%, note this includes small towns which are much poorer than cities, that means the majority of the population was still very poor and the trend to work in coastal factories barely began, so could you really see average people's daily dishes as a guest?
I'm not saying it's rare to eat pork, what I’m saying is eating pork almost everyday like it's a super normal thing, not just every now and then or even ocassionally. I don't doubt there were many people who can afford to tho it's 1.4 billion afterall.
In my mid-sized town eating pork was a treat back then, especially when there were guests or holidays, definitely not everyday, it was soy products, fish (near a big reservoir) and eggs, people's wages were 50 to 100 dollars, farmers were even poorer coz it was all susbsistence farming.
Do the math, pork was fluctuating around 1 dollar per 500g back then.
Yunnan is mountainous so it probably doesn't even qualify as susbsistence farming, but it's warm and has fruit industry and tourism now, you can still find extreme poverty in Guizhou's mountains which is right above Yunnan.
Leiyang is not a town in the American sense, it was a county now a city. Village → town → county → city → capital → province.
I don’t know what you would consider a small town like Leiyang Hunan (small being relative, it has a couple hundred thousand urban and almost a million rural). Of course, Hunan is a bit different from poorer Jiangxi or even Henan. Heck, when I visited the yunnan country side in 2002, I was told many families were so poor they only had one pair of pants (seemed like an exaggeration, but who knows).
I'm not saying it's rare to eat pork, what I’m saying is eating pork almost everyday like it's a super normal thing, not just every now and then or even ocassionally. I don't doubt there were many people who can afford to tho it's 1.4 billion afterall.
In my mid-sized town eating pork was a treat back then, especially when there were guests or holidays, definitely not everyday, it was soy products, fish (near a big reservoir) and eggs, people's wages were 50 to 100 dollars, farmers were even poorer coz it was all susbsistence farming.
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http://finance.sina.com.cn/x/20040908/07101007244.shtml
Do the math, pork was fluctuating around 1 dollar per 500g back then.
Yunnan is mountainous so it probably doesn't even qualify as susbsistence farming, but it's warm and has fruit industry and tourism now, you can still find extreme poverty in Guizhou's mountains which is right above Yunnan.
Leiyang is not a town in the American sense, it was a county now a city. Village → town → county → city → capital → province.