Recently, every time in beginning of winter, I can still see my grandparents get up early for morning exercises, walk home, and happily carry or pull Chinese cabbage home in a small car with a cloth bag. Two trees are missing, and three and five trees are added.

Twenty-five years ago, 95% of the sales of Beijing winter vegetable market came from Chinese cabbage. Until 10 years ago, 70% of the sales of Beijing winter vegetable market still came from Chinese cabbage.

Now with greenhouses, residents in Beijing and northern cities can buy and eat fresh vegetables every day, even in the severe winter with heavy snow. Fresh vegetables, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, and even loofah and sword beans are all arbitrary choices of citizens' winter recipes.

However, in my heart, with Beijing, I still have to eat cabbage to make people feel that it is almost winter.

"Make a good fight for storing Chinese cabbage in winter!"

It has been inevitable for many years that Chinese cabbage can become a "home cooking" in Beijing in winter.

Due to geographical and climatic reasons, vegetables are scarce in winter in the whole northern region.

In this context, the advantages of Chinese cabbage are highlighted: cheap, good quality, storable and edible all winter. Moreover, compared with potatoes, radishes and other vegetables stored in winter, Chinese cabbage is eaten in a variety of ways, and it is delicious to eat. Coupled with its cold tolerance, if carefully looked after, it can be eaten until the next spring.

Liang Shiqiu once described in the book "Talking about Eating": "In Peiping, there are cabbages all year round. In early winter, a peddler pushes a cart, and a cart of cabbages sells along the street. Ordinary people buy the whole car and keep it for the winter. "

In the past, winter storage of Chinese cabbage was mostly purchased by vegetable companies under the Second Commercial Bureau of Beijing (now the Second Commercial Group), and then wholesale to food companies, vegetable shops and vegetable stations in various districts and counties step by step.

Chinese cabbages in vegetable shops and stations all over the country are packed at night and sold in the morning. Because there are many people snapping up, a car full of Chinese cabbage can be sold out soon, and people have to wait for the next bus to buy it. People waiting for the bus at this time will be anxious because they don't know when the next bus will come. Therefore, many people lined up in front of the vegetable shop before dawn, trying to buy cabbage on the first bus.

Because of this, in those days, storing Chinese cabbage in winter was an important work led by the governments of major cities, which played an important role and was fought as a battle every year. The slogan of action is inseparable from "winter storage of Chinese cabbage!" Every year, the municipal government has a special working group and a large number of winter vegetable storage and sales staff.

Let's take Beijing for example. In the past ten and a half months when Chinese cabbage was listed on the market, there were sometimes as many as 30 thousand workers who invested in the acquisition, transportation and sales of Chinese cabbage every day.

In Beijing, where carriages are usually forbidden to enter the city, they have been lifted in the streets and alleys these days. Put a blue substrate and the license plate of a Chinese cabbage in front of the window of a big truck, and you can walk in front of Tiananmen Square unimpeded.