Last Monday I went to see Jane Goodall give an evening talk, part of her brief tour through China promoting Roots and Shoots, an organization she founded several years ago in the hopes of enlisting young people across the world to do ecological work.

It takes stubbornness and an almost pathological optimism to stand in a Beijing auditorium and talk about saving the environment. Fortunately Goodall has abundant reserves of both, and there is something cheering about seeing her on stage, with her stuffed banana-eating chimpanzee, encouraging young Chinese people that it is not too late to turn things around. Goodall is quiet, kindly and warm, like a beloved favorite aunt, and it is impressive to remember that this soft-spoken woman once spent many years doing pioneering fieldwork in the harshest conditions.

The talk attracted a mixture of expats and Chinese students, as well as a fair number of older people of uncertain provenance and a small swarm of photographers. Poster exhibits had been set up in the auditorium lobby, most of them by the Roots and Shoots groups and their offshoots, but these were in Chinese only and so inaccessible to me.

The moment Goodall came out on the stage the photographers popped up to take her picture, hiding her from view. One very serious cameraman stood with his back to her and filmed the audience. Goodall was genial, smiling through the cameras, placing her stuffed chimp gingerly on the lectern in front of her. She was dressed in something fuzzy and black and had a long flowy scarf around her shoulders; all that was missing was a mug of chamomile tea. Her translator was a serious, compact guy in a suit, with a copy of her talk in his hand. They were a team act; Goodall would speak three or four sentences at a time, then the translator would deliver them to the audience in Chinese while the woman behind me repeated them loudly in English for her hard-of-hearing companion.

Goodall started her talk by telling everyone that while she could not greet them in Chinese, she would greet them in chimpanzee, and she then gave a long, crescendoing chimp cry that sounded amazingly like the famous diner scene from When Harry Met Sally. This completely silenced the audience and made the photographers sit down. But the translator, a little bit of a spoilsport, did not give a chimp cry himself.

The first part of Goodall's talk was a recital of her own story - her early dreams of working with animals when she was growing up in England, the near-universal discouragement she received from everyone except her mother, her first meeting with Leakey in Kenya, her faithful mother coming down to live with her in the forest when it was decided she must have a chaperone, and the long frustrations that preceded her first breakthrough observation: seeing a chimpanzee prepare a termite meal by first peeling and shaping a poking stick. This famous event was the first time anyone had seen tool use by an animal, at a time when toolmaking was considered the distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens. It got Goodall the funding needed to continue her work.

Goodall talked a little bit about the many things she had learned about the social habits of chimpanzees, demonstrating the various behaviors on the translator as she described them. She began with a discussion of head-patting, tapping him softly on the head as she spoke, to the complete bafflement of everyone in the room who did not speak English. The mortified man frowned deeper into his glasses and stared at the paper in his hand, which was now bunching up a little bit. When she finished talking, still patting his head, he dutifully translated her explanation, to mounting laughter. Goodall let him finish and then carried on:

'Now, let's say I'm a female chimpanzee...'

The translator's grip seemed to tighten, though I had thought he could not grip the paper any harder.

'Then I may just go up and...' And here she turned to the translator and planted a big wet kiss on his cheek, amplified by the microphone he was holding up defensively to his lip.

'Sweet monkey Jesus!' I thought to myself. 'You're on stage making out with Jane Goodall! Roll with it!' But the translator failed to roll with it at all. He stared down at his sheaf of papers as if he were trying to ignite them with his mind. The audience, of course, was going nuts.

Spurned by this man of ice, Goodall moved to the second part her talk, a litany of the many environmental problems facing the world and especially her beloved African forests. The dynamic there is sad. Demand for wood (driven in large part by China) has led to logging that not only destroys chimpanzee habitat directly, but also creates roads that open previously inaccessible parts of the jungle to poachers. The poachers hitch rides in on logging trucks, set up camp, and then kill every large animal they can find over the course of two or three days. These animals are sold for 'bush meat' back in the rapidly growing African cities; any young collected in the hunt are sold as pets. In essence, the African forests are being mined both for their wood and their wildlife, in a way that guarantees their eventual exhaustion. We're partly to blame for it, since we drive the demand. But, Goodall argues, this also means we exert some power over the situation.

The final part of her talk was devoted to developing this argument, laying out her reasons for not losing hope. She cited two examples of animals in China being saved from the brink of extinction: the Milu deer, which is about to be reintroduced into captivity after a rather extraordinary history where repeated attempts to breed up populations of the animal were thwarted by its being so very very tasty, and the crested ibis, a beautiful bird whose numbers had declined to seven birds in Shaanxi province by 1981, but which has now recovered to the point where about a thousand birds are alive. She also referred to successful desert reclamation in the Loess plateau, which I had not heard about before. Most of my experience with the Loess plateau has involved inhaling it as it floats in giant yellow clouds past Beijing, but Goodall calls it the largest recuperation of a destroyed ecosystem in history.

Environmental organizations pose a dilemma for the Chinese government. On the one hand, pollution in China affects everyone on a day-to-day level, and in some places (like the coal region of Shaanxi) it makes life almost intolerable. Pollution also takes a huge chunk out of Chinese GDP, deters foreign tourism, and annoys the neighbors. Narrowly focused environmental activism (like the national panda fetish) has been good public relations for China, making the country look like it's making serious reforms after a regrettable interval when economic development trumped every other concern.

But there is always a risk that any kind of organized grass-roots activity may cross political redlines, especially since many of the worst environmental problems are a direct result of corruption and misgovernment. Having someone as charismatic and famous as Goodall offers a bit of protection to both sides in the game. Her prestige protects her organization from arbitrary hassles, while her track record of focusing on ecological problems and trying to work within sometimes difficult political constraints reassures the government that the group won't go all Falun Gong on them.

Goodall is used to dealing with a variety of devils - her whole career studying chimpanzees required working with African governments of varying degrees of unsavoriness, and since becoming an environmental crusader she has allowed her image be used in connection with commercial products in ways that purists might find problematic. You get the impression that her tolerance for human imperfection comes from having seen some very dark things, and not just from our own species. After studying chimpanzees for over ten years and coming to see them as peaceful and benevolent animals with a bit of a temper, Goodall witnessed a four-year chimpanzee war of extermination, and discovered a mother-daughter pair who liked to kill and eat babies. To someone who always had higher expectations of chimpanzees than people, the petty hypocrisies of Western consumerism or even Chinese repression must seem like small potatoes in comparison. Her resilience and optimism are remarkable; they reminded me of how many times I have been content to adopt a convenient pessimism in the face of the terrible environmental damage taking place, and made me ashamed of it.

Yesterday (October 6) was the mid-Autumn festival, a main event in the lunar calendar that was doubly significant this year, since it fell in the middle of the week-long National Day celebration, when all of China is on vacation and most of China is on the road. Considering that the festival also fell on a Friday, it was nearly the ultimate party weekend, spoiled only by a bit of rain.

WalMart is my reliable early-warning system for Chinese holidays. Three weeks or so before any main event various special exhibits start popping up, and more and more floor space of the store is devoted to lanterns or zongzi or whatever the item of interest might be, similar to the Halloween and Christmas infestations that hit American shopping malls. About a month ago, I noticed a profusion of gorgeous and expensive red boxes taking up more and more shelf space - the mooncakes had arrived - and I spent some time debriefing my Chinese friends.

'What are mooncakes for?'

'For the mid-autumn festival. They are very famous. Usually we exchange them with friends and eat them cut into small wedges, with tea'

'Do you like the taste?'

'Hmm, maybe not so much.'

Which is the polite Chinese equivalent of putting your finger in your mouth and miming the gag reflex.

'Strange,' I thought, 'why make a holiday dessert no one wants to eat?'

Mooncakes, of course, are the exact cultural analogue of the American Christmas fruitcake, that venerable Christmas pastry of astonishing density that brings people together by uniting the giver and receiver in a shared reluctance to eat it. The Chinese have not yet advanced as far as those intrepid Americans who store a received fruitcake for a year before re-gifting it to another victim, but there are promising signs that the failure to let mooncakes overwinter may just be a function of limited apartment storage space, solvable by applying economies of scale:

'Earlier this month, a prominent mooncake factory in Nanjing was reported to have minced and frozen last year's leftover mooncake fillings and reused them in this year's product. '

At its simplest, a mooncake is a pastry crust wrapped around a disk of filling that in shape, flavor and density strongly resembles a hockey puck. Traditional fillings include lotus seed paste and the salted yolk from a duck's egg, but modern mooncakes can come filled with pretty much anything. A Chinese character baked into the top of the cake warns you what to expect inside.

In simpler times, mooncakes were something you bought cheap in a paper sack and ate in wedges with your friends, bonding in shared hardship. In recent years, however, the trend has been to offer mooncakes packaged up in more and more ornate gift boxes, complete with brass sculptures, fancy utensils, bottles of brandy, and (for the completely unsubtle) miniature bars of gold. These blinged-out mooncakes have proved a useful way to flaunt great wealth, or offer that important someone the equivalent of an envelope full of cash while preserving some semblance of deniability.

Mooncake scientists have been caught a little flat-footed by the rise of the luxury gift box, and are racing to come up with high-end fillings to do the hyperornate presentation justice. A popular 'lucky' price point for the finest boxes is 9999 yuan ($1200), at which point even the most perfectly round egg yolk is not going to be adequate. A Western chef in this impasse might reach straight for the Perigord truffles, but the Chinese prefer their hideously expensive ingredients to lack flavor. They've enlisted the old standbys: shark fin, swallow's nest, pearl dust and (for those who really want to sledgehammer the point home) flakes of metallic gold. The approach so far has been limited to 'let's find something really expensive and grind it up and put it in there', but work on the five-star mooncake continues, with perhaps a hint of desperation:

'The shark's fin was first stewed for hours in sugar water. After it dried, chefs mixed in some ham slices, various nuts and preserved fruits. '

The luxury mooncake fad may be a symptom of a rapidly stratifying society, but another, more charitable way to read it is as an expression of the universal human yearning for the edible. Unlike a fruitcake, you cannot soak a mooncake in brandy - it has to go down on its own merits. I noticed that the most popular mooncakes this year were those that gave the traditional recipe the widest possible berth. Häägën Däzs, past masters at selling extremely overpriced ice cream on the Chinese market, deployed their perennial winner: chocolate-covered ice cream mooncakes. These suspiciously Klondikeian confections have been selling like... well, like hotcakes, to the point where anyone who doesn't pre-order them in the summer months is just out of luck.

Other multinationals haven't been as successful. Starbucks tried to crack the market with a chocolate-and-lavender offering that perfectly blended the rich taste of cocoa with the floral aroma of bath soap, but this proved too much even for the hardened mooncake eater. Meanwhile KFC, the other titan of the China market, chose to punt with a custard tart that it lamely emphasized as 'moon-shaped'.

I thought I would check in with that touchstone of all things cultural, my Chinese chat harem, to see if there was any love anywhere for the poor pastry:

when i was at university, there was a Dept called food and agriculture
one of the classes was about how to cook things
before the moon cake days, they taught how to make moon cakes
the mooncakes made by the students were hard like a rock, they even used it like a stone to fight for fun
when moon day came, the university sent all the students free mooncakes which were from that Dept
no one ate it, we did the same thing as the cooking students did, so there was a moon fight
ha, can I steal that story from you?
of course
dont forget the starbucks part
i will never forgive them for making a lavender moon cake

There is one other traditional food served on the mid-autumn holiday: the pomelo. This lovable fruit can be forgiven its harmless self-indulgence in the area of rind thickness; under all that skin it tastes like a simple, no-nonsense grapefruit.

Homely, fresh, tasty, and impossible to package, it makes the perfect foil for the mooncake. So long as no one develops a a shark fin pomelo (and I'm sure research is ongoing in some blood-spattered Guangdong basement) it will remain the great green hope against the gentrification of the mid-autumn festival.