These are hard times for lovers of China’s meatier regional cuisines. A 49 per cent year-on-year jump in meat prices and an 18 per cent rise in broader food prices led to a 6.5 per cent rise in the consumer price index for August. The manner and degree of China’s inflation problem is hard to judge, but as prices rise, the case for exchange rate appreciation only gets stronger.

The price of a Sichuan meal has been affected by everything from floods to animal disease to drought in Australia. Leave food out and inflation does not look so bad: a rise in the CPI of only 0.9 per cent. But this is not satisfactory, because food prices matter in a still-developing country such as China, and because the CPI is a poor guide to the price level anyway.