Food, Culture and the Path of China’s Culinary History: An interview with Thomas David DuBois

You may listen to this interview from HERE.

Thomas David DuBois is a Professor of Humanities at Beijing Normal University, School of Chinese Language and Culture, and holds concurrent professorships at Shandong University and Hebei University. He previously held positions at The Australian National University and the National University of Singapore. Thomas has published five books and around 50 peer-reviewed articles on China’s history, religion, law and business, and teaches in Chinese. His publications on China’s food history include articles about dairy and beef industries, fast food and brand nostalgia, historical cookbooks and his experience in a Sichuan kitchen. Thomas holds a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD in the history of modern China from UCLA. His latest book is China in Seven Banquets: A Flavourful History, which combines his training as a historian with his passion as a cook.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.

I first came to China in 1992 armed with undergrad and master’s degrees in Chinese studies from the University of Chicago. I was very proud of my academic credentials, especially the language training, but fairly soon realized that real China was very unlike anything I had learned in a classroom. I start with this story because it was really a life defining moment and really set me on my current path of taking on-the-ground experience as the gold standard of cultural understanding. After two years in Jinan, I went back to study a PhD in Chinese history with Philip C. C. Huang, one of the great historians of his or any other generation, although all I really knew about him at the time was that he was one of the few American scholars who was willing to work closely with academic colleagues in the PRC.

After I decided that I wanted to do my doctoral work on the topic of Chinese village religion, I asked him whether I should go for advanced study with this group in Paris or another group at Harvard. He stared at me dumbfounded and told me to “go to China and live in a village,” which I promptly did, staying for roughly a year and a half. I got my PhD in 2002 and went off to work as an academic historian at universities in Singapore and Australia. I published quite a lot and hit all the professional marks, but didn’t really care for either place, nor did the later work feel as grounded as my time doing fieldwork in China. In 2017, I left Australia and was very fortunate to spend a period as a researcher in Shanghai before being offered my current position in Beijing Normal University, which is one of the pioneering institutions for fieldwork in China’s rural and folk culture.

My shift to food studies started with a 2017 trip to Hulunbuir in the far north of Inner Mongolia, where I spent a summer trekking around the pasture learning about the cattle industry. This led to more focused projects about China’s beef and dairy industries, mostly from a business history perspective, and from there into other facets of the food chain, like organic and Community Supported Agriculture. It was the chance to go to cooking school in Chengdu that really moved me to food history, and especially my focus on the cultural history of cuisine, which is completely unseen in English-language historical literature. I started collecting cookbooks and recipes, some going back twenty-five hundred years, and matching up these sources with my perspective as a social historian. Once I developed the basic framework for China in Seven Banquets, the book just wrote itself.

What I’m doing now is a study of seasonality in Chinese cuisine based on the 24-term solar cycle. The inspiration for this book came from an unlikely place. After a sudden heart attack about one year ago, I spent two weeks in a Beijing hospital coronary unit, where I was surrounded by people who were suffering from the “three highs” (blood sugar, blood pressure, blood lipids). The thing is, many of my fellow inmates were in their 30s and 40s, far too young to be battling lifestyle diseases. They were all there for the same reasons: alcohol, smoking, working through the night, and especially a high sodium, high sugar, heavily processed diet.

At the same time, I was being asked to appear on Chinese television and podcasts to talk about the health benefits of the Chinese diet—the same diet that put me in hospital. That whole experience forced me to consider the question what exactly is the essence of the Chinese diet? The answer isn’t to be found in any particular dish or technique, and it certainly isn’t a question that I want to romanticize, even if doing so might help me sell books. Rather, what I see as the essence of Chinese diet is an approach to time, eating according to season, not simply for freshness, but to regulate the needs of the body. What I hope to do in this new book is use the 24-term solar calendar as a framework for twenty-four deep dives into the relationship between time and food. So, it’s back to fieldwork!

Q2. What do you feel is misunderstood by foreigners about food in China? How important is food to Chinese culture and traditions and how varied is the cuisine across the country?

Anyone who goes to China will come back with a personal collection of food stories. That sort of direct personal experience with cuisine creates a deep sense of connection, but it’s not even scratching the surface of just how profoundly meaningful food is to Chinese culture.

When we think about food, people mostly gravitate to two questions, is this dish in front of me authentic, and what makes it so tasty? China’s restaurant, tourist and food entertainment industries certainly play to the two images of exquisite culinary tradition. But food in China is much bigger than that. Food is at the heart of religion, politics, aesthetics, and certainly of health. Food is the constant that runs through and connects the entirety of Chinese culture, past, present, and future.

The way food appears today is already very different from when I first came to China in the early 1990s, but some basics still apply. Broadly speaking, Chinese cuisine is separated into four regional styles: Lu (鲁菜), Yue (粤菜), Huaiyang (淮揚菜) and Chuan (川菜), corresponding to the north, south, east and west, respectively. Lu is named after the province of Shandong and is typically meaty and salty, with heavy use of northern grains like wheat and millet. Yue is what we know as Cantonese, and is known for subtle flavors and skilled preparation of very fresh materials, especially seafood. Huaiyang is known for complicated knife techniques and has local variations that can be sweet or salty. Chuan stands for Sichuan and today is probably the best-known local cuisine, often saddled with the misconception that every dish should be hallucinatingly spicy. But these are just signposts, and they certainly aren’t absolute. There’s a lot they don’t cover, including change over time, especially the rapid convergence of local styles over the past twenty years or so.

Q3. How did food culture change in China from the pre-modern to the modern period and what has remained consistent across the millennia? What were some of the factors driving these changes, such as innovation, trade patterns and the globalization of tastes.

You can definitely pace out the big sweep of Chinese food history in a series of big, monumental innovations, “the day everything changed” sort of moments. Ancient China already had a wide variety of basic ingredients, as well as techniques, such as drying, smoking, and especially fermentation. The ancestor of today’s soy sauce was a condiment called hai (醢) that was made of fermented meat, similar to Roman garum, or fish sauce in Southeast Asia today. From unification up to the Tang dynasty, roughly the same time as the European dark ages, China was closely connected to Central and South Asia, which brought in all sorts of new vegetables, the technique for making sugar, and a new love for milled flour, which is where we get the whole world of noodles, breads and dumplings. As China got richer after the year 1000, high cuisine developed and proliferated, especially in wealthy trade cities like Hangzhou, that also served as ports for new spices and flavors. Interaction with the West after about 1500 brought crops like maize, potatoes, and especially chilies, and after about 1900, plugged China into a truly global food system, culminating in today’s almost instant flow of goods, tastes, and techniques.

But even in this big picture of transformation, certain things stay the same. A lot of regional cuisine is simply a function of geography. Roughly speaking, northern China eats wheat or millet as its main grain, while southern China eats rice, because that’s what grows best in these regions. Historically, wetter areas ate more pork, while drier areas ate more sheep. Altitude, coastal access, all of these things shape the fundamentals of diet, and patterns that were already visible in the neolithic are still here today. 

Q4. What are examples of ingredients or cooking techniques that are commonplace today in Chinese cuisine that readers might be surprised to learn came from outside China?

Some of the most consequential changes are also the least flashy. If I had to identify two big changes that had the longest-term impact, it would be the arrival of high-yield rice in the Song dynasty and maize in the Qing. Each of those unleashed a flood of new calories, allowing completely new ways of life. High yield rice ripens quickly, in some areas you can get as many as three crops per year. That essentially opened the door to urbanization, especially in southern cities like Hangzhou, which in the twelfth century had about a million people. Marco Polo waxed poetic about that city’s amazing wealth and industry, to the point that Europeans thought he was telling fairy tales, and none of that would have been possible without the ability to produce massive numbers of calories in a relatively small space. The later arrival of maize did something similar, but on marginal land. You can grow maize almost anywhere; mountains, sandy soil, you name it. So, it was workhorse crops like maize and sweet potatoes, not finicky ones like flooded field rice that powered China’s big population boom in the eighteenth century—roughly tripling in size in just a hundred years—because a lot of that growth took place in the mountainous Southwest.

Soy sauce was a relatively late arrival. There has always been a huge variety of bean pastes, including ones made with spices or vegetables, and straining off the clear liquid to make soy sauce is a pretty easy process, but it took the nineteenth century expansion of trade and industrial production to make soy sauce cheap enough for ordinary households.

If we’re talking about kitchen techniques, the big one is the high heat stir frying—the technique that most of us immediately associate with China. Again, that is relatively new. If you look at menus and recipes from before the twentieth century, a lot of the dishes are stewed, one reason being that cooking oil was relatively expensive. 

Q5. Following on the previous question, there are always debates about what is “authentic”. So many factors can influence a cuisine, including productive and market forces. As a historian, how do you think about this idea of authenticity? 

Authenticity is a bad parameter. If you think about it, everything is authentic, and nothing is. Chicago and New York laugh at each other’s pizza, meanwhile people sitting in Naples are just shaking their heads in disbelief that this is even a question.

All those ingredients that came to China over the centuries: garlic, onions, refined sugar, dairy, cabbage, eggplant, tomatoes, coffee, red wine, were all new and scandalous when they first arrived. As hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time that garlic simply did not exist in the Chinese kitchen. Even after chilies showed up in the 1500s, it took time for people to learn how to cook with them, and for that taste to move up the social ladder. Sichuan cuisine has always had a spicy reputation, but in the centuries BC (before chilies), the taste came from ginger, Sichuan peppercorns, and some other spices that we don’t see much today, like long pepper. Moving forward, industrial production and cold chains have vastly increased the availability of animal protein, making meat and dairy much more common than they were just twenty years ago. Just like music, food is always changing. Excessive pining for culinary authenticity is often just a cover for nostalgia.

It’s not to say that authenticity isn’t something to strive for, but we do need to define what exactly we intend to preserve. Technology increasingly allows us to replicate tastes and appearances without worrying about the cultural context. One thing that China has done with its heritage initiatives is to emphasize preservation of craft techniques. I recently attended a culinary heritage event in Beijing with displays of kitchen skills that had taken practitioners years to perfect. Some of these, like rolling extremely thin dough for a certain type of shumai (燒賣), could easily be replicated by machine, and few diners would notice or care. That’s what fast expanding chains like Haidilao and Meizhou Dongpo are counting on, since both of these are investing heavily in the model of a “chefless kitchen.” Industrial kitchens like the ones that supply convenience stores are already largely automated, which is why their food always comes out precisely the same.

The question moving forward is whether craft has a social value, and whether it is something that consumers will pay for. There have been restaurants like Quanjude, the famous roast duck restaurant, that tried to upscale production and increase the number of outlets in anticipation of a public listing, only to find out that they had either overestimated their market or that the appeal of the restaurant is something beyond the food on the plate. 

Q6. There are often fierce national or cultural debates about the “heritage” of a particular dish. Heritage often takes the form of laying claim to something, which seems unfortunate. Instead of celebrating a shared appreciation, a dish ends up the subject of a nationalistic or ethnocentric argument. How do you approach discussions about heritage?

Heritage definitely has its problematic side, and conflicts can get exponentially worse when governments get involved. We’ve seen that with arguments over whether borscht properly belongs to Russia or Ukraine, whether Israel can lay claim to hummus, or whether Panda Express should be calling itself Chinese food. China does factor into a small number of these disagreements: for example, over the question of whether kimchi is Chinese or Korean. The technology of fermenting vegetables demonstrably existed in China from a very ancient stage, yet kimchi is arguably more developed in Korea, and the culture more firmly a part of Korean life. In that way, heritage is just like authenticity, in that it comes down to the question of how exactly you are drawing the lines. There’s always an argument to be made for either side.

China has largely avoided conflict over culinary heritage for two reasons, one is they have avoided taking controversial applications to the world heritage bodies, in particular UNESCO. They have in at least one case made a cross-border application for the medicinal tea known as liangcha (涼茶), which is listed as the joint Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) of China, Hong Kong and Macau. The other reason is that China’s mobilization of heritage is overwhelmingly oriented towards a domestic audience. Most ICH in China is recognized at national, provincial or local levels, with an extremely small portion being sent to UNESCO for international recognition. From that perspective, China’s heritage efforts are aimed primarily at preservation and monetization of heritage, rather than staking cultural claims. China has listed tea culture as its ICH, but that’s very different from saying that tea belongs exclusively to China. 

Q7. Food and medicine or wellness have a long tradition in China. The concept of 藥食同源 (food and medicine come from the same source) is very old in China. What are some of the key tenets or ideas underpinning this and do you still see these practiced today in modern China and across the larger Chinese diaspora?

The foundational idea is that the body is part of nature. Just like you would operate a farm according to season with a proper time for planting and harvesting, and so on, the body’s needs change with the seasons of the year, different points in the life cycle, and even different times of day. The most important way of addressing those needs is dietary, using food in a way that we might call preventative medicine.

This tradition of thought is as old as China, older, in fact. It’s already in advanced form by the time we see it in early philosophical and medical texts like the Inner Classic of the Yellow Emperor. Over the centuries, these basic tenets get elaborated in books of gastromedicine like the 14th century Essentials of Correct Diet. In that book, we see each food classified by its inherent nature, heating or cooling, moistening or drying, and its relation to the five viscera in the body. It advises when to eat or avoid certain foods in order to balance out the body’s needs, brought on by changes in season or preexisting conditions. But all this advice is pointless if the food is tasteless or poorly prepared, so yes, the book does contain recipes.

These basic ideas are still visible today, albeit in a somewhat watered-down form. Probably the easiest example of this is an aversion to cold or raw foods. And it’s why you rarely see older people in China drink ice water, especially with food. Even on relatively warm days, it’s common to see people walking around with a thermos of hot water, with or without tea leaves floating in it. This is just one example of how these medicinal ideas still impact daily life.

Q8. What role did food play in the various cultural and religious traditions of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism? Were there major differences in how each tradition viewed food and the role it played in their philosophy or beliefs?

Food is a constant that runs through all of China’s religious traditions, including the big three mentioned here. The idea that diet should reflect the ebb and flow throughout the year of unseen forces like yin (陰) and yang (陽) appears in Daoist and Confucian texts like the Book of Changes (易經). There’s also a moral element. The phrase about Confucius himself is that he ate “in season,” meaning that his conduct—starting with his diet—was properly attuned to the rhythms of the universe, the natural order of things. The other big theme in Confucianism is decorum, which in the ancient world was less a matter of not talking with your mouth full (although table manners were important), but the protocol of properly matching hospitality to the level of the guest, neither too lavish nor too sparse, as a way of establishing the relationship between the two parties.

Buddhism of course added vegetarianism, but it didn’t invent it. There were already plenty of people abstaining from meat and other foods at certain times of year, and for various reasons. What Buddhism brought was a different set of ideas behind the same practice, meaning the prohibition against killing animals. It also had monasteries with large numbers of vegetarian monks and significant financial resources, which together helped China develop a high-end vegetarian culinary tradition. Coming from India, Buddhism was also the vehicle that brought new foods, spices, and cooking techniques from southern central Asia. The technique of refining sugar, for example, came from India, as did a lot of crops like high yield rice. The same logic also shaped how Catholic missionaries helped New World crops like chilies, maize, and potatoes reach China via Manila and Malacca. 

Q9. Before the era of cold chain logistics and modern supermarkets, seasonality was a big part of China’s food culture. How did seasonality impact the foods people ate, as well as the rites and cultural traditions that underpinned Chinese society?

Most people talk about seasonality purely in aesthetic terms of securing fresh, locally-grown produce. That concern does exist in China, as well. People have learned that seasonless produce grown in hothouse tents or shipped in from far away might look nice but doesn’t have much in the way of taste or nutrition. But seasonality is traditionally much more than just aesthetics, it’s also a reflection of character. My earlier point about Confucius eating “in season” was a manifestation of a thoughtful, humble nature, one in which wisdom consists of following the patterns of nature rather than fighting them. Conversely, when a minor character in the novel Dream of Red Mansions (紅樓夢) is introduced eating foods from off season, it’s a subtle red flag that this guy is a “wrong ‘un.”

But again, the fundamental concern with seasonality is health. Eating is pegged to the 24-season solar calendar, with a new season coming roughly every two weeks. This one calendar governs ritual, agriculture and health—heaven, earth, and body—and each season is punctuated with food, be that the time for making temple sacrifices, or knowing when to plant or harvest certain crops. As far as health is concerned, there are hundreds of books, modern and classical, telling you precisely how to eat in any given season. In the summer you would seek out bitter tastes, which is also a diuretic. As I am writing this, we just finished the season chushu (处暑), which means the end of summer heat. To purge the remaining heat, people are advised to eat cooling foods: spinach, pears, lotus root, cow milk, red beans, sticky rice and all sorts of cucumbers and melons. As we move into fall, these foods change to ones that aim to build up strength and fight off seasonal dryness. Even young urbanites are very aware of these seasons. I’m one of millions who receive announcements via push text on my phone.

Q10. In addition to being a student of the history of food, you are also an avid cook. Please share your own personal story about learning to cook and any interesting experiences from this journey. 

Like a lot of people, I grew up in a food-oriented household, and to this day, the kitchen is my favorite room of any house. Cooking is such a great way to meet people, especially in a new country. My travel experiences always seem to end up with me cooking in someone else’s kitchen. Many of my fondest memories are cooking with friends in China, especially in the early days when home invitations were easier to come by than they are now.

After decades of sharing this sort of family kitchen experience, I decided in 2020 to go to cooking school in Sichuan, and then followed that up with a couple of months in two of that city’s best restaurant kitchens. That experience was genuinely life changing. It gave me a new appreciation for the logic of Chinese cooking and left me in awe of the methodical professionalism of a well-run restaurant. I’ve been in dozens of professional kitchens over the past few years, and never seen anything like the screaming chaos you see portrayed on TV.

Working with culinary professionals helped shift my perspective from the social appreciation of food to a much more systemic one. Like most people, I approached food from the standpoint of a diner or a casual cook. The view from the table is aesthetic, focusing on the colors, textures, aroma, and taste of a finished dish. This is the perspective of food appreciation and is the one you see in classic Chinese food literature like Yuan Mei’s Recipes from the Garden of Contentment. It is also something you see in cookbooks and food memoirs, especially when blended with a narrative of personal or familial history. That perspective is valuable, but again, it’s just scratching the surface. A doctor, a produce wholesaler, or a restaurant buyer would approach food in a completely different manner, and see something completely invisible to the diner. This first experience with the restaurant industry matches well with my decades of fieldwork in farms and villages across China, and has blossomed into a number of close collaborations. For example, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be offering a few thousand industry professionals my thoughts on how to develop Beijing’s culinary brand. 

Q11. Tell us about some of your favorite provincial or local Chinese cuisines. You have spoken before about certain places doing something particularly well. Can you share some examples? Also, if forced to design a menu for your final days on earth, what are some must have dishes?

Styles of food are actually converging at a worrying rate. It used to be that Yue-style cuisine was the go-to answer if you asked people for their favorite food, one reason being that food in Guangdong uses a lot of prestige seafood that has an iconic wow factor at the dinner table. But measured in number of restaurants, spicy Sichuan food is far and away the winner. There’s a reason for that as well. The intense tastes appeal to tired urbanites who want to end their busy day with a spicy kick, as well as to restaurant owners, since strong flavors cover the taste of mid-grade ingredients, meaning that lot of the food can be premade in an industrial kitchen.

What I find a source of endless wonder is how every place works their local ingredients into their cuisine. Sheep grazed on the northern Hulunbuir grasslands are without peer, and so is the local hotpot (made with plain water—only tourists would eat such exquisite meat with chilies). Everyone in Hulunbuir knows that the best sheep are grazed in Xiqi, but for cattle you want animals raised in neighboring Chenqi. Different grazing for different animals. The southwestern highlands of Yunnan are known for exotic mushrooms and spices, each coming into season for a brief window. The fermented sour chili sauce from Guizhou is so good that migrants take big bottles of it along with them when they leave home seeking work. Central Henan is hardly a culinary superstar, but even very simple dishes add spices like leafy jingjie (荆芥) that are simply not used anywhere else. Everyone in China knows the famous ham from Jinhua, but they might want to check out the ham made in Xuanwei or Nuodeng.

There are simply so many local tastes in a country as vast as China, but if I had to pick an actual favorite dish, it would be the taste of Shandong where I first lived in the 1990s. A bowl of sesame noodles with garlic and cilantro, served alongside a simple dish of cool tofu roughly chopped and tossed with sesame oil, salt, and the bitter young tree leaves called xiangchun (香椿). Pure delight.

Q12. In China and many countries around the world, online food delivery has become commonplace, especially among the younger generation. In addition to the environmental impact of all the packaging waste generated by this activity, is food delivery having an impact on the traditional relationship people have with food?

Delivery has without question radically transformed a lot of how people eat.

It’s important to remember, however, that institutional or communal dining itself is nothing new. During the 1950s, the whole country switched en masse to canteen eating in People’s Communes. Even when home cooking revived, the kitchen set up was small and primitive, so urban households did a kind of hybrid home and takeaway model where you might make some dishes at home, but get cooked rice, or stewed beef, or deep-fried battered eggplant from a professional kitchen. Every household has that combination of certain things you make at home, and certain things that you buy in. What delivery has done has been to shift that line to the extreme of convenience, removing the necessity of cooking at home almost completely. So, you’ll see delivery drivers early in the morning carrying very small bags of breakfast food, that’s literally one cup of coffee or a bowl of millet porridge, low-cost and low effort foods that are nevertheless still easier to order than make. It’s addictive.

Where I live in Beijing, most of my neighbors get delivery at least once a day. In smaller apartments without proper kitchens, it’s undoubtedly even higher. Beyond convenience, the price is often lower than cooking at home because you don’t have the problem of food waste. But it also produces a state of dependency. Young people simply don’t keep food in the fridge, and if they do suddenly want or need to cook, many don’t know how to start. Literally they don’t know where the market is. This dependence on delivery has profound effects on health, culinary aesthetics, and especially on social habits of eating. Yes, there is still the model of the big restaurant banquet, but I suspect that the great majority of food delivery is consumed alone, with only the company of social media on a cell phone. It’s sad.

There is a backlash, however, in various iterations of the slow food movement. Not just against delivery, but also against the centralization of cold chains, and more generally the increasing distance that people feel from their food. Ask almost anyone, and you will hear a lament that food is not as good as it used to be, however they’re defining that. Cooks will tell you that vegetables grown in a hot house look good, but have no taste, or that industrially raised pork doesn’t have the same color, density or depth of taste as the farm-raised produce they remember from decades ago. Others will complain about the health risks of prepared food. Not just fast food. There are numerous social media sites devoted specifically to naming and shaming high-end restaurants that sneak in industrialized ingredients.

Q13. How is China changing in terms of how it produces its food? We’re seeing a growing emphasis on self-sufficiency and the leadership often talks of ecological civilization. Are these reflected in China’s approach to modern agriculture?

China has always been an agrarian nation and some of the biggest imperial-era government projects like the Grand Canal or the regulation of the Yellow River were to promote agriculture or regulate the agrarian economy. Keeping people on the land and keeping the land productive were the definition of a stable polity. Since the twentieth century, people began to idealize Western, and in particular, American agriculture. Early reformers espoused the goal of moving out smallholders and increasing farm size, all in the name of increasing efficiency. This goal was finally realized in the planned economy of the 1950s, which was aimed at scale above anything else. Food production returned to the small holder in the 1980s, but over the past 20 years, there have again been pushes to scale. Part of the reason is that farmworkers have gone off to work in factories, so there is a lot less labor available in the countryside, but also because of industry-specific government initiatives like for enterprise consolidation under leading industries known as “dragon heads.”

Dairy, for example, initially consisted of thousands of very small farms who fed into a very loosely segmented chain that turned raw milk into a value-added product, such as infant formula. The series of safety scandals, especially the melamine poisoning of 2008, came from this unconsolidated industry. It wasn’t just one person adding melamine to the milk, it was a lot of different people at different stages in an extremely complex production process. The food safety regulation that followed aimed at consolidating entire production chains under the final producer, including the raising of livestock, which now takes place in high investment, high-tech farms with thousands, or even tens of thousands of cattle. The upscaling of the dairy industry accelerated after China joined the WTO both because of new foreign imports, and because the consolidation of the industry brought in vast amounts of new investment from abroad and at home, as well as tie ups with foreign producers like New Zealand’s Fonterra. Other food chains have been affected by this combination of investment and innovation, cold chain management, productive upscaling at home and abroad (for example, using raw materials, purchased on the market or from Chinese agrarian investments in Africa, Southeast Asia or South America), and intense government support.

Staple grains have been a life-or-death concern for the government. Historically, individual provinces were ordered to attain self-sufficiency in grain production, even though some provinces are not at all suited to that kind of agriculture. But China’s government has long resisted the idea of being dependent on the global market for food necessities. This concern has intensified greatly in recent years due to trade conflict with United States, one of China’s main commodity suppliers, and the war in Ukraine, which suddenly removed one of the major producers of maize from world markets. These shocks have convinced China to greatly intensify investment in agricultural technologies, such as water reclamation, and to open new farmland, especially by moving villagers from the countryside to newly built high-rise flats. Within the larger picture of food production, scale and consolidation are again the order of the day, but grain gets special attention and special urgency. 

Q14. In this era of geopolitical tensions, does Chinese history offer any instructive examples of food playing a positive role in facilitating diplomatic relations between warring states or between imperial dynasties and outside groups?

Diplomacy is one of the earliest ways that we see food mentioned in historical sources. Ritual was a fundamental aspect of early Chinese statecraft, and books like the Rites of Zhou (周禮) are essentially guides to the intricate rituals that dictate the lives of elites and commoners alike. For example, when a diplomatic visitor arrived, there was a very strict protocol of how guest and host should behave, who should stand precisely where, what movements each party should make, who should speak and when. Political protocols were far more than cosmetic. Knowing these rules and behaving accordingly marked you as a civilized person, which translated into political legitimacy. The key to diplomacy was not generosity, but prudence. Protocol established the precise relationship between two parties, so if a guest is received with an overdose of generosity, it would reflect poorly on the host, who directs and sets the tone for the exchange. Food was integral to this relationship, such that each type of guest had clearly defined rules about what should be served, where and how. The same principle is evident over 2,000 years later in manuals of Qing dynasty protocol that outline the precise dishes to be served at different levels of a diplomatic banquet. Exactly the same logic.

At the same time, there was a tradition of extreme generosity. Mongols and Manchus were famous for massive outdoor banquets that stuffed thousands of guests with boiled, roasted, and steamed meat. The guest’s sole responsibility was to gorge, anything less was an insult to the host. Besides politics, there’s also the role of banqueting in business relationships. A young British firm’s clerk left a diary of being feted at the home of a wealthy Chinese merchant in eighteenth century Canton. The guest was floored by the incredible hospitality and sophistication of the feast, which included one Chinese and one European meal. Generous though it was, this lavish entertainment was clearly a power move that aimed to show these British merchants precisely who was boss.

Of course, the relationship between dining and diplomacy is quite evident in recent years. On his first visit to China, US President Richard Nixon toasted the new relationship between the two countries with Maotai wine. Before he came to China, Nixon was trained by the CIA in how to properly use chopsticks and gracefully eat a Chinese banquet. Skip forward a few years and you can see the care that goes into hosting a high-level foreign guest. When the famously gastrophobic Donald Trump visited China in 2017, his state dinner included gongbao chicken, probably the single easiest dish in the Chinese lexicon for foreigners to accept. 

Q15. Please share any favorite books, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of China’s culinary history, food culture, cooking or any other related topics.   

The big name in this space is undoubtedly Fuchsia Dunlop, and rightly so. Dunlop’s books are carefully and beautifully written and her depth of experience and knowledge is without peer outside of China. However, one of my favorite books is the Recipes from the Garden of Contentment, Sean J. S. Chen’s award-winning translation of Yuan Mei’s Suiyuan Shidan (隨園食單). Sean is interesting because he’s not a professional food writer, he’s an engineer who decided to start translating China’s classic food text purely out of interest. Since then, he’s also done another classic, the Song-era Zhongkuilu (宋浦江吳氏中饋錄), which he published as Madame Wu’s Handbook on Home-Cooking. Sean also has a really interesting blog, called “The Way of Eating.” For more scholarly approaches, Feng Jin’s Tasting Paradise on Earth (University of Washington Press) is a vivid and highly readable account of food, heritage and nostalgia in three cities in her native Jiangnan. For those able to read French, the great scholar Françoise Sabban has just released her new book La Chine Par Le Menu. Another to look out for is the book Modern Chinese Foodways, which is coming out early next year from MIT press.

There are a lot of foreigners living in China with a profound knowledge of Chinese cuisine, like my friend, Chris St. Cavish, a professionally trained chef who has been based for the past 20 or so years in Shanghai and decided to leave the kitchen to do deep dives into topics like Lanzhou noodles—and when I say deep, I mean it. He learns the craft, lives with the masters, eats dozens of versions of the same dish. He’s truly amazing but not unique. Anyone who is paying attention can’t help but marvel at the incredible depth of skill, knowledge, and culture that goes into even something as simple as a bowl of noodles. Chris recently published Outsider, a book from his experiences in kitchens across Shanghai.

One of my favorite places to go for knowledge of Chinese food is social media. Far and away my favorite Chinese YouTube channel is Wang Gang (王刚), who cooks restaurant-style Sichuan cuisine. When I say restaurant-style, I mean he’s using a professional set up, with the extremely high heat inset wok that is very different from how anybody would cook at home. But he’s still very good for showing the basic steps, not to mention really fun to watch (despite someone’s unfortunate decision to start dubbing his Chinese with heavily accented English). For English language, I strongly recommend the channel Chinese Cooking Demystified. I recently got to meet the owners of the channel, and it was like talking to professional ethnographers. It’s just phenomenal how much they know. You’ll see something completely different from the gauzy, romanticized version presented in productions like “A Bite of China” or massively popular influencers like Li Ziqi (李子柒).

Finally, anyone who would like to follow my research going forward is welcome to have a look at my new Substack. It’s mostly about China’s culinary seasonality, including a real-time introduction to the 24 seasons.

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