Explaining Chinese Food—and China

Vincent Chow reviews Fuchsia Dunlop’s “Invitation to a Banquet” and Thomas David DuBois’s “China in Seven Banquets.”

By Vincent ChowSeptember 18, 2024

• Food & Drink

• Cultural Studies

AT THE START of the 20th century, Chinese reformers, dismayed by their country’s weakness on the world stage, stressed the need for China to modernize by abandoning traditional Confucian ideas and adopting Western ones such as democracy and technoscience. Inspired by Japan’s modernizing Meiji intellectuals of the late 19th century, some even adopted Western practices in their personal lives, including extremely alien ones related to diet such as drinking iced water and eating beef.

Notwithstanding the strong iconoclasm in Chinese society at the time, the push for “culinary modernism” nonetheless provoked huge resistance, not least from Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader himself. For all the perceived failings of traditional Chinese culture, Sun deemed China’s culinary traditions an exception—an example of the great potential of Chinese civilization. “China has fallen behind in all areas of modern civilization—in all areas except cuisine, which even the most civilized nations have not been able to match,” he wrote.

For a country so lacking in soft power, food is one of the few cultural products China has successfully exported around the world. Yet Western understanding of Chinese food remains far from deep. Racial prejudice has shaped negative perceptions of Chinese food since its arrival in the United States and the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century. From the start, locals accustomed to large slabs of meat presented on the plate were suspicious about the quality of the ingredients, seemingly diced up into small pieces to mask their poor quality. Many also questioned the food’s cleanliness, frightened by the specter of restaurant kitchens manned by dirty “coolies.”

Many prejudices remain today, with few people associating Chinese food with sophisticated eating. Most perniciously, the derogatory charge that Chinese food involves the uncivilized eating of cats, snakes, and rats has circulated for years—a common trope that has gained renewed prominence as the origins of COVID-19 have become a hot potato in China’s relations with the West.

This curious existence of Chinese food in the West, both familiar and misunderstood in equal measure, forms the backdrop for two recent books that seek to deepen foreign readers’ understanding of the subject. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food (2023) strives to debunk common Western prejudices of Chinese food as “cheap, low-status and junky.” Not only does the food served in Chinese restaurants in the Anglophone world bear no relation to “what most Chinese people actually eat,” Dunlop argues, but what many in the West who have never been to China think the nation’s cuisine to be is also the exact opposite of what it really is: healthy, sophisticated, and high-quality.

As evidence, each chapter discusses a dish or technique that demonstrates the richness of Chinese cuisine, from the wide range of ingredients used to the intimate relationship between food and medicine. Congee, for instance, made simply by boiling rice in a large amount of water, has long been hailed in China as a panacea for most basic maladies. Dunlop cites the claim of Song dynasty poet Lu You, writing almost a millennium ago, that eating congee is the key to immortality—advice my mother still heeds by making it for me whenever I am ill.

Dunlop’s book, polemical in parts, is a robust defense of Chinese food mounted by one of its leading authorities in the West. When she arrived in China in 1992, Dunlop was the first Westerner to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, a leading culinary school for Sichuan cuisine, one of the four great Chinese cuisines that has seen a remarkable rise in popularity both in China and the West in recent decades. She has since written several bestsellers on Chinese food, including Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China (2008) and The Food of Sichuan (2019).

With no shortage of far-fetched takes in the West today about virtually every aspect of China, Dunlop’s book will resonate with all who see themselves as explicators of the country to foreign audiences—the writers, journalists, and academics who similarly express dismay at the gap between China as it is and China as it is imagined. Dunlop points out that Western prejudices about Chinese food have been no less consequential historically. In the 19th century, colonial adventures in China were often justified on account of bringing much-needed civilization to the “backward” Chinese who “drink mutually out of the same cup which, though sometimes rinsed, is never washed or wiped clean,” as a British envoy put it in 1793.

Much of the book celebrates the culinary traditions of the affluent Jiangnan region in eastern China, the old heartland of Chinese gastronomy and the subject of Dunlop’s 2016 book Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China. Known for its delicate flavors and emphasis on eating in season, the foodways of the region have not only deeply influenced Dunlop’s writing on Chinese food; Jiangnan’s cuisine all but salvaged her passion for Chinese cooking after she had grown disillusioned by the mid-2000s, having gourmandized across the country and witnessed the destruction of natural habitats intrinsic to the process.

The turning point came in 2008 when Dunlop first visited Dragon Well Manor, a farm-to-table restaurant in the heart of Jiangnan run by an owner who advocates for reviving China’s culinary traditions such as eating organically and in season. Dunlop writes that her first meal at the restaurant, in one of eight private dining rooms in a 27-acre estate, made her “understand at both an intellectual and a visceral level what the finest Chinese food was, what it had been, what it could be again” (emphasis mine).

I ate at Dragon Well Manor for the first time a few months ago. The experience left me not only grateful to Dunlop for championing the restaurant in the West for more than a decade, most notably in a 2008 New Yorker profile, but also in agreement with her assessment of the restaurant as one of the best in the world, let alone just in China. But as I slurped up the sumptuous free-range chicken soup and flipped through a ledger meticulously showing the details of all the ingredients in our meal, what also struck me was just how far removed everything was from the food my friends and I eat as young urbanites in China today, to say nothing of “what most Chinese people actually eat.”

What do most Chinese actually eat? Dunlop praises the health benefits of the traditional Chinese diet—heavy on rice, wheat, and cooked vegetables—but that is not what most Chinese actually eat. Since the 1980s, rapid urbanization and rising incomes have led to increasing numbers of Chinese adopting Western diets dominated by meat and processed foods. The impact on waistlines has been the same as in the West: half of Chinese adults are now either overweight or obese, a pattern set to rise to two-thirds by 2030.

Dunlop is aware of all this, but not enough to see the irony of holding up China as an example to follow as Western countries “try to rethink their unsustainable consumption of meat.” She writes that “the resourcefulness of Chinese chefs could be a model for making the most of ingredients and minimizing waste” without mentioning that Chinese households waste more food per capita than US households do.

Lack of self-awareness is a recurrent problem, such as when Dunlop fully embraces being a “terrible Chinese food snob” and compares Western eating habits unfavorably with those of the Chinese. She points out early on that Chinese people often make crude generalizations about “Western food” yet proceeds to do the same herself throughout her book, at one point caricaturing the Western diet as being “beef burgers dripping with bacon and cheese” one day and “sticks of carrot and celery” the next.

As understandable as it is for Dunlop to want to defend Chinese food against its critics, her eagerness to assert its superiority over other cuisines nonetheless prevents her book from doing what the best histories of China do, which is speak to its present. For example, in a chapter about vegetables, Dunlop claims that some of China’s most disadvantaged people, its migrant workers (rural Chinese who work in cities), eat more healthily than “rich, middle-class English families”—an absurd comparison to make at a time when China’s economy is struggling. Many of the country’s 300 million migrant workers are barely scraping by.

Books about China often struggle with the same challenge: how to explain to foreign readers the inherent contradictions of a country with 1.4 billion people and huge disparities in living standards, one that runs the gamut of human experience from the glories of Jiangnan to the daily toil of its internal migrants. Dunlop, eager to counter negative narratives about Chinese food, presents positive ones without noticing that they too are generalizations that play into the same reductionist game.

“[O]nly the Chinese have placed [cooking] at the very core of their identity,” Dunlop writes, highlighting the irony of Westerners looking down on Chinese food. But it is then surely also ironic that the Chinese government has thrown its weight behind the ready meals industry in recent years, ostensibly for food-safety reasons. The same can be said of the boom in China’s food delivery industry in the past decade, as grueling work hours have left many workers too burned out to ever cook for themselves.

A full accounting of all these contradictions would have made for a more insightful book. Why is Dragon Well Manor, mentioned in almost every chapter, so unique in today’s China? Why does it charge more per person for its organic ingredients than the entire monthly food budgets of many migrant workers? Dunlop shies away from fully exploring these questions, presumably because some of the answers—food safety, income inequality, a hypercompetitive society—would be inconvenient for her main thesis. But they are just as crucial to painting readers an accurate picture of the China that is.

Thomas David DuBois takes an altogether different approach in China in Seven Banquets: A Flavorful History (2024). While Dunlop’s account of Chinese food can often seem far removed from today’s China, DuBois roots his account in the long-term historical forces that have shaped Chinese society, with special attention devoted to the impact of money and technology on modern China’s relationship with food.

This emphasis is reflected in the prosaic nature of some of the “banquets” he analyzes in the later chapters. The state of food in China since the turn of the century is represented by the home delivery hot pot, a primordial way of eating whereby raw meats and vegetables are boiled in a huge pot of soup. Despite not seeming well-suited to home delivery, its popularity as a takeaway dish reflects the convenience-driven eating culture of urban China today, enabled by an array of ingredients and sauces sealed individually in a mountain of plastic packaging that also speaks to the environmental cost of changing food habits. For restaurants, meanwhile, hot pot is a lucrative dish to serve as customers cook the food themselves, reducing the importance of trained chefs and even kitchens themselves as the ingredients can simply be prepared off-site in a central facility.

“[T]he history of food in China can’t just be about the food itself,” writes DuBois, a professor at Beijing Normal University. His training as a historian is evident, though the book is not so much a history of Chinese cuisine as an account of how China’s socioeconomic and political developments have impacted its food over millennia.

With less attention paid to the culinary arts, DuBois’s writing is less appetite-whetting than the evocative, often sexually charged prose of the Cambridge-educated Dunlop (“This you will want to lick out like nectar, using your teeth to scrape and your tongue to suck”). But what he successfully captures are the many ways in which food in China serves as the backdrop to other social, cultural, and political pursuits—perhaps the defining quality of the Chinese relationship with food.

DuBois’s focus on seven iconic banquets in Chinese history rather than on individual dishes underscores the deep social connotations of eating in China. The defining banquet of the early years of ancient Chinese civilization is the “Eight Treasures” banquet of the Zhou kingdom (1046–256 BCE)—eight dishes made up of expensive meats, as recorded in the Book of Rites, a classic text of Confucianism.

Served up by successive emperors to elderly patrons of both peasant and noble backgrounds, the banquet epitomizes the “moral society” that was beginning to develop in China, DuBois writes. Food was becoming a literal manifestation of the emerging moral ties, and respect for the elderly became a way for monarchs to brandish their Confucian credentials. The relevance of the banquet in modern Chinese society can still be found easily today: many dishes across China have adopted the “Eight Treasures” format, from porridges to teas, while filial piety remains a central pillar of Chinese culture.

DuBois intersperses his food history with dozens of detailed recipes for signature dishes dating back centuries, from lychee chicken to Kung Pao chicken. His palpable eagerness to showcase his archival work results in occasional tedium as full banquet menus of dozens of dishes (with often inscrutable English translations) run over several pages. Though it is a typically Chinese pastime to peruse in full the menus of important banquets, especially when Chinese leaders meet their foreign counterparts, much of the point of doing so—interpreting the veiled messages in a sea of homophones and poetic nomenclature—is lost in translation, if not downright impossible to do.

The culinary archaeology does pay off, however, when DuBois establishes that some of the banquets would have been rather bland, lacking in spices and seasoning, which reaffirms their symbolic and social utility. These include not just the Eight Treasures banquet but also the “Tail-Burning” banquet of the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), used by emperors to welcome new officials into their inner circles (the tail-burning symbolizing rebirth).

The Chinese banquet as an expression of propriety and ritual, and not merely a series of dishes served up for physical pleasure, will be familiar to every foreign diplomat and businessman in China who has ever been a guest at one. Dish after dish is served, and the food may even be quite delicious, but eating is always secondary to the occasion itself. This is why food waste is especially challenging to tackle in China, as propriety makes waste not just inevitable but even necessary for showing generosity.

A scholar of religion prior to studying food, DuBois is adept at unpacking the layers of meaning contained within the Chinese relationship with food. By dissecting both real and fictional banquets, as well as some in between, he shows food in China to be a well of potent metaphors, a cultural artifact from which meaning is derived, as well as projected onto, much the same as religious myths of questionable historical veracity can continue to exert influence in the present day.

Examples include another iconic, similarly bland banquet: the “Manchu-Han Feast,” served by Manchu rulers during the Qing dynasty to win over the neighboring Mongols. The feast has endured to this day as a national symbol of racial harmony and “coming together in a great nation” despite there being no consensus on when it first occurred or what was actually served.

The notion of food being deeply tied to social and political values in China is something that Sun Yat-sen, often referred to as the “father of modern China,” and his fellow reformers understood well in the early 20th century. For them, food was not just a means of survival but also a tool for speaking to the crises of their time. In DuBois’s book, food functions the same way: as both a means and an end, a subject of study as well as a methodology.

The strongest parts of the book use food to chart China’s social and political history, such as a chapter revealing the complex existence of Western food influences in China throughout the 20th century. The contradictions at the beginning of the century regarding the question of modernization versus Westernization reemerged in the 1950s as state-produced cookbooks struggled to thread the needle between Soviet-inspired utopianism and patriotic austerity.

As Sino-Soviet relations soured, Western food returned to being a symbol of political revisionism, with the fate of the renowned Moscow Restaurant in Beijing encapsulating the vicissitudes of the era. After it was established in 1954 as a shrine to Soviet excellence, workers across the country were handed ration coupons specifically to eat there and experience the opulence and riches of China’s communist big brother. Then as the Cultural Revolution raged, Red Guards forced the restaurant to serve Chinese food instead, before switching back to Russian fare in the 1980s as patrons sought a return to calmer days.

The effectiveness of food as a historical lens makes the absence of a dedicated chapter on Mao’s China all the more conspicuous. The Great Leap Forward campaign is briefly mentioned, but there is ample room for further discussion of the weaponization of food and the enduring legacy of food’s absence during this period—one in which the disjuncture between food as it was imagined in propaganda and state documents versus in reality was never bigger. One can only speculate on the reasons for the omission.

This brings us back to the question of writing about China today. Just as food in China should be understood in its wider cultural and political context, books about food in China can also be understood in the context in which they are published. Since coming into power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has stressed the need for the Chinese people to have “cultural confidence” in their country’s history and values, with an emphasis on traditional Chinese culture.

As innocuous as that may sound, what it portends is a regime that increasingly defines culture in strategic terms. Fostering civilizational pride among its people, including for its culinary traditions, is a response to the perceived cultural hegemony of the United States. If China is seen to have a rich reserve of traditions and values of its own, then there is no need to adopt “Western” ones such as democracy and human rights.

In practice, this has meant tighter controls on cultural activity, both at home and abroad, as projects that disseminate simplistic narratives of Chinese greatness are promoted—even better if they paint the West as being in decline. These efforts are happening in parallel with increasingly hostile treatment toward Western journalists and academics, viewed these days by the regime more as accomplices to Western hegemony than as potential solutions to it.

It is notable, then, that these two new books about Chinese food history are written by a Briton and an American—two Westerners granted increasingly rare access to China and its people. As Chinese leaders from Sun Yat-sen to Xi Jinping have all understood, food has long been a site for deliberation and contestation about the country’s place in the world. What has changed is that China under Xi no longer believes it has “fallen behind in all areas of modern civilization,” as Sun put it, but instead asserts that there is little if anything it needs to learn from the West.

For Western explicators of Chinese culture, therefore, the question they must increasingly ask themselves is who stands to gain from their work—particularly when it is about something as seemingly simple but actually culturally fraught as food.