Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food

by Fuchsia Dunlop

Railroad workers and gold miners in California enjoyed their cheap chop sueys, but they also saw Chinese labourers as aliens who posed an economic threat; American perceptions of Chinese food became tainted by racialized fear and anxiety.

The current fashion for imitation meats such as the Impossible Burger, made from soy and potato proteins, has ancient antecedents in China, where chefs have been concocting vegetarian ‘meat’ since at least the Tang Dynasty, more than a millennium ago.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned from China is how to eat simultaneously for health and happiness.

the idea that cooking liberated people from a feral past and marked the birth of human civilization is one that has pervaded Chinese culture since the dawn of history.

cooking symbolized the transition from nature to culture and was key to defining the human state.

But if cooking was key to the evolution of humans in general, only the Chinese have placed it at the very core of their identity.

If a barbarian did develop a taste for eating Chinese food, it was viewed as tantamount to submitting to Chinese rule.

Around two millennia ago, the Chinese were already settling into the habit of cutting their food into small pieces and eating it with chopsticks. Forks were used only for cooking, and knives likewise banished to the kitchen.

Just as my English father feels bereft if a few meals pass without the comfort of potatoes, most southern Chinese feel increasingly desolate when deprived of rice. Food eaten without fan is a snack rather than a proper meal.

China divides into two very different natural environments: the wet south, where rice grows readily, and the arid north, where people have for centuries relied on wheat and other dry-land grains.

The minor role played by meat in the traditional Chinese diet is one reason why, in the era before chemical fertilizers, the Chinese were able to sustain such a large population with their limited arable land.

a theme in Anglo culinary cultures is the desire to ‘know what it is I am eating’,

To Chinese eyes, western meals can seem crude, clunky and reductive, which is why so many Chinese people still routinely dismiss the culinary traditions of the entire western world as ‘simple and monotonous’

‘You just need to add a little sugar,’ says my friend Dai Shuang, explaining a recipe to me, ‘not to taste its sweetness, but to he wei, harmonize the flavours of the dish.’

The human body was presented as a microcosm of the universe.

The nature of drugs is hard and violent, just like that of imperial soldiers. Since soldiers are so savage and impetuous, how could anybody dare to deploy them recklessly? If they are deployed inappropriately, harm and destruction will result everywhere. Similarly, excessive damage is the consequence of drugs thrown at illnesses. A good doctor first makes a diagnosis, and having found out the cause of the disease, he tries to cure it first by food. When food fails, then he prescribes medicine.

The problem with attempting to assess Chinese dietary therapy is that it’s holistic, subjective and impressionistic, which makes it resistant to scientific enquiry. It’s not, on the whole, about individual ‘superfoods’ but about a complex web of relationships; not about dietary supplements like vitamins and minerals, but a whole way of life. It’s about everything you eat, the whole system. It is an art as much as a science.

All too often, when westerners consider Chinese food to be unhealthy, it’s because of the way they are eating it: ‘unhealthy’ is their own reflection in the mirror; it’s not a reflection of Chinese food at all.

When I meet people with certain chronic physical complaints, I often suspect that they could be helped by taking a Chinese approach to their diet. The problem is that it’s hard to explain. There is no magic pill, no single ‘superfood’, no ‘diet’ as such. It’s an instinct, an approach, one that I have only acquired through many years of exposure.

The cook and pharmacist practiced a similar art.’

only 60 per cent of the credit for a banquet should go to the chef, while the other 40 per cent was due to the person who did the shopping.

China seemed like a country suffering from a kind of amnesia towards its heritage of passionate, precise attention to ingredients.

As they say in China, if you live on a mountain, you eat the mountain; if you live by the water, you eat the water (kao shan chi shan, kao shui chi shui).

The aquatic foods of the south are just one example of what happens when unlimited culinary curiosity meets extreme biodiversity.

Muslims in Dali massage and stretch cow’s milk curds in a manner reminiscent of mozzarella and then draw them out into long, thin sheets that are dried in the sun – these golden ‘milk fans’ (rushan) may be deep-fried into crumbly crisps or toasted on a grill, then rolled up with rose petal jam and eaten like lollipops, on a stick.

The Chinese word for meat, rou, still means pork unless otherwise specified (for other types of meat, a prefix is added: beef is niu rou, mutton yang rou).

More than half of the world’s pigs are now in China.

Pork may be tasty, but it is lowbrow, perhaps even a little vulgar. Pork is what you eat at home, greedily and happily.

Throughout Chinese history, the concept of ingredients has been based not so much on rules as on possibilities.

Chinese cuisine is fundamentally about transformation, about mixing and matching, about creating harmony among disparate ingredients. It is a system of techniques and approaches that can be applied to whatever you choose.

the surrounding hills blurred by mist and water, the rain scribbling violent patterns on the surface of the pond.

Some Chinese culinary traditions certainly grew out of poverty or frugality, like the distinctive fermented foods of Shaoxing; others arose from plenty and privilege, like the love of expensive exotica.

While English gentlemen eat ‘game’, the Chinese always eat ‘wild animals’.

In a broad sense, it might be helpful to recognize that we are all in the same position of trying to renegotiate our relationships with traditional foodways in a new and brutal environmental context.

the master is the one who does complicated things simply, while the mere apprentice is the one who complicates the simple.

And then it is all over. When the last dish has been sent out, they throw down their tools, light their cigarettes, start bantering in earthy Suzhou dialect and become mortal again.

A good indication of the priorities of any culture lies in its specialized vocabularies, in the rich seams of words that distinguish, in granular detail, the finer points of subjects given only cursory attention by other peoples.

laowan ’s stuffing, made from mutton and pork ‘chopped fine as fly heads’, seasoned with ginger, onion, cinnamon, Sichuan pepper, thoroughwort, salt and fermented black beans.

China, with its vast geographical diversity, is more like a continent than a nation.

As the French gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was to say centuries later, ‘Tell me what you eat; I will tell you who you are.’

As humans, we all play with our food. We adopt and adapt. There is no pure ‘Chinese cuisine’ any more than there is pure ‘English food’.

The politics may be different depending on who is doing it, the colonizer or the colonized, the rich or the poor, but appropriation is an inescapable human activity.

The Chengdu chef Lan Guijun, who freely mixes foreign influences with his traditional Sichuanese cooking, offered the perfect justification for his disregard for notions of authenticity. ‘I’m from Sichuan, so whatever I cook is Sichuanese,’ he said. ‘And today’s invention is tomorrow’s “tradition” anyway. I want to cook in a spirited way, not like a machine.’

When a stern-faced chef barks at me to have some more baozi for breakfast or Li Shurong presses me to have another mouthful of her red-braised pork, I know they are offering me the edible equivalent of a hug.

‘If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food. We openly acclaim eating as one of the few joys in this human life.’

The Chinese recognize, perhaps more than any people, how the tastes of familiar foods give us our sense of belonging, tug at our deepest heartstrings, take us home.