In contemporary China, food is used strategically to cultivate relationships with business contacts and powerful officials. Around the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival, boxes of mooncakes in ostentatious packaging are gifted and regifted across society. I was once given some flashy boxes of cakes by a wealthy businessman, which I later found to be stale and mouldy. They might have been circulating for years: they were food tokens, not food.
