Modern Chinese Foodways

An edited collection that explores the multifaceted experiences of Chinese culinary modernity both within and outside of mainland China from the mid-19th century to present.

Modern Chinese Foodways defines some of the major processes by which Chinese food and foodways have become modern, with a focus on the period from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The editors, Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle T. King, and Jakob A. Klein, highlight four prominent areas of change: commodification of food production; the scientization of expertise and the development of new food technologies; the creation of new culinary identities based on gender, ethnicity, and nation; and the circuits of migration taking place since the nineteenth century.

This collection argues that Chinese food and foodways are very much modern—not a given in the face of the chorus of voices that insists on emphasizing its ancient roots—in ways that both recall the experiences of other cultures, as well as in ways unique to China’s own historical trajectory. 

The book combines incisive, original scholarship by thirteen leading voices in the field with editorial essays on the past and future of Chinese food studies to frame the field of inquiry for the next generation of Chinese food studies scholars. Demonstrating the significance of modern Chinese foodways to the phenomenon of culinary modernity writ large, which is still largely shaped by Euro-American perspectives and priorities, Modern Chinese Foodways is the first book of its kind.Series Foreword
Foreword
E. N. Anderson
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle King, and Jakob Klein
Part I: Creating Value: Market Structures and Commodities
1 Lord Millet in Alibaba’s Cave: The Resurrection of an Iconic Food
Francesca Bray
2 Becoming an Everyday Food: Soy Sauce in Modern China (ca. 1800–1930)
Angela Ki Che Leung
3 Beef in China: A History in Eight Dishes
Thomas Dubois
Part II: Systematizing Expertise: Food, Science, and Technology
4 Absorbing Vitamins: How a Nutritional Paradigm Was Reinvented in Republican China
Hilary Smith
5 Taste 100 Herbs: Material Scarcity and Local Plant Knowledge in the Mao-Era Campaign for Native Pesticides
Sigrid Schmalzer
6 Food Delivery, the Platform Economy, and Digital Culture in China: The Human-Nonhuman Entanglement of Urban Chinese Foodways
Fan Yang
Part III: Constructing Culinary Identities: Gender, Nation, and Ethnicity
7 Domestic Cookbooks and Female Culinary Authority in 20th Century China
Michelle King
8 Taiwanese Cuisine and Nationhood in the Twentieth Century
Yujen Chen
9 Getting Smashed: Drinking and Ethnic-Space Construction in a Hubei Tourist Spot
Xu Wu
10 Gastrographism in Contemporary China: From a Literary Past Time to a Professional Activity
Françoise Sabban
Part IV: “Chineseness” in Motion: Migration and Mobilities
11 Japanese Cuisine in Chinese Foodways
James Farrer and Chuanfei Wang
12 Chifas: How Chinese Food Became a Peruvian National Treasure
Lok Siu
13 Pigs from the Ancestors: Cantonese Ancestral Rites, Long-Term Change, and the Family Revolution
James Watson
Afterword: Chinese Food Futures
Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle King, and Jakob Klein
Recommended Works
Contributors
Index“A pioneering examination of Chinese food culture’s transformation amid global historical shifts. Meticulously researched and thoughtfully structured, it is an invaluable resource for scholars of food history and the cultural dynamics of ‘Greater China.’”
—Choice

“Modern Chinese Foodways remains an inspiring work that invites scholars to unpack the translocal, evolving, and contested meaning of identity and food from the lens of science, technology, and their multifaceted cultural values.”
—Technology and CultureJia-Chen Fu is Associate Research Fellow in the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica. She is the author of The Other Milk and is on the editorial board for Re:Past—Studies in the History of Nutrition series at John Hopkins University Press.

Michelle T. King is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the editor of the award-winning Culinary Nationalism in Asia and the author of Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.

Jakob A. Klein is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London. He has coedited five volumes on anthropological approaches to the study of China and/or food, including Consuming China and Ethical Eating in the Socialist and Postsocialist World.