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What do we mean when we say "Chinese" food? A thread on the value of thinking about culinary regionalism and national culinary identities.
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Should Tibetan food, for example, be considered Chinese food? Or is Chinese food just a composite of the four or eight great regional specialties? (2/12)
If you know anything about Chinese food, you've probably heard of the four "great" cuisines (Sichuan (川chuan), Guangdong (粤yue), Shandong (鲁lu), Jiangsu (淮扬huaiyang)), (3/12)
but as Michelle King points out, thinking in terms of culinary regions was a historical development that shifted over time, it's not nearly as timeless or old as we might expect. (4/12)
Scholarly accounts in China typically attribute the standardized 4-part regional culinary scheme of chuan-yue-lu-huaiyang, to the early Qing, which later expanded to eight by the late Qing. (5/12)
But textual evidence for this 4-part schema is curiously absent. The idea that there were four regional specialties doesn't really appear until the post-Mao reform period. (6/12)
So what does King suggest instead? Well, trying thinking about how "Chinese" has been defined historically as a collective, culinary identity. When and why did this happen? How has the collective definition changed? (7/12)
Rather than fixate on culinary regions, let's talk about culinary regionalism and how the concept can accommodate both on-the-ground culinary diversity and nationalist projects of belonging. (8/12)
If culinary regionalism is a way to get at the relationships that have been created between culinary regions and a culinary nation, then with respect to Chinese food, we've been going at it back to front. (9/12)
Maybe it's not culinary regions adding up to a culinary nation, but as King argues, it's the culinary nation that provides order and meaning for combining regional cuisines into a single, collective identity. (10/12)
It's time to rethink what we mean when talking, and eating, Chinese food. (11/12)
