The consumption of food is simultaneously one of humanity’s most basic necessities and one of its greatest luxuries. It has, appropriately, both inspired and reflected cultural activities, from agricultural rituals and ascetic practices to epicurean banquets and poetry. At the present moment, we seem to be living in an era of peak food obsession, fueled by extremely popular food culture, the rapid rise of “foodie” life on social media, and heated debates over the authenticity and identity of cuisine in a multicultural context. Chinese societies have been equally obsessed, with food being a central theme of ancient bronzes, Confucian classics, religious practices, and literary works. For this reason, the study of Chinese food culture naturally brings one through a wide array of disciplines, including cultural studies, history, religion, medicine, and aesthetics. However, with a few notable exceptions, major research in humanistic food studies has tended to emphasize recent time periods, European and American cultures, or both (the “modern west”). The result has been a strong emphasis on “cultural studies” approaches, usually adopting structuralist, culturalist, or Gramscian critiques of power brokers in the past century.Footnote 1 This special issue shows how attention to Chinese food history may bring to light many new questions and methods in the study of food culture.
We bring together here eight essays that approach food not as a self-contained topic but as a vantage point on Chinese history from different perspectives. Four essays take a historical approach, using close readings of medical, connoisseurial, legal, and anecdotal sources to show how specific types of food became sites where knowledge, social identity, and political order were negotiated over time. Miranda Brown and Yang Yong turn to two early medieval medical manuals to show how dairy was prescribed to treat digestive ailments, challenging the common view that the Chinese avoided dairy primarily on physiological grounds such as widespread lactose intolerance. Xiaolin Duan develops terroir as an analytical framework through the well-documented case of Fujian’s Beiyuan tea (北苑茶), tracing how literati linked tea quality to both environmental conditions and cultural practices in order to articulate refined taste, assert social identity, and produce place-based knowledge. Ari Daniel Levine examines six legal and anecdotal narratives of murder by poisoned food, where officials’ epistemic authority works to expose perpetrators and restore threatened hierarchies. Ya Zuo follows the millennium-long presence of the chickpea across the empire, from its prominence as a cosmopolitan “Muslim bean” in the Yuan dynasty imperial diet, to its taxonomic obscurity when conflated with the pea, to its later emergence as famine food, arguing that foreignness made it a kind of perpetual outsider which connected Chinese empires to wider Eurasian worlds.
Two essays take religion as their point of entry and show how dietary practices reflected moral debates and self-cultivation. John Kieschnick examines how traditional vegetarian commitments, such as campaigns promoting MSG, ventures to manufacture vegan soap, and the rise of meatless restaurants, were adapted to early twentieth-century possibilities under the patronage of the socially conservative monk Yinguang 印光. Dominic Steavu reconsiders three important mushroom catalogues from the Song, Ming, and Qing periods to show how the fungi of specific places emerge not merely as culinary resources but as cultural objects whose meanings are co-produced by gastronomy, pharmacology, and practices of the self.
A final pair of essays approaches food in literature. Zihan Guo traces the transformation of the pufferfish from dangerous killer to alluring delicacy by the early twelfth century, showing how demographic shifts and literati efforts to collect and classify regional natural knowledge coalesced diverse experiences into the category hetun 河豚 (“river-piglet”). Wandi Wang examines an understudied dimension of a major cultural icon—the consumption of the plum blossom—and argues that the Southern Song vogue for eating this flower grew out of new developments in the intellectual and medical cultures of qing 清 (“purity”), Daoxue-inflected qi 氣, and the concept of the “poetic spleen.”
The materials highlighted and examined in the articles collected here are equally expansive. Our contributors make use of medical texts, legal compendia and case narratives, catalogues, casual writings, connoisseur manuals, poetry, local gazetteers, and modern newspapers, bringing into view a wide range of actors including literati, officials, healers, monks, and members of the imperial house. Together they point to several new directions to approach food culture and show that “food” is never only about eating. It is a multisensory medium through which moral claims are made, social hierarchies are contested, identities are defended, bodily regimes are justified, and aesthetic judgment is trained. Pick up the thread of food consumption, and you will find yourself tracing it to every corner of the labyrinth of Chinese history.
The contributions speak to one another across themes through interdisciplinary inquiry. Levine and Guo, for instance, illuminate deadly foods from different angles: Levine shows how cases of poisoning turned food into forensic evidence and demanded the mobilization of legal, medical, and moral knowledge, while Guo traces how a naturally toxic fish became an object of culinary desire by being theorized within literati projects of local expertise. Brown, Yong, and Zuo explore how ostensibly “foreign” foods—dairy, more closely associated with northern pastoral worlds, and the chickpea, long marked as an imported legume—open onto broader histories of cross-cultural connection. Kieschnick and Wang investigate “purity” as both a religious and aesthetic concept for consumption: the former examines how Buddhist vegetarian ethics were rearticulated through modern commodities such as MSG and vegan soap, whereas the latter shows how the plum blossom’s delicacy, fragrance, and winter resistance made it a model of “pure” beauty that could be ingested. Finally, Duan, Steavu, and Guo foreground the local, linking distinctive teas, seafood, and fungi to the environments in which they grow and to the textual practices through which such local qualities were rendered legible.
Taken together, the contributions to this special issue point to several commonalities. First, nearly every essay underscores the centrality of textualization in Chinese food history. Food becomes historically legible not simply through consumption, but through naming, classifying, cataloguing, poeticizing, and interpreting, whether in medical writing, anecdotal narrative, taxonomic description, or literary representation. Tea emerges not simply as a natural product but as one whose quality is constituted through literati writing that ties together environment, craftsmanship, and cultivated taste. Dairy is framed not only as a matter of bodily digestion but also as a therapeutic substance through medical discourses. The chickpea’s intermittent visibility as a textual object likewise depends on naming and taxonomic placement, just as the pufferfish’s transformation into hetun relies not only on changing consumption but on the collection of local knowledge. Fungi, too, are represented as cultural objects in catalogues situated at the intersection of nourishment, health, and spirituality. A central question in Chinese food history, then, is not only what was eaten, but how something was recognized, named, and written as “food.”
A second shared theme is the prominent role of politics in Chinese food writing. Many of the essays suggest that politics is not simply an external backdrop for food practices; rather, it is internal to the production of the meanings of food. That is to say, food is a site where hierarchy, power, legitimacy, and expertise are managed and maintained. Levine’s analysis of the poisoned-food cases makes this especially clear, showing how privileged officials assigned culpability to stabilize a compromised order of governance. Kieschnick’s article shows how the promotion of vegetarianism, though framed in religious terms, likewise reveals food to be embedded in public campaigns, commercial production, and new material conditions made possible under the Republic of China. In Wang’s essay, the consumption of plum blossoms, meanwhile, manifested the moral ideals that spoke not only to literati claims of political integrity but also to gestures of withdrawal from official life. Taken together, these essays show that Chinese food writing was a language through which authority, ethics, and the social hierarchy were articulated. Food in Chinese history functioned as a moralized regime of the body and a contested, politicized site within society.
The third shared intervention is the sustained resistance to essentialist narratives in this issue’s articles. They destabilize assumptions that might otherwise seem self-evident. Mushrooms are not mere ingredients, pufferfish were not always already a delicacy, plum blossoms were more than ornamental flowers, vegetarianism was not simply a static religious taboo, and foreign foods were not necessarily assimilated into a stable culinary order. The deeper collective contribution of the issue, then, is to restore “food” as a historical object whose meanings were continuously reinvented and renegotiated. Across these essays, moreover, boundaries that might once have seemed stable—between food and medicine, food and poison, food and object—repeatedly prove porous. That porosity is not incidental. It is itself a historical condition, one that shaped how people consumed, judged, and imagined food.
Lastly, these essays together unsettle any simple notion of a closed, self-contained “Chinese” food tradition. The chickpea shows how an imported crop could remain marked by exoticness across centuries. The discussion of dairy likewise challenges essentialist assumptions about a supposedly innate Chinese aversion to milk. The French term terroir, most closely associated with the tasting of wine, finds a historical resonance in Song connoisseurship of tea. MSG was first identified by a Japanese chemist and later incorporated into Chinese Buddhist projects, which demonstrates how modern vegetarianism took shape by circulating through transnational networks.
We hope this special issue will inspire future research on Chinese food culture by opening up new topics, new sources, and new methodological possibilities. In summary, this special issue demonstrates the continuing potential of food studies for Chinese history. It suggests that the most illuminating stories are not confined to a handful of famous gourmets, celebrated textual passages, or a small repertoire of iconic food items. Instead, food—precisely because it so readily overlaps with so many different aspects of human life—offers one of the richest pathways into the everyday workings of culture and knowledge in Chinese history.
This special issue grows out of “New Approaches to the Study of Traditional Chinese Food Culture: A Workshop,” held on March 9–10, 2024, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-organized by us, Thomas J. Mazanec and Wandi Wang. This was, for a long time, one of the few North American venues to bring together international scholars around a shared focus on Chinese food culture. We are grateful to the many organizations, foundations, and academic units that supported this workshop. Externally, these include Umami Papa; the International Chinese Gastronomy Culture Foundation; the Geiss-Hsu Foundation; the Association for the Study of Food and Society; Google Giving; and the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies. Internally, at UC Santa Barbara, these include the College of Letters and Sciences, the East Asia Center, the Graduate Center for Literary Research, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the Departments of History, Religious Studies, and East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies.
In addition to the contributors to this special issue, we would also like to thank our other presenters—Pei-kai Cheng, Xiaosong Gao, Piotr Gibas, Wai-yee Li, Huijun Mai, and Isaac Yue—as well as the discussants for our panels: Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Lisa Jacobson, Xiaorong Li, Erika Rappaport, Peter Sturman, and Hangping Xu. We are equally grateful to the students and scholars who joined us in the audience. The presenters, discussants, and other attendees offered much stimulating feedback that has helped our authors further refine their contributions.
