The Chinese way of eating is characterized by flexibility and adaptability, a function of the knowledge the Chinese have acquired about their wild plant resources. When threatened by poor harvests and famine, people would explore anything edible in order to stay alive. Many strange ingredients such as wood ears and lily buds, and delicacies such as shark fins, were discovered in this way and subsequently became an integral part of the Chinese diet. Chinese cuisine is also abundantly rich in preserved foods, another consequence of the need to find a means of survival during famines and the bleak winters of northern China. [387] The Chinese attitude towards food is intimately bound up with the notion of health and the importance of eating healthily, the underlying principles of which, based on the yin- yang distinction, are specific to Chinese culture. [388] Arguably few cultures are as food-orientated as the Chinese, who, whether rich or poor, take food extremely seriously, more so even than the French. [389] For thousands of years food has occupied a pivotal position in Chinese life. The importance of the kitchen in the emperor’s palace is amply demonstrated by the personnel roster recorded in Zhou li (the chronicle, or rites, of the Zhou dynasty, which ruled 1122- 256 BC). Out of almost 4,000 people who had the responsibility of running the emperor’s residential quarters, 2,271 of them handled food and wine. [390] While a standard greeting in English is ‘How are you?’ the Chinese equivalent is not infrequently ‘Have you eaten?’ K. C. Chang suggests that ‘the Chinese have shown inventiveness in [food] perhaps for the simple reason that food and eating are among things central to the Chinese way of life and part of the Chinese ethos.’ [391] Jacques Gernet argues, with less restraint, that ‘there is no doubt that in this sphere China has shown a greater inventiveness than any other civilization.’ [392]
To this picture we should add Chinese tea. No one is quite sure when tea-drinking in China began. It was already highly developed during the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) but it certainly dates back much earlier than that. Chinese tea culture is as sophisticated, multifarious, discerning and serious as European wine culture. A traditional tea-house has no equivalent in Western culture; the diversity of teas on offer is bewildering, the ways of preparing and imbibing are intricate, the rituals elaborate, and the surroundings often fine. Although coffee is becoming more popular, tea remains overwhelmingly the national drink. [393] With the growing appetite for things Chinese, it seems likely that Chinese tea-houses will become a common sight in many Western cities before too long.
It seems faintly absurd, therefore, to suggest that Chinese food (or drink, indeed) is being Westernized by the likes of McDonald’s. Of course, Chinese food has been influenced by the West, for example in terms of ingredients (the chillies characteristic of Sichuan food were originally introduced by the Spanish), but the impact has been very limited. The exceptional attachment of the Chinese to their food — in contrast to some other aspects of their culture, like clothing and architecture, which they have been largely prepared to relinquish — is illustrated by the fact that overseas Chinese communities, from South-East Asia to North America, continue to eat Chinese food as their main diet. [394]
Japanese food has been subject to rather greater Western influence. Japan abounds with homespun, Western-based food, much of which was invented in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. The Japanese elite sought to imitate French cuisine in the late nineteenth century, and after the First World War Western dishes began to enter middle-class kitchens, albeit in a highly indi genized form. Essentially, foreign dishes were accommodated into the Japanese meal pattern as side dishes — thereby also mimicking the ways in which Japanese society accepted, and also cordoned off, foreign influences more generally. [395] According to Katarzyna Cwiertka:
The basic rules concerning the blending of Japanese and Western foodstuffs, seasonings, and cooking techniques were set around the third decade of the twentieth century and have continued to be followed to this day, as Japanese cooks carry on with the adaptation of foreign elements into the Japanese context. Some combinations catch on to eventually become integral parts of the Japanese diet. Others are rejected, but they may reappear again a few decades later, advocated as new and fashionable. [396]
While the languages of East Asia are still overwhelmingly spoken within the region but not outside, this is not true of its food. Poor migrants have taken their food with them — Chinese restaurants, for example, have been the mainstay business of Chinese migrants, certainly in the early decades of settlement, as any Chinatown in the world will testify. While European food had only a limited impact on East Asia, mainly as a result of colonialism, reverse migration, from East Asia to the West, much of it over the last forty years, has enjoyed far greater culinary influence. Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Korean and Malaysian restaurants — and, of course, Indian — have become a familiar sight in the West. [397] Over the last twenty-five years, Japanese food has become very popular on the West Coast of the United States, leading to the creation of new Japanese-American hybrid dishes like the California roll. [398]
Rather than the Westernization of East Asian eating habits, it would be more appropriate to speak of the reverse, the Asianization of the Western diet. The reason has much to do with migration but is also a consequence of the sheer richness and quality of many cuisines in the region when compared with the great majority of their counterparts in Europe and North America. Take the case of Britain, the world’s greatest colonizer, whose own food culture can only be described, in its contemporary state, as impoverished and threadbare. The vacuum that was British cuisine after the Second World War has largely been filled by a myriad of foreign influences, in the first instance European, especially Italian and French, but also Asian, notably Indian and Chinese. As a consequence, its cuisine has become a hybrid: in the realm of food, Britain resembles a developing country, retaining something of its own while borrowing extensively from elsewhere. The same can be said of the United States, though of course it started life as a European hybrid in the first place. All cuisines in the era of globalization are becoming more hybrid, but the extent of this should not be exaggerated. In East Asia food remains essentially indigenous and only hybrid at the margins, with the obvious exception of a multiracial country like Malaysia, where there has been enormous cross-fertilization in food between the Malays, Chinese and Indians, resulting in a very distinctive national cuisine.
[387] Chang,
[388] Ibid., pp. 9-10.
[389] Ibid., p. 363.
[390] Ibid., p. 11.
[391] Ibid., pp. 13–14.
[392] Jacques Gernet,
[393] Fuchsia Dunlop, ‘Enthused by China ’s Tea Infusions’,
[394] Chang,