This article documents the presence of cheese in the culinary traditions of southeast China between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries through a close analysis of a single recipe collection, Mr. Song's Book of Nourishing Life. It opens by examining Mr. Song's techniques for cheesemaking, exploring his many culinary applications for cheese, and situating his interest in dairy within the broader tradition of cheesemaking of his place and time. By reconstructing the flavors of centuries past, this article recovers a forgotten tradition of cheesemaking in southern China and challenges popular stereotypes about traditional Chinese cuisine being dairy-free.

This photo essay explores the Muslim Quarter, or Huimin Jie , in the central Chinese city of Xi'an located in Shaanxi Province. It focuses on street life and the vendors who sell a variety of foodstuffs from open-air stalls and shop fronts. The ten black and white street portraits included in the piece convey the Muslim character of this neighborhood as well as its youthful vibrancy.

By adopting a “weak” version of cultural relativism, we can manage our own ethical discomfort without disrespecting those whose culinary values and practices we do not share. This entails recognizing the contextual and performative aspects of all gastronomic rhetoric, including claims of expertise over questions of culinary authenticity and standards of acceptable behavior during the consumption of food and drink; all such claims, while often couched in the language of moral certainty, are in reality susceptible to contestation. It is thus in the language of right and wrong that those engaged in culinary discussions affirm, negotiate, and modify the prevailing standards of taste and good manners. This becomes especially clear when local people test foreigners' willingness to adapt to local gastronomic practices and styles of consumption, aspects of performance that are often coded in ways that force uninitiated outsiders to fail, perhaps unknowingly, in local eyes.

This article examines how commodity status is achieved and how value is articulated across three food provisioning practices and ideologies in China: nationally certified food, local government-sponsored organic food near Shanghai, and an alternative food movement comprising small-scale and independent organic farmers in Shanghai and the surrounding countryside. Understanding value across these three cases requires asking how the social relations of production and the rural labor involved in domestic food production are rendered visible, or not, to urban shoppers. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork as well as on work experiences with transnational food corporations in China, this article illustrates that government initiatives alienate rural labor in an effort partially designed to manage social harmony, while independent organic farmers “bring the rural back.” This analysis adds to our understanding of urban/rural relations in China today. It also shows that for alternative notions of value to flourish, gifts may intentionally moonlight as commodities.

In many areas of rural China, pig feasts have long functioned as a vital ritual exchange among codependent farm households. Called sha nian zhu (roughly translated as “killing the year's pig”), the annual reciprocal feast has traditionally served to maintain community identities, provide aid, and strengthen social ties. Based on interviews with farm households in Zhenlai County in northern Jilin Province, we study the benefits that the annual pig feast provides communities. While some farmers believe this tradition will endure indefinitely, trends of urbanization and privatization—e.g., the peri-urban encroachment and confiscation of village land, the temporary and permanent migration of rural villagers to cities, the industrialization of pig production, and the year-round availability of meat—could lead to the transformation and marketization, or even abandonment, of this ancestral tradition.

This paper traces the historical antecedents and influences on modern Chinese tea arts. What is now commonly known as gongfucha , which has become the standard Chinese tea ceremony, was originally a regional custom from the Chaozhou area of China. Through the twentieth century this custom was first taken up by Taiwanese pioneers, repackaged as an element of quintessential Chinese culture, and then exported back to mainland China since the 1980s. During this process of the reimagination of the Chaozhou practice of gongfucha , foreign elements of the Japanese tea ceremony, especially influences from senchadō , were included. As it becomes adopted throughout China as a new national custom, however, this foreign contribution is obscured and forgotten, and replaced with a national narrative that emphasizes links to the past.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, construction in Shenzhen symbolized both the transformation of Chinese socialism and the concomitant integration of Chinese society into global capitalist networks. This article tells the story of Shenzhen from the perspective of this first generation of immigrants, the so-called Old Shenzheners, who use nostalgia about food to define, debate, and ultimately retreat from conversations about what Shenzhen culture was and what it ought to be. Their food nostalgia is part of a larger cultural tradition of Chinese alimentary politics and has allowed Shenzheners to indigenize capitalist globalization to make the city their own. Old Shenzheners' food nostalgia represents an important moment in the Chinese transition to a post socialist political economy, redefining what it means to be both Chinese and global in a post––cold war world order.

With assistance from lay volunteers and using a giant stove, Tibetan monks at Longen monastery in rural Qinghai province China prepare and serve meals for several hundred of their peers during the summer retreat. In the past, rugged geography and the isolation of this monastery above 13,000 feet gave reasons for the monks to eat local meat since other foodstuffs were unavailable in an area unable to support agriculture beyond herding animals, chiefly yaks and cows. However, closer contact with the outside has allowed the monks to adopt a vegetarian diet, but one that still uses local resources such as yoghurt and wild sweet potatoes.