Elderly mothers pick pineapple in Taiwanese fields and cook curry rice in a Singaporean hawker stand in Lin Cheng-sheng's biopic, 27°C: Loaf Rock, and Eric Khoo's telefilm, Recipe: A Film on Dementia , respectively. Both 2013 Chinese language films employ flashbacks to portray maternal food memories. Lin and Khoo depict food as comforting and possessing a unique ability to stimulate long-term memory to counter the short-term memory loss symptomatic of this form of dementia. The gustatory and the olfactory act directly upon the limbic brain, which houses emotions. In depicting Alzheimer's sufferers and their responses to food, 27°C and Recipe fight for causes. Lin calls attention to the marginalized in his portrayal of the mother succumbing to the disease from the perspective of her son—a character based on contemporary Taiwanese baker Wu Pao-chun, who overcame the adversity of impoverishment to win the world famous Master's de la Boulangerie and found prestigious eponymous bakeries. Parallel to its role in individual memory, food preserves cultural memory. Analogous to culinary arts, cinema, which is made for consumption, combines art and science, embodies culture, and incorporates tradition and innovation, as I show in this comparative study.

Fu Pei-mei (1931–2004), cookbook author and television personality in postwar Taiwan, was often called the “Julia Child of Chinese Cooking.” While Child sought to introduce American audiences to the unfamiliar tastes and traditions of French cuisine, Fu was demonstrating Chinese cooking to a new generation of postwar housewives in Taiwan, who needed her expertise and guidance in the kitchen. Fu authored more than thirty cookbooks, many of which were bilingual Chinese-English, and hosted Taiwan television's first instructional program on Chinese cooking for almost four decades, beginning in 1962. From a political vantage point, Fu's culinary talent, linguistic skills, and gracious demeanor perfectly filled the existing needs of the ruling Nationalist Party on Taiwan. Fu's comprehensive survey of Chinese regional cuisines united an otherwise fractious and fragile postwar nation. Yet Fu would not have attained the level of popularity that she did, had she not also connected deeply with her female audience. Over decades of dramatic social change for women in Taiwan, Fu embraced both the practical and emotional needs of ordinary housewives and career women alike, who sought out her expert guidance in the onerous daily task of feeding their families. This article compares the political, gender, and media contexts of Child's and Fu's culinary careers, in order to highlight the distinctive impact each had on millions of television viewers and would-be home cooks.

This article discusses the ways in which Taiwanese utilized rice as a cultural symbol in anti-globalization movements. Analyzing the period from 1960 to 2015, it distinguishes among three phases: the internationalization phase (1960–83); the globalization phase (1984–2003); and the anti-globalization phase (2004–15). There are two main focuses of concern. First, have Taiwanese dietary habits, represented by rice, their main staple food, changed as a result of cultural encounters created by processes of internationalization, globalization, and anti-globalization? Second, what are the unique characteristics of Taiwan's anti-globalization movements in the context of food justice movements around the world? My research results indicate that Taiwan's anti-globalization campaigns are unique because of their development through large-scale organized social movements and their prominent use of symbolism and performance arts, leading to the birth of far-reaching public discourses and public values. However, possibly as a result of historical factors, discourse about issues of social justice and equality is relatively absent from local food network initiatives in Taiwan.

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.