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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520293526 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/23/2017 |
| Series: | California Studies in Food and Culture , #63 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
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Bitter and Sweet
Food, Meaning, And Modernity in Rural China
By Ellen Oxfeld, Darra Goldstein
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Ellen OxfeldAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29351-9
CHAPTER 1
The Value of Food in Rural China
AFTER A THREE-YEAR ABSENCE, I was returning to Moonshadow Pond, a village in southeastern China, where I have periodically undertaken field research for almost twenty years.
As soon as I entered the house of my hosts, Songling and Baoli, they cut open a local pomelo, a citrus fruit resembling a grapefruit. It was late May, and Songling had zealously saved it for my arrival; the date for storing pomelos had long since passed, and the fruit would have spoiled had I appeared any later. Soon afterward, several neighbors stopped by with tasty treats in hand. Miaoli came to the house with a dish of fermented rice flour pasta that she had stir fried with scallions (weijiao ban). Songling's sister-in-law Yinglei brought over some Qingming buns (ban), sweet, steamed buns made from chopped and boiled wild grasses mixed into a batter of glutinous rice flour and sugar. The following day, Songling slaughtered one of her chickens and cooked another local specialty made up of chicken and ginger braised in homemade glutinous rice wine (jijiu).
Such food exchanges were not unusual in Moonshadow Pond. First, food was given to me to celebrate my return visit and to reconstitute warm social ties. In addition, many of these dishes contained seasonal, ethnic, and other symbolic references, and also embodied very specific medicinal qualities. For instance, the chicken and wine dish that Songling made for me was more commonly prepared on two occasions — either for new mothers to consume after childbirth or for everyone to enjoy during the celebrations of the Lunar New Year. The use of this dish in a postchildbirth diet stems from the ingredients, wine and ginger, as well as the braised preparation, all of which are viewed as conducive to the production of ample breast milk because of their "heating" qualities (more on this below). Moreover, the particular chicken used in this dish must ideally be raised at home and be large for it to impart its nourishing qualities to the mother.
Yinglei's Qingming buns were also not simply sweet treats. These are usually made during the Qingming Festival (Clear Bright Festival) — a time of year near the spring equinox when people clean their ancestors' gravesites. The green color of the buns is based on a homonym — although the character qing in the word qingming means "clear" or "pure," it is the same sound as a different character that means "green."
These dishes were additionally associated with a particular ethnic identity, the Hakka, the Han Chinese linguistic and ethnic group that lives in Meizhou, an area in northeastern Guangdong Province, where Moonshadow Pond is located. And they can be used to distinguish the Hakka from other Guangdong ethnic groups, such as the Cantonese. As one friend said to me regarding the custom of making special food for women after childbirth, "We Hakka make jijiu [ginger chicken and wine], but the Cantonese prefer making pig's feet in ginger!"
Certainly, the use of homegrown or even foraged ingredients, and the gifting of food that occurred that day, was not atypical. In Moonshadow Pond, food circulates constantly because it reaffirms old and creates new social ties. Indeed food is an important medium of social communication in the village. It is a constant focus of effort — from agricultural labor, to cooking, daily provisioning, gift exchange, worship, banqueting, and celebration of yearly holidays. It has great value and creates value in numerous domains of activity.
This book attempts to understand the value of food in rural China, or at least one small place in rural China — the village of Moonshadow Pond. That food is valuable in any society is certainly obvious. After all, food is vital to human biological existence. Further, a cursory look at food in almost any culture will show that it is implicated in many dimensions of social life beyond mere survival — from relationships among people within and outside the family to health, from economic and ecological systems to notions of morality and expressions of ethnic, religious, class, and national identities.
Given the universal salience of food in all cultures, therefore, why write a book about food in one small corner of rural China? One answer is simply that most people who have lived or even traveled in China will quickly agree that, while food is important in all societies, it is a highly charged focus of interest there. As the archaeologist K. C. Chang rather famously said about food in China, "That Chinese cuisine is the greatest in the world is highly debatable and is essentially irrelevant. But few can take exception to the statement that few other cultures are as food oriented as the Chinese. And this orientation appears to be as ancient as Chinese culture itself."
From China's extremely varied and elaborate cuisine to memories of starvation and want, food assumes a central place in Chinese life. There is certainly no dearth of writing that focuses on food in China: cookbooks and even novels; academic studies encompassing everything from the history of food and agriculture in China to analyses of social and cultural rituals, such as banqueting; and investigations of the rapid development of fast food and the explosion of concern over food safety issues. In what follows, however, I hope to provide something different. Instead of looking at a particular issue with regard to food — banqueting, fast food, health, or food scandals, to name a few — I aim to understand the role of food in one community as it shapes people's everyday lives.
The very fact that, in the late 1950s, less than a half century ago, China experienced a cataclysmic famine means that the experiences of older people in rural areas relative to food have incorporated everything from misery and extreme want to relative abundance. On the other hand, because China is rapidly industrializing, and so many young rural people are migrating to cities for work, the connection between food and agriculture is attenuated for many members of the younger generation, who have left behind the backbreaking exertions of peasant agriculture. Such divergent generational experiences are developments that make highlighting the role of food in rural China particularly interesting now.
As we shall see, despite these rapid transformations, food in Moonshadow Pond is an essential building block of social relations and a source of value within, but also well beyond, the market economy. The reform and opening (gaige kaifang) of China's political economy began in 1978 with the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. It had momentous consequences as China opened up its labor markets to the global capitalist economy and de-collectivized agriculture. Food has certainly been drastically affected by this change. Diets have improved and China is now a donor, and not a recipient, of international food aid. Noting rising living standards, changing sexual and family practices, and the migration of tens of millions of rural migrants to the city, scholars have also pointed to moral and ideological shifts, such as the rise of a new individualism in China.
A focus on food, however, can give us a different framework for thinking about these transformations. Certainly the role of food in society has partially reflected the stunning rapidity of social and cultural change in China; trends such as the expansion of the commodity economy and rising individualism can be indexed through changing foodways (for instance, the growth of fast food outlets in cities). But in other respects, food's role as a measure and source of value in China, certainly in rural China, has defied over-simplification. Indeed, the production and consumption of food in rural culture also creates spaces for community, connection, and meanings beyond commoditized values.
In recent years in North America, there has been a renewed interest in our own food practices. Much discussion in academic circles and in the larger public has focused on the ecological toll of a highly industrialized food system, one that depends on petrochemical inputs and entails long distances between farm and table, factors that contribute to both pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The ever-expanding supply of highly processed and fast foods has been associated with adverse impacts on human health, such as obesity. Meanwhile, the use of pesticides and other chemical inputs on crops has raised fears about their links with cancer and other illnesses. Along with the development of fast foods, China is itself also undergoing a rise in industrialized food production. Many of the same ills associated with these practices in the West are now emerging in China. Rather than fear of famine, the Chinese must contend now with fear of food itself; food dangers currently range from the deliberate adulteration of food for profit to the longer-term health and environmental impacts on the food supply of pesticides; herbicides; nitrogen-based fertilizers; and, finally, soil and water pollution from industry and mining.
To grasp some of the changes that have occurred in China's food situation over the last century, particularly in rural China, let us compare peasant livelihoods before the Communists came to power in 1949 (referred to as Liberation), during the following collectivized period, and after the implementation of reforms in 1980. A few examples can give us a sense of the changes in China's food and agricultural system.
For instance, between 1929 and 1933, the economist John Lossing Buck and his colleagues at the University of Nanjing undertook a vast survey of Chinese villages and families (over 38,000 families in 168 localities in 22 provinces of China). Their picture of the Chinese peasant's diet and agricultural system at that time is fascinating and also grim. In densely populated rural China, Buck noted, relying on a predominantly vegetable diet enabled peasants to use less land to support more people; very little energy, no more than 2–3 percent of total calories, came from animal products. Most animals were used not for meat but for draft purposes, and most crops went directly to human food rather than to feed. Because of the uncertainties of life, such as high infant mortality rates and crop failures caused by weather disasters, over half the rural population died before reaching the age of 28. Indeed, peasant informants in Buck's study remembered an average of three famines in their lifetimes. When these famines occurred, portions of the population were reduced to eating tree bark and grass, relocated, or even starved to death. Land tended to be divided into numerous small parcels. Tenancy rates were higher in the south, where tenancy was as high as 32 percent of families.
These data were gathered in the 1920s. But after Liberation in 1949, Chinese agriculture entered a period of whirlwind change. The rapid collectivization efforts of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) led to what was probably the greatest famine in world history, with estimates of deaths directly attributable to famine varying from thirty to as high as forty-five million. After that, a gradual increase in consumption occurred, but per capita food availability did not surpass 1958 levels until 1974.
Changes after 1980 were dramatic. Vaclav Smith estimates that by 1984 the per capita food supply in China rose to within 5 percent of Japan's mean. Between 1980 and 2000, a "dietary transition" occurred, in which the consumption of eggs and fruits increased sixfold, the purchase of pork tripled, and the consumption of pulses, once a dietary staple, declined by two-thirds. All of this occurred while China's population was increasing by leaps and bounds, from 660 million in 1961, to 870 million in 1972, and to over 1.2 billion today. In the context of the growing population and the use of formerly agricultural land for industrialization and urbanization, this dietary transition is even more stunning, since it has occurred in a rapidly growing population using less land for agriculture.
Still, despite a marked dietary transition in China as a whole, dietary patterns in China today do vary depending on place of residence. Compared with rural residents, urban dwellers consume fewer grains but more meat, poultry, fish, fruits, eggs, dairy, and even vegetables than their rural counterparts. Dietary consumption also varies by region. For instance, rural residents of the southeast, where Moonshadow Pond is located, have a much more varied diet than those in the north and west, where growing seasons are short and economic development and expansion have not occurred as rapidly.
Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the Chinese dietary regime today is not a replica of North American or European ones. For instance, entering the twenty-first century, Americans ate over a hundred grams of meat or chicken each day, while the Chinese consumed less than twenty-five. The share of animal products, sugars, and sweets in the Chinese diet is certainly growing and is estimated at between one-fifth to one-third of the diet. But this is still not as much as in the United States, where fat, sugars, and sweets make up over 40 percent of American diets. China, with fewer than ninety-nine tractors per thousand persons in the agricultural population (as compared to over a thousand tractors per thousand people in the agricultural population of the United States), also remains behind in the mechanization of agriculture. And while under 10 percent of the American population is engaged in agriculture, the percentage is about 50 percent for China.
In approaching my project, I wondered how all of these developments might affect the role and significance of food in a specific community. In addition to the important issues of food safety and health, very basic questions of meaning also arise. Scholars such as Sidney Mintz have long pointed out that "modernity" in food systems — that is, the rationalization of food production and consumption, and its increasing uniformity over vast reaches of time and space — has led to the demise of food as a signifier of meaning in particular times and spaces. In other words, food is no longer a language in a local symbolic system because it is becoming increasingly commoditized and is exchanged over ever-larger geographical areas. Might not my earlier examples of food being used as a specific and locally significant symbolic language become increasingly rare, even in rural China, as food turns into a mere commodity that is uniform over great distances?
Writing about food as a local symbolic system in a somewhat isolated rural community of rural North China, Xin Liu called it both a "social institution and a system of values" and remarked, "Day by day, occasion by occasion, individuals must learn rules and conventions of preparing and presenting food in order to communicate with others and become full members of the community. As a social institution, food — like language — is a kind of collective contract that one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to survive in the community it dominates."
Indeed, the importance of food as a means of symbolic communication has a history of several thousand years in China. Speaking about ancient China, historian Roel Sterckx states, "Culinary activity governed not only human relationships but also fermented the communication between humans and the spirit world. Cooking, the offering and exchanging of food, and commensality were among the most pervasive means of social and religious communication in traditional China."
Food has been central to ritual occasions, as offerings to ancestors and gods as well as in banqueting, from ancient China until the present. But as rural China is now experiencing an ever-more freewheeling and unregulated market economy, following directly on the heels of several decades of collectivized agriculture, asking if these historical developments have influenced the role and meanings of food at the local level makes sense.
In examining foodways in contemporary China, however, extending our focus beyond the issues of globalization and modernity is important. A singular focus on modernity can unwittingly produce new forms of Orientalism, by which we evaluate China as moving in a straightforward trajectory toward "modern," albeit Chinese-inflected, orientations. (Ironically, such a focus can cause us to overlook the continuing importance of "nonmodern" practices in North America or Europe.) Thus, before we assume that China is moving in a straight line toward a food modernity of industrialized, generic foods and food practices, dis-embedded from local meaning systems, we must also consider that modernity itself has always generated strong countercurrents. Further, modernity in its present incarnation of globalized capitalism is absorbed in different degrees and ways, even as it continues its spread throughout global space.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bitter and Sweet by Ellen Oxfeld, Darra Goldstein. Copyright © 2017 Ellen Oxfeld. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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