China's Emerging Food Media: Promoting Culinary Heritage in the Global Age (original) (raw)

STANO, S. (2019) “The Aesthetics of Food: Chinese Cuisine(s) between the East and the West”

The Fountain and the Waterfall (ed. M. Leone, B. Surace, J. Zeng), pp. 277-301, 2019

Chinese cuisine is known and especially praised for the attention it pays to every aspect of food, “from its palatableness to its texture, and from its fragrance to its colourfulness; until, as in other works of art, proportion and balance are instilled in every dish” (Feng, 1966 [1952]). Within its huge variety — including gastronomic traditions originating from various regions of China, as well as from Chinese people living in other countries —, in fact, such a cuisine strongly emphasises the aesthetic dimension of food, in relation to both its preparation and consumption. This acquires further importance if we consider the extensive spread of Chinese food around the world and its consequent hybridisation with other foodspheres, including Western gastronomic traditions. This paper explores the aesthetic values associated with Chinese culinary arts by making reference to existing literature on Chinese food cultures and analysing some relevant case studies, especially in relation to the collective imaginary of Chinese cuisine between the East and the West. In the conclusion, a more general reflection concerning the philosophical and semiotic discussion on taste and its judgement is provided.

Food, Culture and Society, 16/2 2013 : Authentic, Speedy and Hybrid: Representations of Chinese Food and Cultural Globalization in Israel

Food, Culture and Society , 2013

In this article Chinese food serves as a prism for the analysis of the globalization processes which Israeli culture underwent since the 1970s. Our main argument is that Israeli culinary globalization evinced over time three distinct momentums. First, the appearance in the 1970s and 1980s of a variety of foods and tastes perceived as ethnic and exotic, or as representations of "other" nations; second, the commodification of these foods and tastes in the 1990s, and their distribution in fast food chains as mass consumption items (i.e., "McDonaldization"); and third, in the first decade of the 2000s, the hybridization of Chinese food with different Asian and worldwide food ingredients and styles, and the creation of a cosmopolitan eating experience. Another argument is that contrary to the common view, which identifies the globalization of Israeli society solely as an "Americanization" of it, globalization also takes the form of an ethnic-national process, and of a hybrid-cosmopolitan process. In this respect, we show that the globalization of Israel creates not only Americanization, but also an aesthetic Asianization (or Easternization of the West), as well as cosmopolitization of perceived representations of the East. Thus, it is maintained that Chinese food passes de-authentication on the one had (its staging), and re-authentication on the other hand (a return to its sources). Finally, our third argument indicates that Chinese food serves as a symbolic marker in the sphere of social stratification. In each one of its mutations, Chinese food operates as a token of status distinction. In the first momentum, consumption of Chinese food served to differentiate a newly emergent affluent class; in the second, Chinese food loses its differentiating quality when it becomes inexpensive and common; and in its third, Chinese food re-acquires upper-class characteristics when it becomes identified with fine cosmopolitan taste.

Anthropological Thoughts on the Chinese Culinary Culture

Taking the documentary film 'A Bite of China' as the subject, this paper reviews the major contents of the film and probe the cultural phenomenon behind it as an anthropological film by the methodology of content-based analysis. The documentary introduces a variety of Chinese culinary cultures in seven episodes mainly including the acquisition of various kinds of food and the culinary techniques of food. The anthropological significance of the Chinese culinary culture is explained. It in-depth discusses why 'A Bite of China' became the most popular documentary film in China at that time from the perspective of film and television shooting technology and post-production.

"Stakes of Authentic Culinary Experience: Food Writing of Tang Lusun and Wang Zengqi." Ex-Position. No.43. June 2020: 109-133.

2020

Tang Lusun (1908-1985) and Wang Zengqi (1920-1997) produced their food writing in the form of familiar essays, respectively, in the late martial law period of Taiwan (the 1970s and 1980s) and the early reform era of China (the 1980s and 1990s). This article examines their essays, especially those on Republican Beijing (Beiping) and wartime Kunming, to explore how narratives of autobiographical, individual culinary experience can develop into sharable or comparable social experience addressing the historical rupture of 1949. Shifting the focus of the theoretical notion of authenticity from the self to the individual's phenomenal perception and the contested arena of social communication concerning historical memory, this article shows that literary practices such as the generic feature of the I-narrator in the familiar essay, the textual construction of chronotopes of food, and (re)publications across the Taiwan Strait have shaped and reshaped "authentic culinary experience" in their texts in response to changing power structures, social interests, and affective needs of the reader.