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Understanding food in Chinese culture is essential to understanding China. As primarily an agricultural society, Chinese life is very much centered around cultivating food both for subsistence and profit. Furthermore, flood and famine have historically threatened the availability of food. Such scarcities over the years created a "mindset" in China that made food cultivation, preparation, and storage major priorities. Since the Chinese economy was often local, the Chinese cook became very inventive in devising meals from often ordinary ingredients. It was also a diet which relied on vegetables, meat and fish often used only for special occasions. Food preparation was often time consuming, but it was important to maintain a healthy diet (when possible) since the work of the peasant was arduous.
To say that the consumption of food is a vital part of the chemical process of life is to state the obvious, but sometimes we fail to realize that food is more vital. The only other activity that we engage in that is of comparable importance to our lives and to the life of our species is sex. For survival needs, all men everywhere could eat the same food, to be measured only in calories, fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and vitamins. But no, people of different backgrounds eat very differently. The basic stuffs from which food is prepared; the ways in which it is preserved, cut up, cooked (if at all); the amount and variety at each meal; the tastes that are liked and disliked; the customs of serving food; the utensils; the beliefs about the food's properties—these all vary. The number of such "food variables" is great.
What characterizes Chinese food?... I see the following common themes:
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The food style of a culture is certainly first of all determined by the natural resources that are available for its use.... It is thus not surprising that Chinese food is above all characterized by an assemblage of plants and animals that grew prosperously in the Chinese land for a long time. The following are some of the most popular staples of the Chinese diet:
Starch: millet, rice, kao-liang, wheat, maize, buckwheat, yam, sweet potato.
Legumes: soybean, broad bean, peanut, mung bean.
Vegetables: malva, amaranth, Chinese cabbage, mustard green, turnip, radish, mushroom.
Fruits: peach, apricot, plum, apple, jujube date, pear, mountain haw, longan, litchi, orange.
Meats: pork, dog, beef, mutton, venison, chicken, duck, goose, pheasant, many fishes.
Spices: red pepper, ginger, garlic, spring onion, cinnamon.
Chinese cooking is, in this sense, the manipulation of these foodstuffs as basic ingredients. One important point about the distinctive assemblage of ingredients is its change through history. Concerning food, Chinese are not nationalistic to the point of resisting imports. In fact, foreign foodstuffs have been readily adopted since the dawn of history. Wheat and sheep and goats were possibly introduced from western Asia in prehistoric times, many fruits and vegetables came in from central Asia during the Han and the T'ang periods, and peanuts and sweet potatoes from coastal traders during the Ming period. These all became integral ingredients of Chinese food. At the same time...milk and dairy products, to this date, have not taken a prominent place in Chinese cuisine.
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In the Chinese culture, the whole process of preparing food from raw ingredients to morsels ready for the mouth involves a complex of interrelated variables.... The base of these variables is the division between fan, grains and other starch foods, and ts’ai, vegetable and meat dishes. A balanced meal must have an appropriate amount of both fan and ts’ai, and ingredients are readied along both tracks. Grains are cooked whole. Vegetables and meats are cut up and mixed in various ways. Even in meals in which the staple starch portion and the meat and vegetable portion are apparently joined together, such as in... “wonton”...they are in fact put together but not mixed, and each still retains its due proportion and own distinction.... For the preparation of ts’ai, the use of multiple ingredients and the mixing of flavors are the rules, which above all means that ingredients are usually cut up and not done whole, and that they are variously combined into individual dishes of vastly differing flavors.
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The Chinese way of eating is characterized by a notable flexibility and adaptability. Since a ts'ai dish is made of a mixture of ingredients, its distinctive appearance, taste, and flavor do not depend on the exact number of ingredients, nor, in most cases, on any single item. The same is true for a meal, made up of a combination of dishes. In times of affluence, a few more expensive items may be added, but if the times are hard they may be omitted without doing irreparable damage. If the season is not quite right, substitutes may be used.
This adaptability is shown in at least two other features. The first is the amazing knowledge the Chinese have acquired about their wild plant resources.... The Chinese peasants apparently know every edible plant in their environment. Most do not ordinarily belong on the dinner table, but they may be easily adapted for consumption in time of famine.... Here again is this flexibility: a smaller number of familiar foodstuffs are used ordinarily, but, if needed, a greater variety of wild plants would be made use of. The knowledge of these "famine plants" was carefully handed down as living culture—apparently this knowledge was not placed in dead storage too long or too often. Another feature of Chinese food habits that contributed to their notable adaptability is the large number and great variety of preserved foods.... Again, with preserved food, the Chinese people were ever ready in the event of hardship or scarcity.
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The overriding idea about food in China is that the kind and the amount of food one takes is intimately relevant to one's health. Food, therefore, is also medicine. The regulation of diet as a disease preventive or cure is certainly as Western as it is Chinese. The bodily functions, in the Chinese view, follow the basic yin-yang principles. Many foods are also classifiable into those that possess the yin quality and those of the yang quality. When yin and yang forces in the body are not balanced, problems result. Proper amounts of food of one kind or the other may then be administered (i.e., eaten) to counterbalance the yin and yang disequilibrium. If the body is normal, overeating of one kind of food would result in an excess of that force in the body, causing diseases....
At least two other concepts belong to the native Chinese food tradition. One is that, in consuming a meal, appropriate amounts of both fan and ts'ai should be taken. In fact, of the two, fan is the more fundamental and indispensable.... The other concept is frugality. Overindulgence in food and drink is a sin of such proportions that dynasties could fall on its account.... Although both the fan ts'ai and the frugality considerations are health based, at least in part they are related to China's traditional poverty in food resources.
Few other cultures are as food oriented as the Chinese. And this orientation appears to be as ancient as Chinese culture itself. I cannot feel more confident to say that the ancient Chinese were among the peoples of the world who have been particularly preoccupied with food and eating. As Jacques Gernet has stated, "There is no doubt that in this sphere China has shown a greater inventiveness than any other civilization."
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