At the Chinese Table: A Journey Through History, Culture, and Culinary Wisdom
Introduction
Food has always been more than mere sustenance. It is a reflection of culture, history, and identity. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chinese cuisine, which stands as one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated culinary traditions. Through the work of Fuchsia Dunlop, a British writer who has dedicated her life to understanding and documenting Chinese food, we gain not only insight into the remarkable diversity and complexity of Chinese cuisine but also a window into the Chinese soul itself. As Leslie T. Chang writes in the New York Review, "To understand the Chinese through their culinary history is to see them in their best lights, as inventive, adaptable, egalitarian, and open-minded."
Food in Chinese Identity
Cooking as Civilization
In her book "Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food," Fuchsia Dunlop makes a profound observation about the unique place of cooking in Chinese culture: "Only the Chinese have placed [cooking] at the very core of their identity. For the ancient Chinese, the transformation of raw ingredients through cooking marked the boundary not only between humans and their savage ancestors, but between the people of the civilized world (that is, China and its antecedent states) and the barbarians who lived around its edges."
This perspective helps explain why Chinese cuisine developed such extraordinary diversity, sophistication, and subtlety. Food was not merely about nourishment; it was about civilization itself. The Yellow Emperor, the mythical ancestor of the Chinese, was said to have been a farmer who taught people how to steam rice…a connection between food and governance that would persist throughout Chinese history.
Food as Governance
The relationship between food and statecraft runs deep in Chinese tradition. The cultivation of grain (millet and wheat in the north, rice in the south)was the overriding concern of the Chinese state since the earliest dynasties. Grain fed the people, financed the government through taxes, and provisioned imperial troops. Every spring, the emperor would mark the start of the sowing season by plowing furrows in a sacred field, performing ritual sacrifices of grain and meat throughout the year to ensure good harvests and, by extension, political stability.
This connection between food and governance was beautifully expressed by a political adviser from the sixth century BC, who compared the work of government to seasoning a stew (geng):
"Harmony may be compared to a geng. You have water, fire, vinegar, mince, salt and plums, with which to cook the fish and the meat....The cook blends the ingredients, equalizing the stew by means of seasonings, adding whatever is deficient and carrying off whatever is in excess....So it is with the relations between ruler and minister. When the ruler approves of something that is not proper, the minister calls attention to that impropriety, so as to correct that approval."
Even Laozi, the founder of Daoism, used cooking as a metaphor for governance: "Governing a country is like cooking small fish." His point was that it's the attention to detail that matters.
Historical Development of Chinese Cuisine
Ancient Foundations
Almost four thousand years ago, Chinese cooking had already developed distinctive traits that would define it for millennia. One was the fundamental divide between grain (fan) and vegetable or meat dishes (cai). A proper meal must include both, a principle so ingrained that ritual bronze vessels from the Shang dynasty (beginning around 1760 BC) were designed differently depending on whether they were for serving grain or meat.
Other foundational elements were already in place by the Zhou dynasty (around 1046 BC): the cutting of ingredients into small pieces, the mixing of meat and vegetables, and the use of diverse seasonings to create highly varied dishes. As the twentieth-century writer and philosopher Lin Yutang wrote, "The whole culinary art of China depends on the art of mixture."
The Song Dynasty: The Birth of True Cuisine
During the Song dynasty (960-1279), what Dunlop calls "the world's first true cuisine" emerged. New varieties of rice imported from Vietnam revolutionized farming by allowing two crops per year, and innovations in cultivation increased yields. The Chinese population boomed, and sophisticated commercial networks developed to transport rice, sugar, tea, wine, dried hams, and condiments around the country.
The Song capital of Kaifeng supported a thriving restaurant scene, with civil servants, merchants, and artisans patronizing establishments that would not appear in Paris for another six centuries. The material abundance of this era spawned "a complex gastronomic culture in which food was not only cooked and enjoyed, but also elaborated, discussed and documented."
In 1127, when Kaifeng fell to invaders, the imperial court fled south and established a new capital in Hangzhou, which became the largest and richest city in the world. This mix of natives and refugees created something of a melting pot, reflected in its cooking. Northern dishes were remade with southern ingredients: shrimp substituted for mutton, pastries became lighter and flakier. This fusion of regional styles created a truly national cuisine, though not everyone was pleased. As one scholar complained, "Food and drink have become all confused, with no longer any distinction between southern and northern."
The Foreigner Who Became Chinese Food's Greatest Champion
An Unlikely Journey
Fuchsia Dunlop's path to becoming one of the world's foremost authorities on Chinese cuisine is as remarkable as the cuisine itself. Educated at the University of Cambridge, she first went to China in 1994 on a scholarship to study government policy toward ethnic minorities at Sichuan University in Chengdu. She found herself in a region with one of China's most distinctive cuisines and began taking notes on the food.
"Almost everyone in Sichuan seemed to love talking about cooking and eating," Dunlop recalls in her memoir, "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper." "As a chef friend once said to me, Chengdu people have 'hao chi zui' mouths that love eating." She quit her studies and enrolled at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine as one of its first foreign students, beginning a journey that would span three decades and produce seven books.
The Outsider as Cultural Authority
Perhaps most remarkably, Dunlop has gained a large following by explaining Chinese food to the Chinese themselves. Her memoir "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper" sold about 200,000 copies when it came out in China in 2018. "Invitation to a Banquet" has sold 50,000 copies since its publication there, and two of her cookbooks have also done well. Among Chinese food lovers and chefs, Dunlop is praised for her deep understanding of the country's culinary history and is known, like a celebrity, by her first name: "Fu Xia" in Chinese.
How did a Cambridge-educated white woman who grew up five thousand miles away become accepted as an authority on matters so important to the Chinese? As China rapidly modernizes, traditional ways of eating and living are disappearing. It has fallen to Dunlop, an outsider, to study the history, sift through the tradition, and taste the dishes as if for the first time. Along the way, she has become the voice of a more authentic past.
"It kind of shames us, because it's our own culture," He Yujia, her Chinese translator, told Chang. "She helps us rediscover what we've neglected for too long."
Chinese Culinary Philosophy: Balance, Freshness, and Harmony
The Principle of Benwei
Central to Chinese culinary philosophy is the concept of benwei, or "root flavors." Ingredients should be cooked in small quantities using refined methods that reveal their essential character. This philosophy has guided Chinese cooking for centuries, with educated gentlemen through the ages searching obsessively for the freshest bamboo shoots, the finest vinegar, or the perfect bowl of congee (which tastes best, according to one connoisseur, when made with rainwater in early spring).
Seasonality and Provenance
Many supposedly modern ideas about eating have been accepted in China for centuries. Consuming the freshest meat, fish, and produce, local and in season, has been important since the earliest dynasties. "Certainly to have a fresh fish and to cause it to become unfresh is a terrible act," wrote Yuan Mei, an eighteenth-century gourmet and poet.
The passage of seasons was marked by the fruits and vegetables available in markets, starting with apricots and cherries in early summer, followed by peaches and melons, then chestnuts, grapes, and oranges at the Mid-Autumn Festival. Everyone knew that the best handmade tofu came from the Sichuanese town of Xiba, just as Nanjing was the place for salted duck, Pixian for chili bean paste, and the hills around Hangzhou for the most delicate leaves of Dragon Well green tea.
"Concern for the provenance and terroir of ingredients, so important to modern western gourmets, was not the invention of the French or Californians, but has been a preoccupation in China for more than two thousand years," Dunlop writes.
Balance and Moderation
Pleasure in eating has always been paired with the need for restraint in Chinese tradition. Classical texts warned against overindulgence. "Even if there is plenty of meat, [a gentleman] should not eat more meat than rice," counseled Confucius in the Analects. The ideal has always been to achieve moderation and balance (yin and yang, heating and cooling ingredients, main dishes and rice), in order to nourish the body while living in harmony with nature.
For most of recorded history, ordinary Chinese ate whole grains, legumes, and vegetables, using small quantities of meat and fish for flavor, and throwing almost nothing away. In rice they found a staple grain that supplies more calories per acre than any other cereal crop, while myriad preparations of what Dunlop calls the "miraculous" soybean deliver as much protein as dairy and meat but more economically.
This nutritional efficiency has allowed China to support a large population on limited arable land, with food that is healthy, satisfying, and environmentally sustainable. "If we're not all to become vegan," Dunlop writes, "Chinese eating may be one of the solutions to the world's environmental problems."
The Global Journey of Chinese Cuisine
Early Misunderstandings
One of Dunlop's goals is to rescue Chinese food from its reputation in the West as "popular, but...cheap, low-status and junky." The earliest Chinese restaurateurs abroad—beginning with those who went to California during the Gold Rush in the 1840s, were uneducated laborers with no culinary training. The dishes they made, like deep-fried wontons and sweet-and-sour everything, were nothing like the sophisticated cuisine back home.
Chinese food in the West remained a "bastardized form of Cantonese cuisine," and this fed a stereotype of the Chinese as slovenly and undiscriminating eaters. Lord Macartney, the leader of a 1793 British diplomatic mission to China, described the Chinese as "foul feeders and eaters of garlic and strong-scented vegetables." In 2002 the Daily Mail called Chinese food "the dodgiest in the world, created by a nation that eats bats, snakes, monkeys, bears' paws, birds' nests, sharks' fins, ducks' tongues and chickens' feet."
More recently, the possibility that the Covid-19 virus emerged in a Chinese market that sold wild animals revived the old "Chinese will eat anything" tropes, though Dunlop notes that consumption of exotic species is limited to a tiny subset of the population and is controversial in China too.
The True Diversity of Chinese Ingredients
Dunlop takes pains to point out that the Chinese are discerning about ingredients and have always emphasized the links between food and health. The quest for nutritious produce in China created a far more diverse array of foods than is known in the West. Dunlop devotes five pages to the "vast clan of cabbages" before moving on to "the punchy Alliums, the tribe of onions and garlics," and then to bamboo shoots, roots and tubers, gourds, mushrooms, and seaweeds.
An entire chapter explores the unfamiliar world of vegetables harvested from water, such as water chestnuts and lotus plants, a category that doesn't exist in Western cooking. She describes the fantastic range of flavors and textures that the Chinese have wrought from tofu, which can be silken or firm, smoked or spiced, stir-fried, deep-fried, frozen, toasted, pressed into sheets, soaked in brine, or molded and fermented into "a delicious state of dishevelment, as high and wild as Stilton on the brink between ripeness and decay" a reminder of the double standards that have made Western gourmets devalue Chinese food in favor of their own.
A History of Culinary Exchange
Contrary to the perception of Chinese cuisine as closed or insular, Dunlop traces the surprising openness of the Chinese to foreign foods throughout history. During the Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220), exotic foods such as grapes, pomegranates, walnuts, sesame, onions, peas, alfalfa, coriander, and cucumbers entered the country from Central Asia. In the Ming dynasty (mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth century), despite its isolationist policies, corn, peanuts, white potatoes, and sweet potatoes arrived from the New World. Two other New World transplants, the chili pepper and the tomato, were adopted more recently and further transformed the cuisine.
For a long time, historians assumed that Chinese cooking developed its enormous variety because people had to make the most of scarce resources. More recent scholarship suggests that the centrality of food drove innovation. Dunlop underscores the value that the Chinese have always placed on culinary ingenuity: pragmatism and pleasure, not poverty, were always the impetus.
The Vanishing World of Traditional Chinese Food Culture
A Changing China
Dunlop's initial encounters with China took place in what she calls "this prelapsarian world of cooking." In the early 1990s, families in Chengdu still cooked dinner on charcoal braziers, made their own pickled cabbage and smoked sausage, and shopped every day for meat and vegetables in open-air markets. In the lanes and alleys of the old city, she met knife sharpeners and tofu vendors, ate delicious noodle lunches for pennies, and tasted classic Sichuanese dishes like fish-fragrant eggplant and twice-cooked pork for the first time.
As China's economic progress accelerated, Dunlop witnessed the demolition of Chengdu's old wooden houses, streets, and entire neighborhoods to make way for highways and high-rises. "My culinary researches began as an attempt to document a living city," she writes in her memoir. "Later, it became clear to me that, in many ways, I was writing an epitaph."
The Modern Food Revolution
In the three decades since Dunlop first went to China, the country's food system has been transformed. Western fast-food restaurants arrived, followed by supermarket chains and megamarkets like Carrefour and Walmart, leading to increased consumption of Western-style processed and packaged foods, saturated fats, and sugary beverages. "Just like much of the US," writes Thomas David DuBois in "China in Seven Banquets," "it was becoming easier for Chinese urban consumers to buy out-of-season fruit from thousands of miles away than it was to get fresh produce from the farm just outside of town."
A generation ago, most Chinese people knew how to cook; in some parts of the country, including Sichuan, it was common for men to be the primary cooks in the family. But rising living standards and a hypercompetitive work culture have changed that. Many Chinese in their twenties and thirties don't know how to cook or are too busy to. According to recent surveys, more than half the population now eats most of its meals outside the home or relies on food delivery services.
The market for prepared meals is booming, including everything from frozen dumplings to ready-made dishes for the traditional New Year's feast. According to a 2022 newspaper article with the headline "Chinese Food, Quietly Deteriorating," "Just to think about spending half a day cooking something, not to mention cleaning up the pots and dishes afterward, is enough to destroy a young person." Cooking from scratch has become a special occasion or a performative exercise, done "only when dating, having friends over, or posting pictures online."
Health Consequences
Many Chinese are losing touch with the tradition of healthful eating that Dunlop celebrates. Consumption of whole grains, legumes, and vegetables is in steep decline. According to a 2021 article in the journal Public Health Nutrition, the Chinese now get 30 percent of their calories from animal products and 29 percent from industrially processed foods. In 1990 the figures were 9.5 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively.
The prevalence of obesity has increased fivefold; the Chinese suffer increasingly from the chronic ailments, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that afflict so many millions in the developed world. The traditional Chinese diet, once a model of nutritional efficiency and environmental sustainability, is being replaced by patterns of consumption that are both less healthy and less sustainable.
The Nostalgia for a Lost Culinary World
Yearning for the Past
The yearning for a simpler and healthier past informs much of recent Chinese gastronomical commentary. Among the most influential expressions of this nostalgia is "A Bite of China," a hugely popular TV series that explores the country's culinary heritage, with episodes on rural villagers harvesting lotus root or making glutinous millet buns using traditional methods.
One of China's biggest social media stars is Li Ziqi, a former nightclub DJ who makes mesmerizing, near-wordless videos of herself hiking up hillsides in rural Sichuan to chop firewood and pick mushrooms or planting and harvesting cucumbers, peppers, and squash in large bamboo baskets. Nearly every video ends with her cooking dishes over a wood fire and sharing a meal with her grandmother in what looks like a cottage without electricity. Li's videos, which have gained her tens of millions of followers, present cooking as an extravagant rural fantasy and inadvertently convey how exhausting it is to put dinner on the table.
The Disappearing Neighborhood Restaurant
When Dunlop first lived in Chengdu, she and her classmates frequented a noodle shop near the university owned by a man called Xie Laoban—"Boss Xie." He was a type recognized by anybody who has lived in China. The stony-faced, chain-smoking proprietor who never cracks a smile or says a word in greeting. Over the years, Dunlop returned for a nostalgic bite whenever she passed through the city.
She somehow convinced this uncommunicative man to share his recipe for dandan mian, a bowl of noodles topped with crispy minced beef and spicy seasonings that is a classic Chengdu street snack. "In all my wanderings," Dunlop writes, "I have never come across Dan Dan noodles as delicious."
The last time she visited the shop in 2001, the neighborhood was being torn down for development:
"The lanes around Xie Laoban's noodle shop lay in ruins, bony cadavers of wood and bamboo, and his restaurant clung to one or two other little shops in a precarious island amongst them.... I sat there and ate my noodles, which were as fabulous as ever, and then it was time to go. I never saw Xie Laoban again. Later that year, I went to look for him. I wanted to tell him that I had described him and his shop in my Sichuanese cookery book, and published his recipe for Dan Dan noodles, which was now being read and perhaps cooked by a network of Sichuanese food fans all over the world. But the place where his noodle shop had stood was a moonscape of debris, a great plain of rubble, scattered here and there with shattered pickle jars and rice bowls. And none of the passers-by knew where I could find him."
Conclusion: Food as Cultural Heritage
Fuchsia Dunlop's work is more than a celebration of Chinese cuisine; it is an act of cultural preservation. In documenting the rich history and sophisticated philosophy of Chinese food, she has helped preserve a tradition that might otherwise be lost in the rush to modernize.
Through her writing, we come to understand that Chinese cuisine is not merely a collection of recipes but a complex system of knowledge, philosophy, and cultural values that has developed over millennia. It reflects the Chinese genius for balancing opposites, for extracting maximum flavor from simple ingredients, and for adapting to changing circumstances while maintaining continuity with the past.
As Chang writes, "To understand the Chinese through their culinary history is to see them in their best lights: as inventive, adaptable, egalitarian, and open-minded." Perhaps it took an outsider to see this clearly and to articulate it with the passion and erudition it deserves.
In a world where traditional food cultures are increasingly threatened by globalization, industrialization, and changing lifestyles, Dunlop's work reminds us of what is at stake. Food is not just fuel; it is heritage, identity, and wisdom passed down through generations. When we lose traditional foodways, we lose not just flavors and techniques but ways of understanding ourselves and our place in the world.
The food has been eaten; the buildings and people are gone. Only the words remain. And in those words, preserved by Dunlop and others who value culinary heritage, the essence of a culture continues to nourish and inspire.
Sources
“At the Chinese table” (2025): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/10/09/at-the-chinese-table-invitation-to-a-banquet-chinese-food
Crepi il lupo! 🐺