Reaktion Books. - China to Chinatown: Chinese food in the West

Chinese saying

This book is concerned with one of the most remarkable social changes of modern times: the radical alteration in the eating habits of the Western world. This subject is so extensive and so little researched that I have confined my discussion to a single aspect of that transformation: the changing attitudes of the West towards Chinese food, which in recent years has led to the opening of a Chinese restaurant or takeaway in almost every Western town, and to the adoption, in a modified form, of many Chinese cooking techniques. As material on this theme is vast and scattered, the main emphasis here is restricted, in terms of literature, to the ways these changes have been perceived by Westerners writing in English and, in geographical terms, to the introduction of aspects of Chinese food culture to North America and to the United Kingdom.

The book is divided into two main sections, a division which reflects the distinction made by the food writer Kenneth Lo between Chinese cooking in China and Chinese food abroad. Lo remarked that Chinese food, like everything else suffers a sea change when removed from its native shores. The same observation applies to attitudes to food, whether it is viewed through strangers eyes as an aspect of a foreign culture, or whether it is perceived from the vantage point of home as an exotic or perhaps suspect addition to ones own foodways.hostile, and the Chinese list of foodstuffs, and their methods of preparing them, were sometimes dismissed with contempt or even disgust. By the twentieth century a more subtle range of attitudes had emerged: some Westerners recognized the achievements of Chinese gastronomy, some continued to find grounds for criticism and rejection, and others, heedless of personal taste, ate the food of the common people of China to demonstrate political support for their cause.

Part II looks at the reception of Chinese food in North America and the United Kingdom. It traces the opening of the first Chinese restaurants catering for foreigners, and the beginning of the appreciation of Chinese cuisine in the West. It then examines the phenomenon of the mass acceptance of Chinese food, with the proliferation of Chinese restaurants and take-aways in the cities and towns of the Western world, the increased availability of Chinese foodstuffs in shops and supermarkets, the injection of capital into the ethnic food market, the publication of recipe books for Chinese food and the use of the media to popularize its consumption. The final chapter sets these changes in the wider context of how eating habits have evolved and relates these changes to the globalization of food in general.

Two broad themes recur. The first relates to the analysis of images of other cultures and of attitudes towards other races. Harold T. Isaacs, struck by the contradictory notions of China and the Chinese shared by generations of Americans, once suggested the following sequence of attitudes: the Age of Respect (Eighteenth Century); the Age of Contempt (18401905); the Age of Benevolence (19051937); the Age of Admiration (19371944); the Age of Disenchantment (19441949) and the Age of Hostility (1949 ). Isaacs was quick to admit that these descriptions were crude, that expressions from different ages coexisted, and that the views of individuals might vary. It would be presumptuous to suggest that this study answers the question how images of another society are formed and perpetuated. However, by concentrating on a single theme, that of food, it does reveal the complexity of attitudes towards what is perceived as foreign. Present-day attitudes to Chinese food may be manipulated by advertising and the forces of international capitalism,