Fuchsia Dunlop on the Story of Chinese Food

Recorded over a banquet at Mama Chang in Fairfax, Virginia, Fuchsia Dunlop argues that the Chinese food most Westerners know is a historical accident — a narrow, defensive adaptation by Cantonese immigrants, not a sample of an exceptionally diverse and sophisticated cuisine. Drawing on her new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food, she traces how that misrepresentation formed, why Chinese cooking’s obsession with terroir and texture goes unrecognised abroad, and how industrialisation and standardisation now threaten the country’s own culinary skill base.

Key ideas

1. Western Chinese food is a historical accident, not a representative sample. The Chinese food most people in the West know descends from Cantonese immigrant cooking, made under racial prejudice, limited ingredients, and for diners with no reference point for Chinese food — a simplified, popular, but unrepresentative slice of the cuisine. It calcified because the timing was wrong: Chinese food arrived early, when Western palates were conservative, and 20th-century war, revolution, and the Cultural Revolution then cut China out of international culinary exchange. Dunlop also credits Ferran Adrià’s claim that Mao Zedong is arguably the most important culinary figure of the last fifty years, for sending China’s farmers and chefs to work in factories.
2. Prestige tracks national wealth, not culinary merit. Japan grew rich before China, and Japanese food — sushi above all — commands prices and prestige that Chinese food, by Dunlop’s account just as accomplished, has never been given. She frames this as a straightforwardly economic explanation for an apparently aesthetic judgement.
3. No single scheme captures China’s regional diversity. After roughly thirty years of research, Dunlop still discovers entire new regional traditions on every visit. She dismisses the popular ‘eight great cuisines’ classification as a recent invention — dating only to about 1980, not antiquity — that overweights elite coastal cuisines (Cantonese, Jiangnan) and misrepresents others: it files Hunan under refined banquet cooking rather than the spicy home cooking that actually defines its current popularity.
4. China effectively invented the obsession with terroir, but gets no credit for it. Seasonality and provenance have been central to Chinese cookery for centuries, yet Chinese restaurants abroad rarely advertise their ingredients the way Spanish or Californian restaurants do — a legacy of being typecast as cheap rather than premium. Dunlop predicts that uniting China’s culinary skill with this older ingredient obsession would put the cuisine ahead of any rival.
5. Texture is a distinct Chinese aesthetic category the West lacks vocabulary for. Chinese diners prize textures — slithery, gristly, crisp — that many Western eaters find off-putting or simply do not register as a category of pleasure. Dunlop links this to a cultural comfort with the physicality of eating, contrasted with English restraint, and to the ancient dictum (attributed to the philosopher Gaozi) that ‘food and sex are human nature.’
6. Chinese cooking’s hardest technique is disappearing under commercial pressure. Stir-frying — fast, unforgiving, and instinctive rather than measured — is, by several chefs’ own account, the most difficult method in any cuisine, difficult enough that senior chefs increasingly hand the wok to apprentices rather than cook it themselves daily. Dunlop connects this to two industry trends she views with concern: ‘yù zhì cài’ (centrally pre-prepared dishes needing only reheating) and an electric ‘robo-wok’ she saw demonstrated in Beijing.
7. A cuisine is a living practice, not a fixed canon — which undercuts standardisation efforts. Sichuanese local government has published official specifications for classic dishes such as mapo tofu, but Dunlop argues cooking is inherently ad hoc and creative, and that today’s ‘classics’ are themselves comparatively recent inventions — mapo tofu is about a hundred years old, and chillies only reached Sichuan a couple of centuries ago. A new wave of Chinese students and immigrants abroad is also making Western Chinese restaurants more faithful to home cooking, rather than tailored to Western taste; Sichuanese food travels especially well because its identity rests on a portable set of flavourings rather than on ingredients, unlike Yunnan’s cuisine, which depends on produce found nowhere else.

Content

Why Western Chinese food misrepresents the cuisine

Asked by Dan Wang about Ferran Adrià’s claim that Mao Zedong is the most important culinary figure of the last fifty years — for sending China’s farmers and chefs to work in factories — Dunlop broadly agrees, but locates the deeper cause of Chinese food’s low Western standing elsewhere: history and timing. The Chinese food most Westerners encountered was created by Cantonese immigrants working under racial prejudice, without their usual ingredients, cooking for diners who had no reference point for the cuisine. What emerged was ‘this simplified, very appealing, fantastically popular and successful, but not really a good representation of this amazing culinary nation.’ That first impression calcified: Chinese immigration arrived early, when Western palates were still conservative, and a century of war, revolution, and the Cultural Revolution then cut China off from the international culinary exchange that might have corrected it. She adds a second, purely economic mechanism — prestige tracks national wealth. Japan grew rich first, so Japanese food, and sushi in particular, commands prices and status that an equally accomplished Chinese cuisine has never received.

A civilisation-sized cuisine no single scheme can capture

Dunlop has researched Chinese food for roughly thirty years and still discovers entire regional traditions she had not previously encountered, a point she illustrates by naming Jiangxi and Heilongjiang — a province bordering Russia, with its own Russian-inflected local cooking — as places she has yet to properly explore. She is dismissive of the ‘eight great cuisines’ scheme often presented to Western readers as ancient and authoritative: it dates only to about 1980, and its categories distort as much as they describe. It elevates elitist Cantonese and Jiangnan cooking, includes Anhui despite its diminished culinary standing today, and files Hunan cuisine under refined banquet food rather than the spicy home cooking that actually explains its current popularity. What Chinese diners are eating now, she argues — Sichuanese, Hunanese, Guizhou food — has never been especially elitist; the ‘Confucian gentleman scholars’ who once wrote about food have simply been replaced.

Terroir before the West had the word for it

Dunlop’s book devotes a chapter to what she calls China’s early invention of terroir: an obsession with seasonality and exact provenance — which land a vegetable came from — running through centuries of Chinese cookery. Yet Chinese restaurants abroad rarely trumpet their ingredients the way a Spanish restaurant will cite its Ibérico ham or a Californian one its supplying farm; Chinese food has instead been typecast as a domain where diners do not go for fine ingredients, a stereotype she calls ‘completely mad.’ Her prediction is pointed: if contemporary Chinese cuisine manages to unite its chefs’ exceptional technical skill with this older obsession with ingredients, ‘they’re just going to blow everyone else away.’ Pressed by another guest at the table on whether terroir claims (citing prized teas) reflect genuine quality difference or marketing, Dunlop draws the same comparison she uses for wine: soil and climate plausibly shape an ingredient, but a cultural and imaginative overlay — including outright fakery, such as tea falsely sold as grown in Hangzhou’s Longjing hills — inflates the premium further.

Texture, and the physicality of eating

One of Dunlop’s most distinctive claims is that Chinese gastronomy treats texture as a category of pleasure in its own right, to a degree she says is unmatched elsewhere — hence the appeal of foods English texture-vocabulary can only describe as ‘slimy’ or ‘gristly.’ She traces this to a cultural difference in how physical eating is allowed to be: citing the ancient philosopher Gaozi’s dictum that ‘food and sex are human nature,’ she contrasts English reticence about eating noises and visible relish with an unabashed Chinese enjoyment of foods that require active engagement from the teeth and tongue — gelatinous duck’s tongue, say, or the gristle of a pig’s foot. Foods that strike a Western palate as merely difficult, on her account, are not failures of refinement but a different, and in her view under-rated, aesthetic register.

Technique under pressure: stir-frying, hot pot, and industrialisation

Dunlop treats stir-frying as Chinese cooking’s most demanding technique, precisely because it offers no room for correction: ingredients must be cut evenly so everything finishes at once, seasoning must be right the first time, and the whole process is executed by instinct rather than measurement — ‘like wushu, like martial arts.’ She has repeatedly observed senior chefs hand the wok to a younger apprentice rather than cook their own signature dishes, because only constant daily practice keeps that instinct sharp. She sets this high-skill technique against two commercial trends she views with unease: ‘yù zhì cài,’ the spread of centrally pre-prepared dishes that restaurant staff need only reheat, and an electric ‘robo-wok’ she watched a Beijing chef demonstrate, an early attempt to automate stir-frying itself. She extends the same worry to hot pot, whose expansion she calls ‘the hotpotization of the Chinese restaurant scene’ — convivial and inexpensive, but low-skill, and for that reason commercially attractive to restaurateurs in a market where trained wok chefs are hard to find. The effect, in her account, is to flatten a technically diverse cuisine — Sichuan food above all — into one repetitive, low-skill format.

Tradition as a moving target

Local governments in Sichuan and Chongqing have published official specifications for classic dishes, an approach Dunlop compares to a wine appellation contrôlée. She judges the effort well-intentioned but largely irrelevant to how cooking actually happens: chefs work ‘in a much more free, ad hoc, creative way,’ and few measure ingredients to the gram. Her deeper objection is historical — the dishes being codified as timeless classics are often recent. Mapo tofu, she notes, is only about a hundred years old, and Sichuan had no chillies at all until a couple of centuries ago. A cuisine, she argues, ‘is a very vital, living form of culture, which is recreated in every kitchen every day,’ so ‘the difference between practice and theory is quite deep’ — conservatism about a fixed tradition misreads a cuisine that has always been made through innovation.

How a new diaspora is changing Chinese food abroad

Dunlop dates a shift in Western Chinese food to roughly 2010, when a new wave of Chinese students and immigrants began arriving in cities such as London, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, wanting the regional food they ate at home rather than a version tailored to Western palates. Restaurants no longer had to compromise to survive, which is how genuinely regional Sichuanese, Xi’an, and Yunnanese cooking began to appear abroad. She argues Sichuanese food specifically travels well because its identity rests on a compact, transportable set of flavourings — Sichuan pepper, dried and pickled chillies, doubanjiang, soy sauce, vinegar — applicable to whatever fish or vegetable is locally available, rather than on ingredients that cannot be sourced outside China. Yunnanese cuisine, by contrast, depends on produce — as Dan Wang’s account of his months in Yunnan underscores — that exists nowhere else, which is why it resists faithful reproduction abroad however skilled the diaspora cook.

See also

• Fuchsia Dunlop — speaker; writer on Chinese food and cookery, and Cowen’s only three-time guest
• Tyler Cowen — host
• Dan Wang — speaker at the table (via Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other); presses Dunlop on Yunnanese cuisine, Sichuan’s export success, and the elitist bias of the ‘eight great cuisines’
• Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other — companion episode: Dan Wang’s own Conversations with Tyler appearance on China’s political economy
• Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on the History of Wine, Terroir, and the Judgment of Paris — a parallel cultural history of a foodstuff, including terroir as a constructed rather than natural category