California Studies in Food and Culture, no. 63. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017. xv, 256 pp. (Illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29352-6.
Ellen Oxfeld has spent over twenty years researching the village of “Moonshadow Pond,” Meixian County, Guangdong. She has amassed considerable knowledge regarding all aspects of the food economy. In this book, she describes with sensitivity, and in detail, the roles of food in society. Moonshadow Pond was a farming village, but is now transitioning to a mixed economy. Rice was the elite crop. Sweet potatoes were the food of the poor; during difficult times they were the food of everyone. Onions, Chinese cabbages, and other Chinese vegetables and fruits were also cultivated. (Production statistics are found at the back of the book.) Today, agriculture is becoming an occupation for the elderly, as the young find easier and better-paid work.
Moonshadow Pond is typical of China in its use of foods and feasts to mark every social occasion. Social transactions create a constant circulation of foods, as people give gifts and “prestations” (socially obligatory gifts), exchange vegetables and eggs, sell small items to each other, and bring back special presents from town or from distant Hong Kong. The obligatory cup of tea lubricates all social interaction, even the most casual; older people remember the days when boiled water had to do. Childbirth requires the mother to consume healthy foods that restore her “blood” (iron), produce milk, and strengthen her body. Chicken stewed with ginger and other healing, mineral-rich items are common.
In the past 110 years, China has gone from imperial dynasty to war-torn “republic,” to total chaos in World War II and its aftermath, then a Communist government, bringing the enormous famine of 1958 to 1961 and then slow, uneven improvement, and finally rapid development in the last thirty years. Moonshadow Pond is close enough to Meixian’s capital to have profited from the last of these. Many Moonshadowers commute to the capital to work, and more young people are leaving the countryside permanently—part of the great country-to-city migration that has rolled over the world in the last 200 years and has finally reached all of China. More remote and less fertile parts of rural China remain desperately poor, but Meixian now has plenty of pork and vegetables, and even shrimp and ocean fish, formerly luxuries for this inland county. Moonshadow Pond’s traditions and changes are a fair sample of China as a whole. Extensive quotes from local people enrich the historic accounts and the explanations of the social uses of food and food exchanges.
Meixian is the traditional centre of the Hakka people (Kejia in Mandarin), a minority speaking a language (n.b., not “dialect”) incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers without special training. Some dishes are locally popular, though by no means confined to Meixian; these include chicken stewed with ginger, pig stomach with vegetables, and local swamp eels. More distinctively Hakka is stuffed bean curd (tofu): bean curd cubes split and stuffed with chopped shrimp, chives, fish, or other fillings. Local tradition holds that bean curd was used as a substitute for flour, unavailable for dumpling-making in old times. I missed any reference to cow spinal cord, a classic Hakka dish—possibly not Meixianese.
This book represents a valuable addition to studies of food in Chinese society. Recently, many historical and ethnographic works on Chinese food have appeared, both by Chinese and Western scholars, and several conferences have been devoted to the field. Food has been so important as a social marker throughout Chinese history that no one can neglect it. Chinese politeness often requires that spoken language at banquets, festivals, and celebrations is formulaic and has minimal communication value (it is “phatic communication” in Malinowski’s terms). Food transactions therefore often carry the social messages at such times. What is served, how it is served, how guests are seated, whom the host treats specially, and similar vectors take on much significance. Oxfeld has unpacked these matters with skill and perceptiveness.
However, I found the book’s lack of Hakka language terms problematic. Everything from plant and animal names to social terms is given in standard Mandarin. This deprives the scholar, and the interested general reader, of an opportunity to learn something about the Hakka language’s everyday usage. This language, spoken by tens of millions of people (the number is uncertain), is poorly documented, at least in the Western world; what materials exist are largely formal dictionaries and linguistic analyses. One cannot blame Oxfeld; ethnographers who write about Hakka communities seem to follow the Mandarin-only rule, as do many ethnographers in China today. This is unfortunate, given the Communist policy of standardizing Mandarin as the general language of the country. Local languages and dialects are dying out. Hakka will last a while, but someone should document its everyday forms and terms before they are lost.
Oxfeld also fails to identify some local plants. She records a wild-gathered green that she knows only as kumai; this is the general Chinese name for sow thistle, a widely eaten and even cultivated food throughout Eurasia.
E.N. Anderson
University of California, Riverside, USA