Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xix, 190 pp., [22] pp. of plates. (Map, table.) US$29.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-02396-3.
In 2005, Foreign Language Press in Beijing published the richly illustrated, charming little book Chinese Chopsticks. It was written by Lan Xiang, a long-time chopsticks collector and the founder of the Chopsticks Museum in Shanghai. The museum’s collection is said to include over a thousand pairs of chopsticks from China, Korea, Japan, and Thailand, with the oldest ones dating back to the Tang period (618–907). While quite informative, Lan’s book is not an academic work on the subject. It took another decade for a long-overdue study of the cultural history of chopsticks to be finally published. Without a doubt, it will be a welcome addition to the pantheon of seminal works on the culinary history of East Asia. The publication does, however, have one important limitation. The book claims to be a “comprehensive and reliable account of how and why chopsticks became adopted by their users and continued, as a dining habit, through the centuries in Asia and beyond” (1). The author adds that the book also aims to discuss the “culinary impact of chopsticks use on Asian cookeries and cuisines and vice versa: how the change of foodways in the region influenced people’s choice of eating tools,” and “to analyze the cultural meanings of chopsticks and chopsticks use in the respective cultures of their users” (1). Judging from the endorsements that appear on the back cover of the volume, these three goals—specified at the beginning of the introduction—have been successfully met, and in many respects this is definitely the case. Yet, it needs to be pointed out that all four endorsements were written by China specialists: Benjamin Elman from Princeton University, On-cho Ng from Penn State University, Di Wang from Texas A&M University, and Ge Zhaoguang from Fudan University, China. It is difficult to assess whether scholars of Vietnam, Korea, and Japan were not involved in the review process of the book, or whether the geographical scope of the original manuscript was less extensive. The fact remains that the treatment of chopsticks culture in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is noticeably less in-depth than of that relating to China.
The volume consists of seven chapters and a conclusion. Following the introduction, the story begins with the origins of chopsticks and their primary role as a subordinate companion to the main eating implement in China, which was a spoon. Initially chopsticks were merely used for grasping vegetables and other ingredients in a stew or broth. In chapter 2, we learn how agricultural and culinary transformations during the Tang period turned chopsticks and a spoon into a set that functioned as a symbol of the sophistication of the Chinese civilization. It is at this point, as the Tang culture began to spread beyond the Chinese territory, that a “chopsticks cultural sphere” that includes today’s China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, began to take shape (66). This process, completed by the fourteenth century, is described in chapter 4, and customs and etiquette related to the use of chopsticks across East Asia are studied in chapter 5. Unfortunately, these two chapters are not comparable in terms of their depth and erudition to chapters 2 and 3, which focus on China. While it is undoubtedly clear that the author possesses an outstanding understanding of Chinese culinary history, making extensive use of archaeological evidence and a wide selection of Chinese classical literature to support his argument, his analysis of the rest of the chopsticks cultural sphere leaves much to be desired. For example, in the discussion of the culinary histories of Japan and Korea, examples of present practices rather than documented historical usage are cited (74, 82, 88), and references to support such statements are very scarce (108–116). For example, “[A] pot to make a stew or a hearty soup (as nabemono) must have had a long history in Japan, as boiling is a common cooking method there and around the world” (108) is not a phrase one expects to find in a solid academic publication.
Chapter 6, which deals with the topic of chopsticks as a gift, metaphor, and symbol—primarily in China—is again quite strong, as is chapter 7, which tells the fascinating story of the spread of chopsticks to North America and Europe, including a discussion on disposable chopsticks, which today are considered a serious environmental problem. In the conclusion, Wang drags Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked into the discussion, which, in my view, is not very helpful. Equally irrelevant are the references to Roland Barthes that appear in the introduction and in chapter 4 (10–11, 67). With sociologists and anthropologists clearly in the lead as far as pioneering research on food is concerned, this is an understandable strategy for adding scholarly cachet to the book, but there is no need to do this. Historians can contribute to the definitional efforts of social scientists by examining how cuisines have developed over time and by situating them within particular social and cultural contexts of production, distribution, and consumption. This is precisely what Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History does, and quite successfully so. Without a doubt it is a valuable book, which would be a welcome addition to any library that has an ambition to build a sound collection on the world’s culinary history.
Katarzyna J. Cwiertka
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
pp. 648-649