Stewed Chicken and Long-Nosed Kings: Tasting Troubled Plenty

ABSTRACT

This ethnographic article examines conditions of material plenty in post-reform China from the perspective of staff and suppliers at a farm-to-table restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. From data gathered during mealtime conversations and through everyday reflections on food and flavor, I piece together an historical hypothesis about changing times and tastes in Hangzhou. I find that food talk embodies and reflects my interlocutors’ analysis of a state-superintended post-reform social order, which is undergoing a crisis of “familiarity.” I argue that the sensory qualities of food afford unique access to past experiences in the present, making food a crucial site of political consciousness and critique.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Jiangnan region
• restaurant
• food sourcing
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Yale MacMillan Center.

Human subjects protections

Research for this article was approved by the Yale University Human Subjects Committee, protocol # 1407014265. The research program was determined to be of minimal risk to participants. Pseudonyms have been used for all the individuals mentioned in this article.

Notes

1. Scott et al., Organic Food and Farming in China; and Shi et al., “Safe Food, Green Food, Good Food.”

2. Klein, “Everyday Approaches to Food Safety in Kunming”; Veeck and Veeck, “A Food Safety Crisis in China”; and Yan, “Food Safety and Social Risk in Contemporary China.”

3. Day and Schneider, “The End of Alternatives?”; Huang, “China’s Hidden Agricultural Revolution, 1980–2010”; and Yan and Chen, “Agrarian Capitalization without Capitalism?”

4. Oxfeld, Bitter and Sweet, 31.

5. Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts.

6. Barbalet, “The Analysis of Chinese Rural Society”; Faure and Siu, “The Original Translocal Society and its Modern Fate”; Lai, Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China; Skinner, “Rural Marketing in China”; and Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China.”

7. Kleinman et al., Deep China; Lee, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination; Xu, The Good Child; and Yan, “New and Old Moralities in Changing China.”

8. Fei, From the Soil, 42.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., 48.

11. Ibid., 88.

12. “生人变熟人一个就是什么呢，一个是熟人介绍，中国人熟人介绍。第二个呢就是天天在一起 … 第三个呢就是什么呢，[采购员]他们这样出去或者什么呢，吃饭。当然，都是积累的。.”

13. Li, “From Bitter Memories to Revolutionary Memory”; Perry, “Moving the Masses”; and Sun, Social Suffering and Political Confession.

14. Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960”; and Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine..

15. Kelliher, Peasant Power in China; and Unger, The Transformation of Rural China.

16. Li, “Deng Xiaoping’s Prosperity Perspective,” 18.

17. Ibid, 9.

18. I use the word “peasant” as my informants do, as a social/political classification identifying rural residents, particularly those engaged in primary production.

19. Rofel, Other Modernities, 206.

20. Farquhar, Appetites.

21. Merrifield, “Seeing and Knowing.”

22. Manning and Wemheur, Eating Bitterness.

23. Oxfeld notes that her informants shared similar reflections. See Oxfeld, Bitter and Sweet, 75.

24. The quotes in this paragraph are taken from a joint interview with two of the restaurant’s accountants, Auntie Deng and Manager Jing. Their analysis was echoed by other informants in their age set.

25. In English, the term “spiritual” carries strong religious overtones; but the sense of the Chinese term is more closely related to the idea of “spirit” as animating force, enlivening spark, geist. “spiritual” problems can be understood as both moral and ideological.

26. Yan, “The Good Samaritan’s New Trouble.”

27. Osburg, Anxious Wealth.

28. See Zhang and Ong’s introduction to Privatizing China: “[W]e view privatization as a process that both produces free-floating values of self-interest and allows them to proliferate in daily life” (3). In other words, they see a close connection between the privatization of economic resources after the reforms and the elevation of a logic of individual self interest in “private” social life.

29. She was thinking of an incident from summer 2014, in which 30,000 tons of hydrogen peroxide -soaked chicken feet were seized by police in Zhejiang Province. See Zhou, “New China Food Scandal.” An apparently well-established and well-networked group had been selling the meat in more than ten provinces.

30. See Luo Yu’s astute analysis of the connections between Chinese yuan shengtai discourse, ideas of ‘close-to-nature’ indigeneity, and Chinese state agendas for domestic development and global presence: Luo, “An Alternative to the ‘Indigenous.’”

31. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

32. Lai, Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture.

33. Schneider and McMichael, “Deepening, and Repairing, the Metabolic Rift.”

34. See Xue, “Treasure Nightsoil as If It Were Gold,” for an historical discussion of nightsoil collection and use in Jiangnan.

35. He Xuefeng analyzes similar dynamics in “The Society of the Semi-Acquainted” and “A Loose Discussion.”

36. Santos and Harrell, Transforming Patriarchy; and Yan, Chinese Families Upside Down.

37. A town under Hangzhou City administration.

38. An area in Hangzhou City’s Yuhang District.

39. Fenghua is a town administered by Ningbo City, located to Hangzhou’s southeast.

40. Counihan, “Bread as World;” and Holtzman, Uncertain Tastes; Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia.

41. Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Just.”

42. Interlocutors who used this phrase to describe past customary activities most often used it to indicate the scope of their own village and neighboring villages. I understand it to imply a granular regional scale rather than a horizonless world in which literally everyone does the same things at the same time. Jiajia huhu is defined through shared practices that are necessarily culturally and agroecologically limned.

43. Lai, Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture; and Oxfeld, Bitter and Sweet..

44. Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move; and Zhang, Strangers in the City.

45. Ling, The Inconvenient Generation; Richaud and Amin, “Life Amidst Rubble”; and Yan, New Masters, New Servants.

46. Chuang, Beneath the China Boom; Mei et al., “School Consolidation”; Yang et al., “Social Health Insurance Consolidation.”

47. Andreas and Zhan, “Hukou and Land;” and Kan and Chen, “Tilling Another’s Land.”

48. Zhang and Pan, “The Transformation of Urban Vegetable.”

49. In using this word, I am aware of the echoes of work by Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman, and other scholars of modernity. Sara Ahmed, in Strange Encounters, and Li Zhang, in her study of rural migrant workers in Beijing, Strangers in the City, offer sophisticated contributions to the study of strangers-in-modernity. I am interested in something slightly different: the sense of stranger-ness between unknown people of similar cultural background who presume each other to be either social equals, or equally-established residents of a place. I am thinking of all the people living in my Hangzhou apartment complex who did not know their neighbors, for example.

50. Nolan, “Developing Indifference”; Zhu, “Interests Driven or Socially Motivated?

51. TallBear, “Caretaking Relations,” 25.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Yale University MacMillan Center []; Social Science Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Merrifield

Caroline Merrifield received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Yale in 2018. Her research investigates changing patterns of food provisioning in China, and her first book project focuses on direct food sourcing relationships in China’s growing alternative food movement. She has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hangzhou and Beijing.