Book Reviews: Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China

• Published in: The China Quarterly Vol. 232; p. 1125
• Main Author: Bunkenborg, Mikkel
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.12.2017
• Subjects: Children; Economic reform; Ethnography; Famine; Food; Hunger; Local economy; Modernity; Morality; Rural areas; China
• ISSN: 0305-7410; 1468-2648
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305741017001485

The material is organized under the headings labour, memory, exchange, morality and conviviality and each of these five chapters deals with an aspect of the value attributed to food. Since decollectivization in the early 1980s, the local economy has changed from an emphasis on the communal cultivation of rice to a more varied small-holder production of rice and vegetables for subsistence and fruits, pork, poultry and fish for the market. Different foodstuffs connect the present with the past as they evoke memories of festivities or hunger, they connect people by circulating as formal and informal gifts and affirm solidarity when presented as offerings to ancestors, they are indispensable means of fulfilling moral obligations in cycles of care between parents and children, and they fuel the pleasurable sociality of shared meals and banquets. From this perspective, Oxfeld suggests, the most significant effect of the economic reforms that started in the late 1970s is not the emergence of anomie and dislocated individuals, but rather economic growth and the ready availability of a wide variety of foodstuffs that have enabled people to step up the connective exchanges of food and thus to strengthen the moral fabric of their communities.