Driven by Nostalgia
Chaoshan hot pot has become more and more popular in the recent years. Some of my friends are craving for Chaoshan hot pot. Every time when we meet together and want to have lunch or dinner together, they will always suggest eating Chaoshan hot pot, which option has always been denied by me. Born and grow up in Chaoshan, of course I would always miss the food and the taste of the hometown.
During the undergraduate study in United State, I would go and try the restaurant if the restaurant’s name was related to Chaoshan. Through this way, I hoped I can find more or less hometown’s taste and hoped it could be the pill that mitigate the nostalgia. However, the outcomes were always disappointing. And eventually, I gave up trying to find the taste.
Superficial Diversity
Now in Shanghai, I can find a lot Chaoshan restaurants while I type in “Chaoshan” in the map application. It has become part of the diversity of the food culture in this city. I, a person from Chaoshan, think I am actually outside of the Chaoshan food culture in Shanghai.
I always question the “diversity”, or in other words, the “diversity” for me is superficial in most conditions. People can move from hometown to a strange city, but can “culture” move from place to place? What aspects of culture are saved and what aspects of culture have been lost during such movement? Food is partial representation of the culture, but can the non-local restaurant reserve all the properties and essence? Hybrid culture means the combination of the different culture. Restaurants generated from other culture, in the aim of satisfying more people’s tastes and needs, then have to adjust and modify themselves to make sure that they can have more customers to survive. Then here comes the question that, what we can learn from such “modified” or “adjusted” culture?
Culture Defined by Market
In the article Culinary Infrastructure: How Facilities and Technologies Create Value and Meaning around Food, when the author Jeffrey M. Pilcher mentioned about modern infrastructure of culinary culture, he thinks culinary infrastructure of knowledge actually functions as a tool of setting the standards of the definition of food culture. The media and the specialists are the ones who play the most important role in the culture definition. I do not mean that, the cultures shaped and defined in this way is totally unrelated with the original ones. What I want to say is that, we can only take the culture shaped in this way as an introduction of the culture. To really get in touch with culture, we have to pursue the origination of it.
Here is the link for the inroduction of Chaoshan Food
Weibin Kang
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