Introduction: Feeding, Eating, Worrying: Chinese Food Politics Across Time

Abstract

Why study food and food politics? The simple answer is: because everyone eats. Food is perhaps the fundamental human-nature relation. As a species, humans have engaged with and transformed non-human nature in myriad ways to find, make, and consume food. We need food to survive as individuals, just as societies need to organize food getting to endure. The food possibilities of regions, seasons, and forms of rule underlie much human movement and settlement in the past and today, and the success of political regimes hinges importantly on the governing body’s ability to ensure food supply and distribution. In the study of human history, societies, and humanecological relationships, food is central. This fact isn’t always recognized. In the spring of 2018 and again in the autumn of 2019, we (the contributors) gathered for two workshops on the theme of “Feeding China.” We were coming together on the hunch of Ling Zhang, one of the collection’s editors, that food is a compelling connecting thread between diverse fields of scholarship in China Studies. Our group of contributors includes historians, political ecologists, geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists who variously study environmental history, military history, peasant revolution, agrarian change, food security politics, environmental politics, food and anxiety, sustainable development, meaning-making around food and diet, rural-urban transformations, moral and political economies, hunger, grain markets, and the circulation of basic food supplies in China’s past and present. On the final day of the second workshop, just before everyone departed, we gathered to reflect on why we study food and food politics, and if food is indeed a compelling thread to bring us into conversation. Each of us shared, in turn, how we came to study food, or to include food in our scholarship on other aspects of Chinese culture and society. For one of us, “food is a way to access non-elite perspectives” from the distant past, in part because there are “things you can see in food culture that you can’t see in written culture.” For another, food is an important entry point in contemporary fieldwork where “chatting over a meal gets you everywhere; you get to intimate questions and problems through food.” Another said that they didn’t have a choice in studying food because, “If you want to understand China’s agrarian change, you need to understand food.” As a plea to further interrogate food-based relations in the academy, another contributor said, “Food is what Chinese people talk about. What are we missing if we suppress this topic?” [in our research and disciplines]. While our perspectives and interests as a group vary, and finding convergences among our far-flung studies isn’t always easy, we meet on five convictions. First, that food is analytically valuable. We agree that studying food itself, or studying other phenomena and relationships through food, is important for our research and our disciplines. Second, GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 2022, VOL. 8, NO. 3, 153–156 https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2022.2122384