Ambivalent Regionalism and the Promotion of a New National Staple Food: Reimagining Potatoes in Inner Mongolia and Yunnan

ABSTRACT This article addresses the relationship between national, regional, and local dimensions of Chinese culinary cultures and identities through the prism of the potato. Specifically, I explore how the central government’s strategy to transform the potato from a marginal food into a Chinese national staple opened new possibilities for actors in some marginalized inland regions to reimagine their potato foods as recognized elements of local and wider regional cuisines and culinary identities. In doing so, I also draw attention to the constraints that actors faced in their attempts to reimagine local potato foods, including the sense of ambivalence that continued to surround foods once widely associated with poverty. I discuss these processes of culinary reimagining with reference to potato-growing areas in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China and Yunnan Province in the southwest.