Chinese Food Culture

The Chinese food culture
Origin of the Chinese food culture, and its relationship to the Chinese culture.
How important is food in people’s daily life? It is quite different in the context of race, nation and religion. In China, food plays a significant role in people’s daily lives, not only for its nutritional factor, but also for its cultural connotation. From the words of Guanzi (a book of Chinese philosophical materials collection of Guanzhong), “To the Ruler the people is Heaven; to the people food is Heaven”, (Cheng, 1954) we get a general idea of the political and social value of food in China. “You are what you eat” is one of the most common aphorisms in China. In a more specific explanation, one would say, “Do you want to understand

In general, people refer to the negative part as Yin and the positive part as Yang. They coexist with each other in a dynamic balance. When things change, the forces between them change and a new balance will be generated. (Jia, Xia & Sun, 2008) When this idea comes into the field of Chinese food, it affects the relationship between the Fan(cooked rice, steamed bread, noodles) and Ts’ai(vegetable and meat dishes). In Chinese opinion, people should take these two components in an appropriate proportion in every meal in order to achieve a healthy and balanced diet. Between them, Fan is the basic staple food to fill people’s stomachs, and Ts’ai is the appendage to enrich the enjoyment of taste. This philosophy is due to the lack of food resources in China’s history. In most case, people just expect to fill their stomach, rather than consider too much on the experience of the taste buds. However, with the improvement of people’s living standards and the development of food industry, the old Fan-Ts’ai relationship has changed. Chinese people pay more and more attention on the diverse experience of the taste buds. Ts’ai became as the leading role in a formal

(Pitchford, 2002)
Five flavors and five elements.
In a Chinese perspective, everything can be composed of the five elements, which are wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. In order to create a harmonic situation for something, these five elements must be arranged in a sequence that is based on their characters. (see figure 1.1).The relationships between these five elements are interdependence and mutually restraint. Each element represents a different meaning, such as direction, season, color and energy, etc. (Jia, Xia & Sun, 2008)
In Chinese cuisine, people are treating the five flavors (sour, bitter, sweet, pungent and salty), in the same connotation as the five elements. Sour represents wood; bitter represents fire; sweet represents earth; pungent represents gold, and salty represents