Chapter 9 China, a personal perspective
DOI: 10.23912/978-1-908999-03-0-2356 | ISBN: 978-1-908999-03-0 |
Published: September 2013 | Component type: chapter |
Published in: Food and Drink: the cultural context | Parent DOI: 10.23912/978-1-908999-03-0-2005 |
Abstract
While I genuinely welcome the public’s apparently insatiable appetite for food-related television shows, I am not sure that the continuous diet of light entertainment and culinary competitions does much to extend our collective knowledge. I’ve had a long-standing ambition to write and present a series that achieves something different – that reveals the complex cultures of China through the universal language of food. With Exploring China: a Culinary Adventure, broadcast by the BBC in 2012, I hope that’s what Ching He-Huang and I managed to achieve. Having not been on a substantial trip to China since 1989, this was the perfect time to return. The real China still exists, thank goodness, even although westernisation and relentless progress are nibbling away at traditional ways of life – of cooking food, of eating together, of family life and community ties. We travelled from the wild frontiers of the north to the industrial megacities of the south, and saw the inevitable conflicts between tradition and modernity, between communism and capitalism. We also talked to ‘real’ people from many different regions, and their evident cultural pride gave me hope for the survival of the ‘real’ China.
Sample content
Contributors
- Ken Hom (Author)
- Donald Sloan (Author)
For the source title:
- Donald Sloan, Oxford Brookes University (Editor)
Cite as
Hom & Sloan, 2013
Hom, K. & Sloan, D. (2013) "Chapter 9 China, a personal perspective" In: Sloan, D. (ed) . Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers http://dx.doi.org/10.23912/978-1-908999-03-0-2356