Month: July 2025

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Stand Straight and Never Bend:

Twelve Thousand Years of Feeding People in the Face of Drought, Flood, Fire, and War

E. N. Anderson

This post consists of material on Chinese food that I have assembled over a lifetime, and not published because I haven’t had enough time or energy to finalize the work. I think this material will be useful, especially to food historians of China. I have organized it, more or less, by historic period, and then by topic, following the outline of my book THE FOOD OF CHINA (1988).

A Chinese proverb says: “Freezing to death, stand straight and face the wind; starving to death, never bend” (Rohsenow 2012, proverb D183).

This work is dedicated to the memories and the continuing lives of billions of farmers, in East Asia and throughout the world, who froze, starved, suffered, and continued to feed the world.

“Let us now praise famous men….

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported.

And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten….

Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not be blotted out.”

Ecclesiasticus 44:1, 8-13

Chapter 1. Introduction

For thousands years, the Chinese world has fed an increasing population.  For the last ten thousand, more and more of the food has come from cultivation. Domesticated crops and animals replaced wild foods. More intensive methods of agriculture appeared. Today, China feeds over one and a quarter billion people, mostly from domestic production, despite rapidly increasing imports.

The Chinese rural proverb above explains, with perfect adequacy, how they did it. This book fills out the details.

Success has come at a cost. The natural environment is profoundly altered. Charismatic megafauna is largely gone. Even relatively small, innocuous species are at risk. More serious is the danger to the whole food production system. Environmental problems mount, ramifying through a complexly linked system, destabilizing it.

The time has come to do a full evaluation of the system’s development, in order to see what can be done to save it and save the future. We need to evaluate what worked and what failed. Several excellent works have appeared, such as Robert Marks’ China: Its Environment and History (2012) and Brian Lander’s The King’s Harvest (2021). These need extension over longer time, and into the future.

China’s most basic and important secret of success is perfectly captured in the proverb at the head of the chapter. For ten thousand years, billions of farmers, fishers, herb gatherers, food workers, and ordinary Chinese in all walks of life stood straight in the wind, and starved without giving way. Their incredible, quiet heroism sustains us all now. It deserves full recognition. We need to know how they did it: how they chose what crops to grow, how they domesticated these, how they developed whole agroecosystems from them.

A key realization is that they did not do it alone. From earliest times, the people of the land now called China had contacts stretching across Eurasia. They were in touch with peoples of central Asia, northeast Asia, southeast Asia, and, eventually, points farther afield: Europe and Africa from early imperial times, the Americas after 1500. Thus, a study of Chinese cultural ecology must range over the entire world, simply to get adequate coverage. Another reason for world perspective is comparison. Understanding the origins and development of agriculture in China requires comparative examination of such matters throughout the world. This book is thus a study in human ecology, focused on China but encompassing the entire planet, focused on ecological theory but encompassing theories from agricultural development, world-systems sociology, and sociopolitical history.

I am enormously indebted to a many friends who have assisted in my search for Chinese food lore. First of all, I thank my lifelong coworker Paul Buell. Going back in time, my mentors included above all Edward Schafer, and then much more briefly, but very significantly, K. C. Chang, Yuanren Chao, Wolfram Eberhard, G. William Skinner, and Arthur Wolf. In the field, I worked most with Chao Hungfai and Chow Kwoktai. More recently, major ongoing help has come from Jenny Banh, Katy Hung Biggs, Miranda Brown, Fuchsia Dunlop, Brian Landor, Erica Peters, Carolyn Peters, Francesca Sabban, David Schak, James and Rubie Watson, and many others.

            This book completes a lifework of studying China’s food system. Many years ago I wrote a book, The Food of China (1988), intended as a modest contribution to a cultural ecology of east Asia. This book has remained one of the few accessible studies of Chinese food, and as such has achieved a rather undeserved status as a reference book. It is now far out of date for such a purpose. In particular, archaeology has made enormous strides since the 1980s, dramatically pushing back the dates of Chinese agriculture, and greatly increasing our knowledge of early millennia.

Many readers of the earlier work became captivated by descriptions of wonderful food, and missed the fact that I was largely concerned with describing a highly successsful agricultural system, and crediting its success to the billions of anonymous farmers and food workers who created it. The world now needs more than ever the insights of traditional East Asian agriculture.

In the period since The Food of China appeared, serious studies of Chinese food have greatly increased. My book was soon followed by Frederick Simoons’ encyclopedic Food in China (1991). Meanwhile, several brilliant studies by the great French scholar Françoise Sabban brought a whole new level of sophistication to the field.

Then, with the new millennium, came several truly magistral syntheses of selected areas. Hu Shiu-Ying, an amazing ethnobotanist whose career spans over 70 years of research, produced her own life synthesis, Food Plants of China (2005). Dr. Hu passed away in 2012 at the age of 102—surely a testimony to the virtues of Chinese food and medicinal herbs.

H. T. Huang’s life work on Chinese fungal and fermentation technologies reached fruition in the enormous volume (Huang 2000; Dr. Huang passed away in 2012 at the age of 95). Chinese ferments also received their fair share of attention in Sandor Ellix Katz’ The Art of Fermentation (2012), another magistral work. Fermented foods can now boast that two of best books in world food literature are written about them.

Lillian Li completed a similar life project in her definitive study of famine in Chinese history (Li 2007). The French scholar Georges Métailié (2015) contributed a long volume on the history of botany to the Needham series, Science and Civilisation in China. It discusses food plants along with other works, but is focused on the history of plant books and bencao (“basic herbal”) literature, so has little on food. Needham’s own introductions to botany (Needham, Lu and Huang 1986; Needham and Daniels 1996) are much better at concepts and on food.

The German sinologist Thomas Höllmann has written a fine general introductory book, beautifully illustrated, translated as The Land of Five Flavors: A Cultural Hisory of Chinese Cuisine (2014). A pleasant and accurate new history of Chinese food is The Emperor’s Feast, by Jonathan Clements.

Göran Aijmer continues a 60-year career of studying Chinese festivals and rituals, which always involve highly symbolic food (Aijmer 1965, 2003, 2018—a mere thin sample of an enormous bibliography). His 2018 paper compares ritual use and ideas about rice in south China and the Shan groups of Myanmar and India.

Food in art is covered in a volume edited by Stacey Pierson (2022).

I have written several obscure publications on Chinese food since 1988 (notably Anderson 1990, 1991, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2013a, 2013b), and two books that brings together recent findings and old data on early and medieval Chinese food (Anderson 2014, 2019).

The other, and more often studied, face of cultural ecology is the change and development of human ecological systems over time. Environmental history of China, once an arcane topic (Elvin 1973, 2004a, 2004b; Elvin and Lui 1998), has exploded as a field, with major works coming out literally every day. Mark Elvin’s morbid assessment of long decline in the environment and the welfare of the people and my own more upbeat analysis in The Food of China is well balanced by Robert Marks in two superb studies (1998, 2012; see also Marks 2009). His careful accounts show indeed a rapid and depressing environmental decline, but also China’s success in feeding a rapidly expanding population. None of us disagrees on the facts; the difference is that Elvin and Marks are more impressed by the loss of biodiversity and environmental riches, while I am more impressed by the success of a huge, diverse empire in feeding its people reasonably well without totally destroying its entire life support system. Europe coped with rising population by conquering weaker lands, genociding or enslaving their inhabitants, and exporting millions of people to them. China did not have that option, except for relatively small migrations from southeast China. I have discussed these issues at more length elsewhere (Anderson 2014, 2019).

            Brian Lander’s The King’s Harvest (2021) stands out as an insightful synthesis of the development of the Chinese state and its environmental policies from the Neolithic through Qin. Lander has also done thorough studies of the animals of the Neolithic (Lander 2020; Lander and Brunson 2018). Lander has also provided an excellent oversight of the steady replacement of wetlands by fields and cities in the Yangzi Valley (2022a). Kathryn Linduff and coworkers have produced an excellent analytic history of China’s early intereaction with neighbors (2018).

Gang Deng’s major opus The Premodern Chinese Economy (1999)chronicles the long process of developing a rural economy based on free small-scale farmers and an agriculturally conscious and sensitive state that did a great deal to aid that sector. He chronicles the successes of many small landowners in passing civil service exams, thus allowing upward mobility, but also documents the enormous number and seriousness of famines. Like others who have written histories of Chinese agriculture, he sees the steady shrinking of farm sizes, forcing harder and harder work and innovation by the farmers just to stay at the same level. The government was willing to help, possibly all too willing, since it trapped farmers in an endless cycle rather than giving them other opportunities. Indeed, but I agree with most historians that the reason for the trap was increasing government autocracy, and thus hidebound reaction, in Ming and Qing, rather than a structural matter.

All these works note the increasingly rapid decline of large wild mammals, and this has been put on a solid footing with dates, maps, and numbers by Shuqing Teng and associates (2020) and Xinru Wan and others (2019). They record the disappearance of elephants and rhinoceroses (once common), the near disappearance of bears and tigers, the reduction of wild camels to a tiny handful (now threatened by roads; Yang et al. 2019), the loss of most deer, and other sad losses. These declined along with the rise of human agriculture, but the rhinos were hunted into extinction even before that got out of hand. Even the little muskdeer is about gone, doomed by its valuable musk, a scented oily compound in a gland on its back. On the other hand, Père David’s Deer has been reintroduced. It survived in Qing only in royal parks. From here it went to England, surviving there in parks. It died out in China. (It is properly milu in Chinese, but often called xiangsi, “resembles four,” because it looks like a mix of deer, horse, donkey, and goat—or sometimes other animals.)

Among more specialized recent works we may count three excellent books on the Yellow River:  David Pietz’ Yellow River (2016), Ling Zhang’s The River, the Plain, and the State (2016), and Ruth Mostern’s The Yellow River, A Natural and Unnatural History (2021). Both biographize this center of China’s history. The river heads high up on the Tibetan plateau, then flows through mountain and desert country, making a huge bend around the Ordos Desert. It then flows south through the loess plateau, then turns east, cuts through mountains, and opens onto the North China Plain. Here it is blocked from flowing directly to sea by the Shandong mountains, so it must turn north or south to get to its fate in the ocean. Over time, it has shifted back and forth, with catastrophic effects in the historic period. Mostern provides an amazing array of graphics, from her own beautiful color photographs to charts and maps of every period’s management, settlements, and disasters. The book is not only a historical account, but an atlas.

The river became “China’s Sorrow” after the deforestation or grassland destruction for agriculture of the loess plateaus along its middle course, a process well begun by Han and catastrophic by Song. Earlier, much of the country included in the Great Bend had been rather fertile, with lakes (cf. Fan 2018 for even earlier good times). In Tang it deteriorated, especially during and after the great rebellions. Brushy and dry in cold dry periods, forested on higher ground in warmer and wetter ones, the loess plateau became more and more damaged by human-caused fires as well as agriculture from about 3000 years ago (Mostern 2021; Tan et al. 2018).

The wars of Song and Yuan led to violence and chaos, which, among other things, led to massive deforestation to build fortifications in the loess region, a center of violence and strife. In Song, the North China Plain also became devastated. The river broke its banks in 1048 and cut a whole new channel, debouching north of Shandong. Then in the 1120s came enormous floods (Zhang 2016). In 1128, the local governor, Du Chong, made what may be the most disastrous mistake in all military history: he opened the dykes to flood the land in a foolish and hopeless attempt to stop the southward advance of the Jin forces. The river cut a new channel again, moving south, and devastated millions of peoples’ homes and farms. The loss of life reached astronomical figures.

The Yuan briefly tamed the river, during a period of mild weather, but renewed rains and storms broke it out again. Ming saw not only more and worse flooding, but an earthquake in the Wei River area killed an estimated 830,000 people (Mostern 2021:185), many buried when their homes, caves excavated into the loess, collapsed. Enormous famines and other disasters from then till the mid-twentieth century are chronicled by Pietz (2016) and Mostern.

Many excellent understandings of the problem were aired, and many good ideas on fixing it were written up. Some were even tried: distributory channels, dredging, canals, multiple levees, dams. The problem was insuperable in preindustrial times. Only late 20^th century technology could do the job, by a combination of big dams, small dams, reforestation, terracing, levees, diversion, and rechanneling. Even now, erosion is a problem and flooding is a danger. The dams are rapidly silting up, so the problem will be as bad as ever in the near future. Diversion of water for irrigation, however, lowers the river significantly, such that it sometimes fails to reach the ocean, so extreme floods are less serious than once.

The silt load has been reduced more than 90% recently, by a combination of checkdams, reforestation, reservoirs, and diversion of much of the water for irrigation upstream from the loesslands (Y. Liu et al. 2020). This may or may not be sustainable. The river carries less and less water—now only 3% of China’s overall fresh water—but still irrigates 13% of China’s cropland (Y. Liu et al. 2020).

More local are studies of lakes. A saline one in far north China shows cooling at 8.2 thousand years ago, dry at 6.9-5.9, and—like almost all records from the northern hemisphere—cooling at 4.2-4 (J. Li and Y. Liu 2018). Solar forcing is responsible for these widely-seen changes. Another case is Lake Bosten at China’s far northwest corner, almost in Kazakhstan. It gets its precipitation from the Atlantic, not the monsoon. A large fish-rich lake with much cultivation around it, it was a farming center from Han, and even supported wet-rice agriculture in the wetter times of Ming (Fontana et al. 2019; the Little Ice Age forced the Atlantic storm tracks south, leading to more rain for China’s far northwest). Another local lake study concerns Kunming Lake, at Kunming, Yunnan, which flourished as a rich, productive, beautiful lake with incredibly fertile shores through much of China’s history, but shrank due to encroaching farms, and finally has become polluted beyond all measure (Hillman et al. 2019).

Endymion Wilkinson’s monumental Chinese History, A New Manual (new editions every couple of years) contains a long section, “Agriculture, Food and Drink” (in the 2012 edn., pp. 433-466), which covers the basic historical, anthropological, and culinary literature very well. It is followed by a section on “Technology and Science” (467-479), but this section is brief and concentrates on modern times.

Starting from Han but continuing through Qing is a record of famines, assembled and analyzed in the Chinese literature and recently analyzed by Yan Su et al. (2018). They found 4186 famines in the 2117 years of their study—about two per year. The famines were slightly worse in colder areas, but nobody escaped. Cold areas were more than twice as likely to report economically depressed years, partly because they depended heavily on one or two species of millets, usually reliable and tough but vulnerable to bad years. Far more famines were reported in bad harvest years, but even the best years had a few local ones. Periods of sharp improvement (from famine to good times) were 70-90 CE, 580-590, 1140-50, 1280-1300, 1400-1410, 1680-1760 (note that the last is much longer, but after it conditions steadily deteriorated). Good governance was almost as important as climate in making a decade good. Note, however, that all but one of those recovery periods come shortly after a major cold spell (536-580, 1120s, 1300s, early and mid 1600s; see Anderson 2019). The exception, 1280-1300, was an exceptionally warm period. Cold years were deadly.

The sociology of Chinese food has also advanced. A number of Chinese scholars have devoted time and energy to interpretive studies, revealing the social and cultural complexities of food, eating, and food ideologies in the Chinese world. Among these are Sidney Cheung, Rance Lee, Ambrose Tse, David Wu, Yan Yunxiang, and many others. Western anthropologists such as Sidney Mintz and James and Rubie Watson (Watson 1997; Watson and Watson 2004) have also contributed greatly. The medical aspects of Chinese foodways have received much attention, with outstanding work by Elisabeth Hsu, Vivienne Lo, and many others.

Jacqueline Newman has not only contributed introductory works, but has also done yeoman service editing the food journal Flavor and Fortune. Dr. Newman has chosen a “popular” approach and style, but her scholarly knowledge of Chinese food is orders of magnitude greater than that of many scholars who write in proper academic venues. Newman gave her collection of over 4000 Chinese cookbooks to SUNY-Stony Brook. She has described regional cuisines, as have many contributors to the journal. She finally retired in 2021.

Historian Miranda Brown of the University of Michigan has a food blog at https://mudadong.wixsite.com/website?fbclid=IwAR3tv2oSPndwRyej1YTwgBAAQJyE0pxcEl5Uwj0beHhCnFrT6UmKzoVjZJ0 that introduces her highly original and thoroughly researched findings. She is emerging as the United States’ leading scholarly historian of Chinese food. Her opposite number in England may be Fuchsia Dunlop, chef and food expert, who has moved from writing cookbooks to writing increasingly scholarly works on Chinese food.

Chinese food has to be served on something, and from earliest times the ceramics and metalware of China have been famous as among the most beautiful in the world. Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood (2004) wrote a particularly thorough and scientific history of Chinese ceramics for series Science and Civilisation in Chnia. Ceramics connoisseurship included beliefs about the value of certain wares for protecting the food as well as for highlighting its beauty.

One sour note in the rise of Chinese food is the continual use of sloppy mistranslations. Even the best modern food studies, cookbooks, and translations use “wine” for jiu (alcoholic liquors in general), “lotus root” for lotus rhizomes, “plum” for mei (sour apricot), and so on. One would think scholars and cookbook writers would try not to mislead. Similarly, in spite of accurate linguistic transliterations for Cantonese and Hokkien, food writers routinely use old-time missionary approximations that mutilate the words and guarantee mispronunciation by naïve outsiders. Indeed, even the standard transliteration of Mandarin (and, for that matter, Korean) are often misleading.

Chapter 2. Some Basic Background

            China’s food and everything connected with it depends heavily on the monsoon. It, in turn, depends on the winds and sea currents around, Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the place where southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere winds and waters diverge from a hot, fairly calm equatorial zone. The ITCZ can shift well to the north of the equator, and when it does China gets more rain. This comes from the hot, wet air that rises from the heated seas and is driven north. Hadley cells evolve as the hot air rises, flows north, and then sinks again. In most of the world, this sinking air produces deserts at the edge of the tropics. The air is dry, but still hot. In China, however, it just flows on, driven by the massive heat engine of the South China Sea, and gives out only over north and northwest China (Beck et al. 2018; Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). It still produces most of what little rain comes to Gansu. North and west of there, other air currents cut in: far west China gets the last feeble dregs of the Atlantic storms, especially when the Atlantic is cold, driving the storm belt south (Anderson 2014). North China gets winter rain from Siberia, and even Hong Kong can have miserably cold winter drizzles from north winds that pick up further water from the China Sea.

            The Himalayas block the monsoon, making northeast India and Bangladesh incredibly rainy but Tibet extremely dry. When Tibet is cold, it depresses the temperature and rainfall quite widely over China. More sun in north China is also costly, heating the land and reducing the monsoon (Beck et al. 2018).

            Another factor is the Walker circulation, the grand pattern of circulation over the oceans. It gives us, among other things, the alternation (erratic, every 5 to 50 years or so) of El Niño and La Niña. Trade winds (from the east) blow warm water from the rest of the Pacific to its western area, especially just south of the Equator, which causes cold water to well up on the west side to make up for it, one reason for the California and Humboldt Currents. La Niña makes for a dry east (California and the coasts of Peru and northern Chile) and a wet west, mostly in Indonesia and Australia but also a bit of support for the Chinese monsoon. El Niño occurs when the warm water sloshes back to the east, giving California and sometimes even north Chile some rain but causing drought in southern Indonesia and in Australia.

            Lately, global warming has added to the picture, giving Australia and California historic droughts. China has slightly more reliable rain but also heat and flooding.

            China’s climate has had massive ups and downs over time: warm and wet till 6200 BCE, then somewhat cooler and drier, then sharply cooler and drier in 2200-1800 BCE, with coolness marked till 1500 (B. Yang et al. 2021). The far northeast, which gets winter rain and snow, remained wet till 3100 (X. Liu et al. 2019). Long dry periods alternated with warm, wet ones during the period from the decline of the Ice Age glaciers to the dawn of agriculture (Weiwei Sun et al. 2019). These track the release of vast amounts of cold, fresh meltwater as glacial lakes drained. Such events affected especially the north Atlantic. Warm water, and thus warm air and rain, were forced south. The Atlantic Meridian Overturning circulation, which causes a huge percentage of the climate and weather in the northern hemisphere, was weakened. Even the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) moved south. The Indian monsoon weakened at such times. Other than these periods, which included especially the Younger Dryas, the entire time range was warm and wet in China.

            The climate turned warmer and wetter during the Han Dynasty, turning worse near the end of Han—probably a major factor in that demise. Then volcanic eruptions elsewhere in the world led to a terribly cold and dry period after 536 CE and especially after 550, lasting till about 650 and clearly affecting the rise and fall of Sui. Climate improved sharply, climaxing in the Medieval Warm Period of 900-1300, which gave very good times to the Song Dynasty, except for a cold wet period in the early 1100s that greatly damaged Song rule (Zhang 2016). The MWP allowed the rise of the Mongols, as their subarctic habitat got warmer and wetter. They took China, but the rise of the Little Ice Age after 1300 caused cold and flooding that helped end their rule there. However, they were by then established in warmer parts of Asia, and continued rule over central and western Asia for centuries.

            The Little Ice Age hit China extremely hard, hurting Ming and probably encouraging the Manchus to move south and take China (Pei 2021). The modern period went with warming after 1800, and of course the recent extreme warming due to release of greenhouse gases by human action—including vast amounts of coal burning and some oil and natural gas use by China, as well as release of methane by rice agriculture (Anderson 2019; Pei 2021). The role of climate in Chinese history and prehistory is usually best seen as an accelerator and trigger for events that would probably have happened anyway (Anderson 2019), but sometimes seems to have really caused things that would not otherwise have happened, such as major damage to Northern Song (Zhang 2016) and the timing and violence of the Sui-Tang and Ming-Qing transitions (Pei 2021). A more detailed study shows that the Little Ice Age was particularly cool in the northeast and east, and was wetter there; it was drier in the west, and sometimes even a bit warmer than usual, as in the Tarim area (Xuecheng Zhou et al. 2019).

            Taiwan, unusually for China, gets considerable winter rain, especially in the north. This is directly a result of the winter north winds blowing over the China Sea, but more remotely it is connected with Arctic sea ice, and thus increased with cooling weather in the last 3000 years (T. Lin et al. 2021), especially the Little Ice Age.

            Tibet had similar dynamics. One study (C. Liang et al. 2019) of vegetation near the great Qinghai lake shows rapid change from 10,500 to 9000; increase in amount and diversity to 6500; decrease to 4000, then increase to 1500, then fluctuations after that as people become numerous. The increase at 4500 to 1500 is dramatic, with a real crash around 1500. There was a fairly even balance of grassland and evergreen forest (pine, spruce, etc.). This tracks temperature and precipitation, but not very well; note the increase after colder times (4000-4200 BP). Vegetation cover drops suddenly about the time of the 536 shock but then never recovers, thanks to human pressure (overgrazing and overharvesting of fuel).

            In China’s far western deserts, similar things were happening. They were even drier than usual some 6000 years ago. Glacial melt after the Little Ice Age led to much more water for a while in the last couple of centuries (J. Liu et al. 2019), but now all is drier than ever. Faunal changes confirm the broad contours of climate change there (T. Zhang and Elias 2019; X. Zhang et al. 2018). The extreme northwest corner of Xinjiang, in the Altai mountains, is under the influence of the Atlantic and gets its rain on the westerly winds from there, thus contrasting dramatically with the rest of China. This area was warm and dry in the early Holocene, then cool and wet 8000-6300 years ago, then warm and dry till 5500, cold and wet till 4000, warm and dry till 2500, colder and wetter till a thousand years ago, then gradually warmer and drier. This tracks Atlantic temperature shifts, but is nothing like the rest of China. Note the key shift at 4000 that made the rest of east Asia cold and dry, but made the Altai warmer (Y. Zhang and P. Meyers 2016; Y. Zhang and P. Yang 2018).

            In the farthest northeast, sediments from a lake in Heilongjiang reveal that the area was warm and wet 13,400 to 8700 years ago. It was warm and dry for a while after that. A cooler dry period set in 8200 years ago, but the Intertropical Convergence Zone shifted north in that period, which spared this area. The 4200-4000 BP event was more dry and cool, with the ITCZ shifting south and making everything worse (S. Zhang et al. 2020; Zuo et al. 2018).

Farther west, near Dunhuang but up on the high plateau above it, the small Tian’E Lake shows wet periods 1270 BC-AD 400, AD 1200-1350, AD 1600-near present, with dry in between. Vegetation there was sagebrush and other desert shrubs, and dryland grass. Spruce was nearby, but not after 1420 BCE. Nearby lakes had similar records, with some minor differences. This is near the extreme west limit of the monsoon and the extreme east limit of Atlantic-origin rainfall, so it is not only extremely dry, but the rainfall is erratic (Jun Zhang et al. 2018).

Later, a cave record from south China shows fairly consistent good monsoon till 860, then a dry period, followed by a very dry one 910-930, a dramatic rise in monsoon activity to 980, high rainfall till 1020, then sharp drop 1340-1380, and weakness till 1850, with extreme minimum 1580-1640. It then rose and stabilized. The correlation with dynastic events is obvious; note especially the dry periods at the fall of Tang, Yuan, and Ming.

            In the tropics, the Little Ice Age was wetter, as the ITCZ contracted and concentrated the rainy monsoon there (W. Zhang et al. 2018).

            China’s flora now reaches 31,200 vascular plants as of 2017 (M. Lu et al. 2017; W. Xu et al. 2018), with 26,978 that can be analyzed as to timing of origin, with many still to be described. Famously, China includes such “living fossils” and the ginkgo and dawn redwood, in the east and center, but evolution has been rapid, especially in the west and especially for the non-tree species (Li-Min Lu et al. 2018). The breakdown as of 2018 is “2308 ferns, 2105 annual herbs, 12,721 perennial herbs, 2295 climbers, 5690 shrubs, 3642 trees” (W. Xu et al. 2018).

Chapter 3. New Syntheses of Prehistory

China’s prehistory goes far back in time, to specimens of Homo erectus up to a million years old,and later forms that resemble Neanderthal people. (For convenience, the area now in the Chinese state is called “China” herein, though this chapter discusses things that happened thousands of years before the Chinese state began.)

Some are samples of the mysterious Denisovans, a human species or subspecies first known from Denisova Cave, Russia, and found in genetic dilution in east Asia and above all in New Guinea and Australia. A 34,000-year-old woman’s skullcap from Mongolia and a 40,000-year-old bit of bone from near Beijing are Denisovan. Denisovan genes from this population survive in small amounts in Chinese, Cambodians, Koreans, Tibetans, Mongolians, and Altai people, but are not detected (so far) in Japanese or several Siberian groups (Loesch et al. 2020). This Denisovan genome is rather different from the one leaving several traces in the genomes of New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals

            The Chinese people descend from various strains of Homo sapiens that moved through south and southeast Asia and worked their way north, and from other strains that came via central Asia. These long-vanished migrations are as shadowy as the ancient human forms. They left genetic traces, but the timing and routes are obscure, with estimates of arrival between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. Related, but distinct, north Asian groups appeared in Siberia well before 20,000 years ago, and some went on to cross Beringia and settle the New World.

            The people of east Asia today exhibit a north-south cline, visible in steadily lightening skin and more evident eyefolds and high cheekbones as one goes north. This is at least partly an adaptation to cold: the light skin allows more sunlight to work on dermal layers to produce vitamin D, the eyefolds protect the eyes from extreme chill, the rounder cheeks provide padding and insulation for further cold protection. Conversely, dark skin in the south guards from excessive sunlight, and the small size of some tropical Asians is probably an adaptation to difficulty of finding protein and calcium in tropical forest environments. 

A Paleolithic site in Henan that is 30,000-40,000 years old revealed bones of tapir, rhino, cheetah, deer, raccoon dog, lynx, fox, etc. Presumably people were eating many of these. Wild millets of both common types were being harvested and processed by 28,000-24,000 years ago, along with wild roots and tubers (Li Liu et al. 2018).

At the site of Xiamabei in the Nihewan Basin has ochre prepared as paint, microblades that were hafted, and bones of horse, deer, and zokor (Myospalax, a gopher-like rodent), in a steppe environment with chenopods, sagebrush, and scattered pines (F. Wang et al. 2022). The site dates to 40,000, right at the beginning of modern Homo sapiens sapiens in China—the point at which modern humans replaced Denisovans and/or whatever “archaic” humans were there. The early Paleolithic in China is poorly understood, and this is a major find.omHo

As to the Neolithic itself: An excellent review is Gina Barnes’ Archaeology of East Asia (2015). A thorough overview of the origins and rise of agriculture, best in its coverage of prehistory, is found in Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes (2021). A very thorough up-to-date review of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture has been provided in a two-part paper by Shengqian Chen and Pei-lin Yu (2017a, 2017b). They cover all major sites, crops, pottery and stone manufacture, and related concerns. They point out that intensified foraging preceded and merged with agriculture. Hunting was important in the north, but plant use always dominated the center and east (see also Bar-Yosef and Wang 2012). There is still much more to be done on food in early Chinese ritual, as more and more tomb materials allow us to test reports in the early writings (such as Xunzi; Tang and Yue 2013:5).

An enormous Ph.D. thesis by Wing-tung Ko (2022) covers animals from the Neolithic through the early Bronze Age in the middle Huai river valley. Ko synthesizes an enormous amount of archaeological data. The usual animals are present. Deer were the major game in early times. They gradually became less common while domestic animals became more so, but the Huai was behind many parts of northern China in this. Ko goes on to update the record by providing the recent history of the major tame and wild animals. A whole chapter concerns the giant softshell turtle Rafelys swinhoei, now down to three known individuals. Ko not only studied it archaeologically, but sought out the three survivors (two of which are a pair in Vietnam), and carried out a thorough ethnozoological study of the place of the species in Vietnamese culture, interviewing many locals on memories and experiences with this animal.

Pottery from ninth millennium BCE in Henan is associated with pre-agricultural settled communities (Wang et al 2015). Pottery was first invented in East Asia. It was later independently invented in the New World and possibly elsewhere. Pottery up to 19,000 years old, possibly 20-21,000 (Sato and Natsuki 2019), has been found in China. By 16,000 years ago it was common and widespread, and moving out to Korea and Japan. By 17,000 it was in the far northeast and what is now neighboring Russia but was historically part of China; here it had an uneven course, with local abandonment by hunting specialists who had little use for it (Terry 2021).

Clearly, by 18,000 years ago, life was settled and affluent enough in China to make pottery bowls and jars worth the trouble of manufacture. Wandering foragers have little use for such heavy, breakable objects. Early finds of pottery in China and Japan (where it was only slightly later, certainly there by 16,000 years back) often show residues of cooking fish. Settlement at good fishing and shellfishing spots is evident. These early dates on pottery are unique in the world. In the Near East and the Americas, pottery comes in about the time agriculture begins, with settling down and cooking grain as probable correlates. In eastern Asia, agriculture lagged pottery by thousands of years. Even what is now northeast China and the Russian Pacific had pottery by 14,000 years ago, though agriculture never reached some parts of those regions until early modern times. The pottery is fairly crude—low-fired and gray—but it served well and spread far.

By 9000 years ago they were firing it up to 1050 C in Cishan and Peiligang (Barnes 2015:93, 102). They thus must have already invented the simple ancestor of the “dragon kiln,” a kiln built up a hill slope at a carefully calculated angle. High caloric value firewood burned at the bottom, with a vent that sucks in oxygen as the wood burns. This produces extremely hot air that flows upslope at an even rate. I saw such a proto-dragon-kiln at Banpo, the neolithic village near Xian, in 1978. It was dug into a slope, extended several feet up, and would have done the job. Dragon kilns later produced enough heat to melt iron, allowing the Chinese to invent cast iron (in Zhou, by the 8th century BCE; Barnes 2015:145-147), long before anyone else could get such heat. It requires over 1500 C.

A famous traditional dragon kiln still operates in Okinawa. I saw it in full cry in 1966, when it was simply one more old kiln producing standard traditional pottery for the town. I assumed it was closed long ago, but it is still operating, as a living museum, producing the old classic Okinawan styles for avid tourists as well as locals.

Before agriculture, people in east and central China often depended on acorns. Grinding stones and pottery from the Shangshan culture, which flourished from 8000 to 6200 BCE in the lower Yangtze region, reveal largely acorn residue. Like Koreans and Native Californians, they processed acorns extensively. Acorn eating has become rare in China, however, though persisting in those other areas. 

The Environment as Agriculture Began

We return to the early Neolithic to pick up the story from the invention of agriculture. The warm post-Pleistocene “thermal maximum” or “optimum” gave good rain even to Inner Mongolia (M. Jiang et al. 2020). It came to a sudden but not dramatic break at 6200 BCE. Far more serious, in fact a major worldwide shift, came at 4200-3800. Climates widely turned colder and drier. These two changes were evidently a major shock to Neolithic populations, forcing them to work harder and smarter for a living. Shifts in the direction of increasing and intensifying agriculture appear in local records (Barnes 2015:121; Anderson 2014).

            Charcoal from archaeological sites reflects choice. A revealing study by Hui Shen et al (2020) shows that in the Guanzhong Basin in Yangshao times it ran to elm, oak, tamarisk, and jujube. From the eastern plateau, basically Shanxi, in Longshan, there was much oak and Prunus (peach, possibly mei, and others). In late Longshan and after, there was more maple, also willow, pine, fir, Rhamnus, etc. and some bamboo. More northern sites in Longshan had pine, oak, elm, sumac, Prunus. Later, in the early dynastic period, there was pine, oak, hackberry, elm, sumac, willow/poplar, etc. Western areas in Shaanxi, including the Majiayao culture of Yangshao times, had considerable spruce, from the mountains of the Tibetan frontier ranges. There was oak and some fir, not too much else. Spruce drops off and oak comes in over early times. Platycladus, a warm-weather conifer, occurs. Increases in oak and Prunus probably show deliberate selection; pine increases where fire became common. Warm temperate to subtropical woodland in the southeastern part of the study area (roughly the Tianshan mountains) grades into dry pine in north and west. This boundary shifted northwestward during mid-Holocene, then back southeast after 4000 years ago. They thus found woodland, where others find grassland with scattered trees and groves; this is due to the sampling method—burned wood from fires. Only trees get much attention. Another group around Hui Shen found evidence of fruit collecting, including Prunus padus (cherry), Pyrus, Sorbus, Cotoneaster (a red berry), from 2300 BCE, wild; then cultivated mulberry (not native there) appears from 1500 BCE—the first evidence of tree cropping in the Xian area.

             The Luoyang area near the Yellow River had broadleaf deciduous forest 9230-8850 BP (not BCE), steppe-meadow 8850-7550, steppe with sparse trees 7550-6920. The floodplain stabilized after 8370. Millet-based agriculture arose in Peiligang, 8500-7000. The Yangshao period peaked 7000-5000 in this area (Junna Zhang et al. 2018).

On the Mongolian plateau, millet agriculture was already moving in from the southeast by 6500-5300 BCE. Hunting of aurochs, deer, raccoon dogs, and other game was important for food. Drier times after 4000 BCE impacted this rather edenic world (C. Zhao et al. 2021).

In central China, what is now the Yangtse Delta was drowned by rising sea levels at 9000 BP. Sea levels fell enough by 7000 to begin exposing it again, and a paradise developed (L Li et al. 2018). River deltas, especially subtropical ones, are high-energy, high-nutrient environments that maximize food production, especially with the moderate and fluctuating salinity, which maximizes production of such food factories as oyster beds. The land continued to grow, and still does so; Shanghai was open ocean a very few thousand years ago.

Farther upriver, rice was harvested by the Shangshan culture (10,000-8200 BP), using tiny stone finger knives ancestral to the half-moon-shaped metal ones still used in traditional parts of southeast Asia. These are used to cut the stalk just under the head, leaving the straw in the field, where it now feeds water buffaloes and then rots back into the soil, unless it is harvested separately for use in sandals, rope, and the like. In Shangshan times, long before water buffaloes came into use, the value lay in catching the heads before they shattered and dropped the rice into the water of the marshes where it grew. Wild rice ripens unevenly, and the heads shatter with ripening; very early, rice was bred to ripen simultaneously across fields and to hold onto its seeds (one mutation of the rachis—the stalk that holds the grain to the plant—is enough).

In Shangshan times, rice beer was invented (Liu, Zhang et al. 2024). Using a qu starter, presumably with Monascus (and maybe Aspergillus and Rhizopus) molds and yeast (including apparent Saccharomyces cerevisiae), the people brewed beer from cooked rice. Cooked starch and traces of mold and yeast were found on vessels. The beer also contained some Job’s tears and something from Panicoideae and Triticeae grass groups, and acorn and lily. The Shangshan culture lasted 10,000 to 9,000 BP. Rice chaff was used to temper pottery. Pollen from various grass species was found. “Predomestication” by 13,000 and actual domestication by 11,000 led to this.

The following Kuahuqiao culture (8200-7000 BP) brought in sickles. The stone tools are identifiable by the characteristic wear, rather similar to sandpapering, that the silica-rich rice stalks produce on the stone tools. At Kuahuqiao and the nearby Jingtoushan site, 8300-7800 BP, rice was cultivated. Deer, pigs, dogs, and alligators were found. The pigs showed tooth crowding (sign of beginning domestication) and had been eating cooked food. They also had human whipworms Trichuris trichiura, necessarily acquired from people. This is possibly the earliest evidence of domesticated pigs in China, though they are also early in the middle Yellow River area.

The subsequent Hemudu culture, from 7000 BP, continued and probably completed the domestication of rice, which then fueled the Liangzhu culture (this paragraph is summarized from Jiajing Wang, Jiangping Zhu, et al. 2022).

Early Prehistory

Li Liu and colleagues have synthesized the coming of agriculture to Tibet: “Recent genetic and linguistic studies have traced its origin to Neolithic millet farmers in the Yellow River region of China around 8,000 y ago.” This is presumed to be related to the Yangshao culture and its expansion west and southwest. When they moved into the highlands, they mixed with locals, probably hunter-gatherers, and continued a tradition: “They prepared qu starter with Monascus mold and rice for preparing alcoholic beverages,” for ceremonies “which to some extent have survived in the skorbro-zajiu ceremonies in SW China….” The skorbro is a vigorous circle dance of the area today. The zajiu ritual involves drinking from a common pot, using straws, and this is archaeologically attested. [It is still done much more widely than just SW China.] The earlier Dadiwan, Peiligang, Cishan, and Houli cultures preceded the Yangshao and may have included even earlier ancestors of Sino-Tibetan. The Dadiwan site had a large public building with plaza, and large jars probably for alcoholic drinks. Early Yangshao, 7000-6000 BCE, was centered in the Wei Valley. With Miaodigou (from 6000) and later (to 4700) it spread over a wide area in the Yellow River drainage. Then the Majiayao culture (5300-4500) expanded into the west, and all these expanded into eastern Tibetan Highlands. Drier conditions from 7000, along with rising population, led to stress and migration. The first Neolithic evidence from the highlands is from 6000-5000.

            These early Tibetans lived on the usual millets, as well as rice, which is interesting, since these highlands are cold and dry. Some did not have domestic animals except dogs. They continued to hunt. Beans (Vigna and Vicia) are attested. Lily bulbs were eaten, and snake gourd roots were used, probably for medicine and brewing. Acorns were eaten—these sites are low enough to be in deciduous forest. Bracken fern rhizomes were used, and kudzu was used, presumably for various purposes. Potentilla anserina roots, a common food in the highlands of central Asia, were eaten.

            In the Huai River drainage, dependence or near-dependence on wild plants in Peiligang times, in spite of developed agriculture, gave way to full agriculture with dependence on millets and rice around 6400 BP, at the beginning of the Yangshao period, there dating to 6400-5300 BP (Y. Yang et al. 2023 from research at Shigu).

            At 5300 to 4800 BP, the Qujialing and then the Shijiahe cultures flourished in central China, growing both millets and rice, intensifying production. In the upper Huai river area, foxtail millet and rice outranked broomcorn millet (Li et al. 2024), as one would expect from the climatic situation.

Later Neolithic Sites

At Liangzhu in the lower Yangzi Valley, where towns almost reached urban size, pigs show the expected increase from 5500 to 4300, but then a decline sets in, because of global warming. It led to a major sea level rise from 4480 to 4315 BP, causing flooding and abandonment of Liangzhu city around 4480 BP (W. Zhang et al. 2022). The Liangzhu culture drastically shrunk down by 4000. What was left was buried by a flood around 3800. Liangzhu produced much ale, ancestral to modern jiu; other cultures of the time produced a great deal too(M. Li 2018:62ff).

Liangzhu covered 300 ha, and had perhaps 23,000-35,000 people, as well as dams, rice paddies, levees, canals, and in general a managed landscape (B. Liu et al. 2017; L. Xie et al. 2015). It may have been the source of the Austronesian migrations that reached Taiwan and the south coast of China—or it may not. What art we have looks somehow more Thai, less Austronesian, but that is mere impressionistic gaze. Alas, buried rice paddies do not speak, and inferring language from them is a dubious endeavor.

By contrast, north China flourishes up till 3800 BP, after which centripetal tendencies concentrate development more and more in the central Yellow River area, where full civilization begins, pigs and all.

In the far northeast, the Hongshan culture flourished till 2800 BCE. At the site of Niuheliang, the Hongshan people built a near-urban agglomeration of houses and public buildings, with a temple noted for its goddess figure with blue stones set in for eyes. This is not likely to mean the Hongshan people were blue-eyed; blue eyes have always been a symbol of the uncanny and ghostly or spiritual in Chinese iconography. The whole culture has an alien feel, unlike anything else in the Chinese record. It left no identified legacy.

Also thoroughly different in culture from the core Chinese realm was the extreme west of Xinjiang, which was occupied by Indo-European peoples at some early point. Far northwest Xinjiang received west Asian foods earlier than the rest of east Asia (Dodson et al. 2022). Wheat, barley, and west Asian domesticated animals came by 5000 years ago. Agriculture got considerably more serious after the harsh weather of 4200-3800 years ago. The central-Asian Andronovo culture brought very early bronze. The same group has found agriculture back to 3400 years ago, expanding after that, in the Qinghai area; this is the highest agriculture on record at that time (Dong et al. 2016). The usual crops and animals appear: barley, wheat, millet, sheep, other animals. It is worth noting here that barley varieties kept migrating to China throughout history, with some coming by sea or via the Silk Road in fairly recent historic times (Jones et al. 2016).

 Yuan Jing and collaborators (2020) review the data. The West Asian domesticates had providentially come in just in time to save the north from collapse. The animals in particular—sheep, goats, and cattle—supplemented the pigs, while wheat and barley slowly became visible, though never common until the rise of urban civilization. The cattle soon became heavily C₄ in diet, indicating grazing in millet stubble and probably being fed on millet hay.

By the 3^rd millennium BCE, huge settlements had arisen in north China. They tend to be in rather unexpected places, cold and dry. Perhaps the need to secure a lot of food, for emergencies, led to such early cities. Much bigger towns arose soon after. Shimao in the northern loess plateau of Shaanxi flourished from 2300 to 1800 BCE, covered 400 ha, had a huge wall and palace, was beginning to work with bronze, and was in every way a city except for lack of writing or other record-keeping. Another large walled community of the time in the northwest was Taosi in the Jinnan valley of Shanxi, at 280 ha, which, among other things, developed a musical ensemble of alligator-skin drums and suspended chimestones (lithophones). Lithophones continued to develop and flourish into Zhou Dynasty times (M. Li 2018:126). Taosi was conquered or at least strongly influenced by Shimao in 1900 and ceased to be important (Jaang et al 2018). Wars of conquest at considerable distance may have begun by this time, or may not (Jaffe et al. 2022 are skeptical). Erlitou, the capital of the Xia dynasty, rose a bit later than these early cities, but overlaps with them for one or two hundred years.

The relatively enormous and very complex sites of Shimao and Taosi flourished during the worst climatic time of all, 4300-3800 BP (2300-1800 BCE), in northwest China, at the same time that the previously more impressive Liangzhu culture was collapsing. (Taosi started a bit earlier than Shimao, and may have collapsed by 3900.) Shimao at 400 ha was possibly the biggest site in east Asia up to those dates, though large sites are now turning up to the east. Taosi was in the next bracket. Both were in the loesslands, and depended on the usual millet-pig base. Food animal bones recovered from Shimao were 20% cattle, 44% sheep or goat, 28% pig. Taosi was much more pig-dependent (52% of bones), with many dog bones, indicating use as food (as in many other early sites), and had 9,000-15,000 people (Campbell et al. 2022). Shimao had very large amounts of jade, often beautifully worked, and not confined to obviously elite houses, though social differentiation was well advanced. There was also a bone needle workshop (Jaffe et al. 2022) and extremely well-made bone mouth harps (Li Jaang and Zhouyong Sun, comment within Jaffe et al. 2022, pp. 110-112), similar to ones found today in southeast Asia. They appear to have had a good deal of cultural importance, but so far are rather anomalous.

Shimao was only first among many large sites; the more China is explored, the more turn up. Recall the Liangzhu site of comparable time and size. However, the climate event at 4200-4000 BCE triggered a massive collapse, probably involving other factors besides cooler and drier weather; epidemics have been proposed. The population of north China shrank, locally by up to 75%; the lower Yangtze area was ruined. The Luoyang basin was less hard hit, which probably explains the rise of Erlitou to relative dominance (Jaffe et al. 2022, including commentary). In the Tao River area of southern Gansu, where wet forested mountains alternate with very dry valleys, complex cultures arose, also hit hard by the 4200-4000 event. This set back farming and led, or encouraged, a shift to more herding of livestock (Jaffe et al. 2021).

Central north China from 3500 to 2600 BCE, the late Yangshao phase, was rapidly diversifying crops, with rice and soybeans increasingly supplementing the millets. Here too, larger settlement were emerging, including the near-urban site of Xishan, with rammed-earth walls. Other sites had moats and smaller walls (Tao et al. 2022).

A route along the eastern foothills of the Tibetan ranges emerged, with transmission of the millets and rice from the upper Jinsha (Yangtse) by 5000 BP to northern southeast Asia a couple of thousand years later. Transfer was rather slow and gradual, into an economy of mixed hunting and gathering. Soybeans, chenopodium, adzuki beans, perilla, brown pepper, and other food plants were present in small amounts, probably eaten but not cultivated. The cold dry event from 4200-4000 BP would have made millet a better option, rice less good (B. Wang et al. 2023).

The adzuki bean was domesticated in central Honshu, Japan, about this time, by the Jomon people (Chien et al. 2025), supposedly “nonagricultural” until recently but now known to have been growing or managing many plants. Domesticated adzukis spread to China fast, though actual times are unclear.

Chenopodium album continued to be an important crop for seeds and leaves throughout Chinese archaeology and history. A large form giganteum has developed and is often used for walking sticks (Duan 2025). The goosefoot or pigweed staff is a cliché in Chinese poetry, standing for extreme rusticity and simplicity. A proper sagely poet carried one. Poets from Du Fu to Han Shan immortalized this humble plant, as did Korean poets.

Millet was a staple in the Liangshan area by 5000-4800 BP (Guo et al. 2024).

Languages and Prehistory

Proto-Tibeto-Burman (Proto-Sino-Tibetan) has words for rice, the millets, and beans. Possibly, a word for wheat reconstructs (Bradley 2011), but this must show early borrowing, with wheat words spread through the language phylum. The Tibeto-Burman (or Sino-Tibetan, or Trans-Himalayan) phylum is more and more clearly derived from original stock of some sort spoken in the central Yellow River drainage and possibly as far south as Sichuan, in or just before Yangshao times (Sagart et al. 2019; Menhan Zhang et al. 2019; and see above on Li Liu and colleagues, 2022). Stories among some South Chinese Tibeto-Burman minorities record a homeland in mountains to the northwest, a perfect fit for the mountains of Shaanxi and Gansu. The phylum has picked up astounding linguistic diversity in its far south and southwest, especially in the northern Indian subcontinent, but this is largely by mixing with local languages, many now lost.

The main Tibeto-Burman stem, largely in China (broad political sense), is a fairly coherent group with many words for agriculture (Sagart et al. 2019). The spread of millets evidently accompanied the expansion and spread of the Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) language phylum, which centers in the same origin area and southward into Sichuan and has a comparable time depth. It has been fairly closely nailed to the middle Yellow River area, home to the Yangshao cultural tradition and the huge late Neolithic settlements (Bellwood 2023; Van Driem 2021). Some Tibeto-Burman groups in southern China have origin myths telling of a spread from mountains far to the north and west, and this would fit the Yellow River hypothesis (Wang 2013).

By 2000-3000 BCE, people genetically like modern Tibeto-Burmans (as far as Nepalese Tibet) expanded rapidly from the central Yellow River area (C. C. Wang et al. 2021; S. Q. Wen et al. 2016). Also, people with western Eurasian genetics moved in from the west; at least some of them were probably Indo-European speakers. Interesting is a boy buried about 2000 BCE in far west China is fully east Asian genetically, but the burial goods all represent the Afanasievo culture, a west Eurasian one often assumed to be carried by Indo-European speakers. Evidently central Asia at that time was as mixed as it is now. The famous mummies of the area were dressed in western-style clothes. Some were light-haired, but some others were genetically East Asian.

North of the Tibeto-Burman phylum are several languages traditionally called “Altaic,” from association with the Altai Mountanis. These traditionally include Turkic and Mongolic languages. Recently, Marina Robbeets has made a powerful case for a “Transeurasian” grouping: the Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus, Korean and Japanese families all deriving from a common source (Robbeets et al 2021). She reconstructs words for sowing, millet gruel, pigs, and other cultivation words. In her major article (Robbeets et al. 2021) she provides an enormous list of words cognate to all or some of the languages. (Alas, it is available only to the fortunate few who can call it up online; it is “supplementary online material” to the major published document.) She also traces the origin of the phylum to the Liao River drainage in northeast China, where the Xinglongwa culture flourished around 5900-5600 BCE, with domesticated millets and pigs. She strongly suspects it to be the source culture for the language group. With the caveat that the source culture was probably more widespread, general, and long-lasting than the Xinglongwa specifically, I can only agree.

The list does provide compelling evidence for the initial unity of at least Tungus, Korean, and Japanese (the Tungus-Korean link was already well known), and for a homeland where she pinpoints it. The connections of Turkic and Mongol to each other and to the wider grouping are very tenuous. Carefully working through Robbeets’ materials convinces me that early borrowing cannot be ruled out as the source of the similarities. Borrowing was rampant, with such basic terms as “seven” and “name” spreading from language to language with viral fluidity (Bjørn 2022). Resemblances of languages as disparate as Korean and Turkic are quite likely due to this.

Some Russian linguists argue further that these languages relate onward to the Indo-European, Uralic, and even Semitic and Caucasus languages, in a giant “Nostratic” or “Eurasian” phylum. This is definitely pushing the evidence—the few similarities could be pure chance—but it cannot be ruled out.

Genetic evidence runs strongly counter to some of the above scenarios. There is no genetic commonality (besides generic Asian) between the Liao farmers of ca. 3000 BCE and the Mongolian and Amur peoples of the time. On the other hand, Robbeets’ ideas are confirmed for Korea and Japan: they are today overwhelmingly descended from (or at least closely related to) the Liao farmers. I suspect the Tungus are also in this category, and the unrelated Amur people known archaeologically spoke a different language, possibly Gilyak (a language of uncertain relationship spoken on the Amur today). At least, the Russian “Nostratic” phylum is impossible to square with the enormous genetic diversity of modern and archaeological Eurasia. Sharing of a single language group across vast stretches of genetically unrelated people is a feature of modern armed military conquest; it is hard to imagine it happening any other way. Conversely, we know a great deal now about the movements of peoples in Eurasia, and they would account quite neatly and precisely for the similarities between, for instance, the Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic languages (see e.g. Bellwood 2023).

The Silk Road, then as now, was a whole complex of routes carrying all sorts of commodities. Among other mysteries, the Tokharian languages entered at some point, probably from Yamnaya and Afanasievo cultural backgrounds around 2000-3000 BCE. They are historically attested from Xinjiang, but the languages died out in early Medieval times. These are Indo-European languages. Three survive in a few texts archaeologically found in Central Asia. The Tokharian languages represent an early branch of the phylum, later than Hittite but earlier than the great radiation of the surviving IE languages (Bellwood 2023). The Tokharian languages presumably arrived in the east at about the same time as early western-derived genetic signatures.

At the other end of the Chinese world, evidence continues to pour in confirming the progress of Austronesians from south China to Taiwan, and then later the radiation of the Malayo-Polynesian branch to the whole Indo-Pacific region, from Madagascar and East Africa (see Beaujard 2009, 2012) to Oceania. Genetics confirm massive mainland migration to Taiwan from before 1300 BCE till many centuries later; they were genetically like modern Austronesians, but also a good deal like Tai and “Austroasiatic” (presumably Vietnamese and Cambodians), showing a good mix of early rice farmers (C. C. Wang et al. 2021). They also show similarity to a very early northeast Chinese genetic strain that exists today only in dilution, as a component of east Chinese genomes.

A thorough review of the early evidence shows an earlier occupation, not known to be agricultural, but possibly so. Then came the Austronesians, farming rice and millet. They apparently came from the lower Yangtse and the Fukien coast, which is known as one possible area for rice domestication and differentiation. Skeletons reveal a southern East Asian genetic identity, in contrast to the northern East Asian genetics of the millet growers in the north, who soon migrated south and mixed in (Wang et al. 2025).

Austronesian sites in Taiwan are now very numerous and cover all the island (Hung and Carson 2014). Conversely, Neolithic people of Fujian show close relationships to the Austronesians, but later Fujianese are largely descended from migrants from farther north (M. Yang et al. 2020).

Peter Bellwood argued a few decades ago that the Austronesian languages spread along with agriculture. He has continued to research this, summarizing a lifetime of work in First Farmers (2^nd edn., 2023) The Austronesians were probably among the first domesticators of rice. Starting with rice in the lower Yangtse, where they may have been the people of the huge neolithic sites there, they expanded to Taiwan, and diversified there. One branch, the Malayo-Polynesian language family, exploded into the seas. It first moved to the Philippines, then out to Malaysia, Indonesia, Micronesia, northern Melanesia, and ultimately Polynesia and Madagascar.

Archaeology and genetics tend to confirm this scenario, but people, languages, and crops mixed along the way, so Malayo-Polynesian speakers in Madagascar often have a great deal of African ancestry; those in New Guinea are heavily Papuan in background; and so it goes. The exact timing and course of the move to Taiwan remains controversial. It is probably linked with the sudden appearance of intensive agriculture there, possibly with the Liangzhu culture. It was largely Bellwood’s work that inspired Van Driem (2021) and others to look to Sino-Tibetan’s expansion with millet, and then these and other studies, as well as Bellwood’s actual mentorship, inspired Marina Robbeets’ more adventurous hypothesis, noted above, of the expansion of Transeurasian languages from the Liao River area (Robbeets et al. 2021).

In general, the migration of north Chinese to the south is classically a world-scale demographic shift, but there was also some migration from south to north in southern China (M. Yang et al. 2020), possibly involving Tai and Vietnamese people.

Rice agriculture also led to expansion of the Thai-Kadai language phylum from the middle Yangzi area. This extremely important linguistic aggregation certainly spread south—we have recorded history for the latest millennia—and became the language of much of southern China and, later, southeast Asia. So, if current hypotheses are correct, early rice agriculture was shared—perhaps jointly developed—by Thai and Austronesian ancestors, and possibly by the smaller Mien and Hmong phyla.

Many would even add the Austroasiatic languages: Mon, Khmer, Vietnamese, and many relatives, including the Munda languages of India (Van Driem 2011). Some rice agricultural terms have been reconstructed for proto-Austroasiatic. The center of diversity, variety, and complexity of this phylum is eastern India, among the Munda, but Van Driem has shown that these languages are probably mixed with local now-lost tongues. The Austroasiatics involved may have even come by sea from Myanmar (Bellwood 2023). Van Driem (2021) convincingly argues that Austroasiatic differentiated somewhere near the China-Burma-Laos tripoint, or north of that; this puts it at an early center of diversity. Its spread very possibly introduced rice agriculture to India.

This speculation was solidly confirmed, with striking timeliness, in a major survey of Yunnan individuals between 7100 and 1500 years old. This study was carried out by Tianyi Wang and others (including the genomics leader Mark Stoneking) in Science (Wang et al. 2025). They studied one person from the site of Xiaodong who was fully 7100 years old, and who had a very ancient and totally distinctive basal East Asian genotype previously known only as a “ghost lineage” in Tibet. Tibetans are basically children of the Sino-Tibetan radiation from Northeast China, but in southeast Tibet they met and mixed with this previously lost lineage, leaving a genomic legacy unlocated till now. (The Xiaodong rock shelter has materials going back 43,500 years, with similarities to later Hoabinhian materials.)

After 7100 years ago, this lineage disappears in Yunnan. It was replaced by an East Asian lineage, again previously unknown, but identifiably close to the northern East Asian type that unites the Sino-Tibetan and Korean-Tungus peoples and to the southern East Asian type found among Austronesians and Thai-Kadai (Kra-Dai). This new “Central Yunnan” lineage turns out to be abundantly present in Austroasiatic people, and is fairly obviously within their original genetic ball park. It is found in Central Yunnan but not, so far, very much in the west or north, which show northern influences by the time skeletons appear to study. Farmers in northern Southeast Asia between 4000 and 3000 years ago are strongly Central Yunnanese by heritage.

Modern Austroasiatic peoples, especially the small minorities of southeast Asia generally, show this ancestry. So do neighboring groups from the Karen (Sino-Tibetan) to the Laotians, and especially the southern Yunnanese Sino-Tibetan groups like the Hani (Sani, Akha), though these various groups are all mixed, with strong northern East Asian genetic heritage.

 The Vietnamese language and people are clearly a recent intrusion into the northeastern fringe of the phylum’s distribution. Its vocabulary is swamped with vast borrowings from Thai and Chinese languages, including the entire Thai tonal system.

Rice agriculture appeared in Yunnan and (probably) in extreme northern Southeast Asia by 4000 years ago. This means it spread slowly from its hearth, compared to agriculture in Europe, which, once introduced from Anatolia, spread at a quite steady rate of one kilometer a year. Spreading to the Yunnan-Laos border, a thousand miles from the lower Yangtse fountainhead, took about 4000 years, or ¼ km/year.

Agriculture was well established in southeast Asia by 2000 BCE, at least in the north. This spread was accompanied by linguistic expansion (Bellwood 2023). The Tai seem very definitely involved in this. I strongly suspect that they were the main drivers in the east, but it now looks as if the Austroasiatics may have been key in the central areas, following Wang et al. (2025).

The spread of rice agriculture goes with spread of northern genes, from what is now China, and the dilution or even displacement of the local people, who were related to the surviving “Negritos” of southeast Asia and more distantly to the Melanesians (Bellwood 2023).

             Tai customs and loanwords survive in Cantonese culture today, and the Cantonese and Vietnamese tonal systems appear borrowed from Tai. (“Tai” here represents the Thai languages, related to the obscure and now rarely-spoken Kadai languages of south and central China; these two branches had a common ancestor around the time of the rise of rice agriculture, and presumably spread with it, as Tai/Thai was certainly doing in historic times.) The North Chinese are quite different from the southerners in genetics. This fits the known intrusion within historic times of the Chinese language into Tai, Austronesian, and other linguistic strongholds around and south of the Yangtse. Modern South Chinese are rather poorly studied genetically, but appear to be an amalgam of ancestral northerners, local people, and southerners. Evidently there was much moving around then.

Katy Hung, a Chinese investigator working in Taiwain, has found that the Saisiat, an Austronesian group of Taiwan, has a legend of “little black people” living there before the Saisiat came in from the south (which fits with the Pearl River origin). The “little black people” taught them a good deal about agriculture (Katy Biggs [Hung], Facebook postings and emails, Nov.-Dec. 2014). It seems likely that the pre-Austronesians of Taiwan were related to the Philippine Negritos and other small, dark peoples of south Asia (such as the Andaman Islanders), and were absorbed by the taller, lighter-skinned Austronesians; this is what has happened, but only partially, in the Philippines and southeast Asia. If the Saisiat are right, the Austronesians did not introduce the first agriculture to Taiwan. Recent work casts some doubt on the whole question of migration of agriculture from the mainland and its association with proto-Austronesians. The basic model still works, but inevitable complications have appeared.

Prehistoric Agriculture

The Millets

Agriculture began twice in China, perhaps as a linked process, perhaps (though less likely) as independent invention. Millet agriculture, based on foxtail millet (Setaria italica) and broomcorn or proso millet (Panicum miliaceum), developed around 8000 BC in the Yellow River drainage, possibly the middle part of it. “Millet” is a general term for any small-seeded grain crop. There are many species of millets, originating in East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the New World; the two most important ones worldwide are these two original Chinese species, but others such as barnyard millet (Echinochloa spp.) soon joined them, and other species came later from other regions. Pigs and dogs were added to the picture almost immediately; pigs were probably domesticated in China, independently from separate domestication in western Eurasia.

In at least some parts of central north China, broomcorn millet dominated early periods, from the dawn of agriculture around 8000 BCE to perhaps 4000 (see Lander 2021). It was apparently domesticated in the dry northwestern loesslands, not the Yellow River valley or plain (Hunt et al. 2018), though this requires confirmation.

Broomcorn millet yields a harvest in as little as 45 days, and is the fastest-maturing and most water-efficient of grains (Hunt et al. 2018). It has been a good crop for nomad tribes. It also makes a fine catch crop if a major crop fails.  It spread from China over Central Asia from 2500 to 1500 BCE, its characteristic isotope signature (of C4 metabolism) appearing in bones by then (Hunt et al. 2018; Spengler et al. 2016). It reached Kyrgyzstan and Kashmir by the 3^rd millennium BCE, but has not been discovered yet in Xinjiang before about 2000, indicating we are missing something (Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al. 2022). This helped develop multicrop agriculture in cooler areas (Popular Archaeology 2015), since, though the plant is very tolerant to heat and prefers hot conditions, it will grow in a very short summer. It spread to Mesopotamia by 1100-1500 BCE (Rutgers University 2022).

Its use declined slowly over time, then rapidly with the coming of the New World starch crops, especially maize. It still is useful in central Asia (Wang et al. 2016:333). Early broomcorn millet from northwest China is genetically close to samples from India and Europe, showing where they originated (C. Li et al. 2016).

Foxtail millet rose to dominance after civilization started; it was a clear leader by Shang. It is somewhat resistant to salt as well as drought, though not as drought-tolerant as broomcorn millet. It prefers the warm, moist climate of eastern China, and thus did not spread through Central Asia, though it did reach India early.

An interesting insight into the rise of millet agriculture is that wild cats and rats by the middle 6^th millennium BCE had been eating a great deal of C4 food, the only common ones in the area being the millets. The rats had been raiding fields and stores and the cats had been eating the rats (Barnes 2015:124).

Often grown with millets is buckwheat, which is native to China, specifically the southwest—Yunnan and eastern Tibet. Two species exist: the commonly grown Fagopyrum esculentum and the more cold-tolerant F. tataricum, bitter but tolerating harsh conditions. Both tolerate cold and drought well, but esculentum, the one now grown worldwide, does best in north and northeast China (and only locally in its southwestern home; Krzyzanska et al. 2022). Russia is the leading buckwheat producer today, but China is close. The time of domestication of buckwheat is unknown. The crop has not benefited greatly from the revival of “ancient grains,” in spite of its many advantages.

On the eastern North China Plain, the Houli culture grew millets and had possibly-wild rice and domestic dogs and pigs from 6500 to 5000 BCE, to be followed by the more agricultural Beixi culture (5000-3900), which added more pigs. At this time much or most food was still gathered: acorns and hazelnuts, grapes, jujubes, wild cherry (Cerasus japonica), water chestnut, euryale, elderberry, wild soybean, perilla, Physalis alkekengi, crabgrass.

Wild foods stayed important into the Yangshao period (7000-4500, contemp w Qujialing, 5300-4500, elsewhere, and roughly with Dawenkou in the east). Miaodigou with its beautiful pottery is a middle phase of Yangshao, Majiayao (5300-4000 BP) a late phase (Li Liu 2021). Majiayao was succeed in the west by the Qijia culture, running about 4200-3500 BP; it was in this time that horses, sheep, and goats enteresd the area (Womack et al. 2021).

The Xinglongwa culture in northeast China was on the verge of full Neolithic status. In Chahai village south of the Liao River, around 5900-5600 BCE, with pigs kept but not domesticated, and both wild and domesticated millets present. Houses were simple and were the units of the economy (Tu et al. 2022). This is all suspiciously close to the place, time, and economy identified by Martine Robbeets as the original homeland of the Transeurasian languages, and Robbeets et al. (2021) indeed so designate it, as noted above.

Wei Wang and colleagues (2025) review the early agricultural story of the Liaoning-Inner Mongolia border area, in Robbeets’ Transeurasian origin area. The Xiaohexi culture, before 8500 BP, shows no real sign of agriculture. The following Xiniglongwa 8200-7200 BP had millet, and is considered by Robbeets to be a good candidate for the original Korean-Japanese-Tungus ancestral stock. It was followed by two local Neolithic cultures: Zhaobaogou 7000-6400, and Fuhe 7200-7000. After this, some metal appears, in chalcolithic Hongshan, 6500-5000 with its huge towns; also Xiaoheyan 5000-4000. The Bronze Age in the area is represented by Lower Xiajiadian 4000-3500 and then  Upper Xiajiadian 3000-2500. The climate was warm and humid till the 4200-4000 BP event, after which cool and dry.

No livestock are found much before Hongshan and most meat came from hunting even then. After that, most came from domestic animals. Millets were grown throughout, and were the only staple. Deer (red, roe, water) overwhelmingly dominant the hunting picture through Hongshan. After it, there is a sudden near-total change to pig dominance, with substantial sheep/goat, cattle, some horses and chickens. In hunting days, raccoon dogs, badgers, Myospalax, swans, pheasants, and other game were hunted.. Dogs were domestic throughout the record, at least from the later Neolithic.

Plants gathered include mountain apricot Prunus sibirica, local walnut Juglans mandshurica, hazelnut Corylus mandshurica; by Xinglongwa, cultivated apricots show up. Wild plants gathered include Artemisia annua, chenopods,and various other useful plants. By lower Xiajiadian, hemp, soybean, Sichuan pepper Zanthoxylum bungeana, sweetclover, mallow Malva sylvestris, and other plants were grown.

These cultures preceded the better-known and fully agriculture-dependent and rice-farming Dawenkou (4100 to 2000) and Longshan (2900 to 1900) cultures. The Beixin culture in the Longshan group seems to have invented the tripod dish, a constant of Chinese art from humble ceramic beginnings in Beixin to the spectacular cast bronzes of the early dynasties (G. Jin, Chen, et al. 2020; G. Jin, Wagner, et al. 2019). Rice made it to the middle Yangzi only about 3000 BCE, and to Hainan Island by 2600 BCE (Yan Wu et al. 2016).

By 3000-2000 BCE, a pattern of broomcorn millet in the driest northwest and foxtail millet, with increasing rice, in moister areas arose in north China (Sheng et al. 2018).

Rice

Rice appears as a wild or semiwild food by 8,000-10,000 BCE, but cultivated rice may not be older than 6000, with abundant cultivated rice before 5000 (Luo et al. 2019, Huai River area; Yangtse dates are a bit earlier). It was domesticated in the middle and lower Yangtse valley, spreading rapidly to the Huai and much more slowly to the south. In warmer periods it spread north to Shandong.

Rice seems to have been domesticated a bit later than millet. As of 7000-5000 BCE, people of the south China coast lacked agriculture, and lived mostly by fishing and seaside foraging where possible (Zhu et al. 2021). Wild annual rice grew in natural seasonal marshes and ponds; wild perennial rice has wider habitat preference. The annual was the type domesticated, beginning around 8000 BCE (Huan et al. 2021) but not fully domesticated for a couple of further millennia (Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). While it was almost certainly domesticated in the middle and lower Yangzi Valley, it spread north by 8600-8500 BCE to the Huai and Han valleys (the area between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers), there to mix very soon with millets. They came south to this area by 7000 BCE, and crossed the Yangzi by 5800 (Huan et al. 2022). Mixed farming of rice and millets, and possibly other crops, developed, with rice dominating in the Yangshao sites of that area. Foxtail millet was in the Han region by early Yangshao, but rare; broomcorn does not turn up till middle Yangshao (Huan et al. 2022).

Timing, especially for rice, is controversial, due to difficulties in telling wild grains from the earliest domesticated ones. Domestic rice, Oryza sativa, exists in two broad classes of varieties: japonica, with short, roundish grains that cook somewhat sticky, and indica, with long grains that cook dry. Japonica is more cold-tolerant, flourishing in Japan and California; indica requires warmer conditions. The original domestic rice was japonica, domesticated from Oryza rufipogon in the lower to mid Yangtze valley. It spread slowly through China and then to India, where it mixed with native Indian wild rices, again O. rufipogon. This produced indica rice (O. sativa var. indica), and, independently, aus rice, which is more resistant to heat and drought. These two crossed, giving rise to intro-indica, which spread widely (D. Guo et al. 2025). One strain of it—with further genetic adventures—became the basmati rice of northwest South Asia (D. Guo et al. 2025), with its distinctive long grains and nutlike flavor.

 Indica and intro-indica spread back through southeast Asia to China, where they variously remixed with japonica, producing a spectrum of modern rice varieties adapted to all sorts of conditions. Until recently, japonica flourished in central China and reached somewhat into the north; indica dominated the south. Today, breeding for conder conditions has moved the lines well to the north.

Indica spread back throughout southeast Asia and north into southern China, but they are less cold-tolerant, so japonicarice monopolized north China, Korea, and most of Japan until recent development of hardy varieties. Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes (2021) provide an extremely important account of the development of rice agriculture in Asia.

At first rice was grown wet. It was probably planted in drying waters after spring floods, as African rice (Oryza glaberrima) is today in so-called “decrue” agriculture. Later it was irrigated, and also planted dry in areas with reliable heavy rain. At the Xiaohuangshan site in the lower Yangtze Valley, rice was eaten from 7000-5000 BCE, but was just coming into possible domestication, and competed for attention with root foods and acorns (Ling Yao et al. 2016). A well-preserved rice paddy has been excavated at the huge and long-occupied Chengtou Mountain site in Hunan (Facebook posting by Chinese Archaeology—the Tiger Meets the Dragon [Facebook page], Jan. 26, 2022). Wet-growing developed as paddy fields became more general in the 5^th through 4^th millennia BCE (Weisskopf, Qin, Ding, Ding, Sun and Fuller 2015; Weisskopf, Qin and Fuller 2015).

Rice spread from two centers, Hunan and the Yangzi Delta, and these may represent independent domestications. They may even represent different language phyla; they are at the inferred origin areas of the Tai-Kadai and Austronesian phyla, respectively. Rice spread throughout East and Southeast Asia at a speed averaging .8 km/yr (Cobo et al. 2019). This rate implies strongly that most of the diffusion was by farmers actually spreading into new territory, rather than by hunter-gatherer groups picking up the art (Cobo et al. 2019). Cobo et al imply the linguistic connections by noting the spread of those linguistic groups and their clear association with the spread of rice in later millennia.

            Since 8500 BP, with a strong monsoon, rice flourished north to lat. 36, in the Peiligang (8500-7000 BP) culture. Acorns were more important than cultivated foods at that time. Rice agriculture was trimmed back by the 4200-4000 BP event during Longshan (4500-4000) to lat. 33.29. But after that the rice and farming methods improved and it expanded north again. It was at least present, possibly through trade, in the early dynastic Erlitou (3800-3500) and Erligang (3600-3400) periods. Over time, rice grew along rivers, in low basins; foxtail millet dominated on pediment plains; broomcorn dominated in high valleys  (Jia et al. 2021).

The dry period around 4200-3800 years ago hurt rice farming, but caused it to spread and be adopted more widely, as other sources of food dried up. Early impacts on vegetation were low, but soon became visible. A series of papers by Ma Ting and coworkers have traced its relationship with climate in east and central China (Ma, Rowlett, et al. 2020; Ma, Tarasov, et al. 2019; Ma, Zheng, Man, et al. 2018; Ma, Zheng, Rowlett et al. 2016). Rice agriculture was strikingly slow to spread to Taiwan (around 3000-2000 BCE) and Japan (only a few centuries BCE), leading Qin Ling and Dorian Fuller to maintain that “rice farmers don’t sail” (Qin and Fuller 2016). A bit exaggerated—the rice did get to those islands eventually—but their explanation, the difficulty of getting out of the paddy and sailing with rice and the needed skill package, rings true.

Rice agriculture may have led to China’s famous communalistic yet individually responsible philosophy of life (Talhelm et al. 2014), because of the need to work together while still remaining individually responsible for one’s share. Today, and also in the past so far as literature can tell us, South China shows more communalism, the north more individualism. Small farms managed by independent farmers but requiring a great deal of cooperative labor would strengthen this idea of the proper society. Ruan et al. (2014) cast doubts on this, pointing out that the study used thin sampling, straw-man alternatives, and rather little awareness of traditional Chinese views. In fact, the basic communalist-individualist philosophy is already visible in and indeed basic to the writings of Confucius, and he lived in a millet-dependent area where rice was uncommon. On the other hand, the difference between south and north remains clear, and southern groups that do not cooperate on a large scale to grow rice do not show the high levels of communalistic values (Anderson 2007). Rice agriculture seems to have had some share in values creation, though millet agriculture brought its own responsibilities.

Millets reached the south coast by 5500 years ago, an expectably early date (Dai et al. 2019). However, much of the coast resisted agriculture, apparently because they were doing well as mobile fishers and foragers. Agriculture would have been too massive a shift to appear desirable. On the Fujian coast and Taiwan, agriculture barely made a dent before 3000-2500 BCE, when presumed Austronesian expansion brought advanced rice agriculture. Before that, people lived on fish and seafoods, sago, yams (Dioscorea spp.), Job’s tears, acorns, Cordia fruits, arrowroot, and Canarium nuts (Hung et al. 2019).

Inner Mongolians were consuming millets, beans, nuts, and yams at the same time and even earlier (Guan et al. 2021). Strikingly different is the finding from a site in the Chengdu Plain that shows no occupation at all until 2700 BCE, when millet agriculture appears (d’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2013).

Rice was locally present by 6000 BCE, and remained rare but available (C. Wang et al. 2017). A very early site in Shandong had rice by then, as well as millets. Probably still wild were soybeans, perilla, and chenopods (Crawford et al. 2019).

At Dadiwan, an early site (5500 BCE), many bones were reported as chicken bones, but turned out to be local pheasant (Nuwer 2020). So did the “chickens” reported from other Neolithic sites (Peters et al. 2022). The chicken had apparently not gotten that far north yet. It is native to far south China and southeast Asia, and linguistics strongly implies that it was domesticated by ancestral Tai-Kadai, since the Tai word for it, kai, has gone worldwide (e.g. Cantonese kai; Mandarin ji, derived from kai). The first unquestionable record of domestic chickens that we have so far is of a large number of them at Ban Non Wat, Thailand, 1650-1250 BCE. They are in north China soon after. This is clearly late, and chickens must have been under domestication earlier than that; they appear in the Near East only a few years later (by 1200 BCE)! The problem is that chickens in southeast Asia kept back-crossing with wild jungle fowl, which tame themselves in forest environments, as I have seen in Malaya. There is thus no reliable difference between domestic and wild birds until quite late. Or perhaps one might better say that people kept wild-type but quite tame chickens, breeding them into docility but not separating them from wild birds, who were themselves becoming docile from breeding with tamed stock. 

Wheat, Barley, Oats

Deng (with Fuller et al. 2019) has also reviewed archaeological finds of wheat. Wheat and barley were delayed in acceptance for quite a while, because of local preference for boiling grain into porridge (Archaeology News Network 2020); wheat is terribly slow and hard to cook that way, and barley not very tasty or nutritious (though barley gruel was a staple of old Europe). They were present, and used, by 2500 BCE in northwest China (earlier in east Central Asia, later in central China), possibly popularized by the harsh climate of 2000-1800 BCE, which would have made them popular as a winter crop alternating with the summer-grown millets (Cheung 2019). Millets came late to western China, but wheat and barley were fairly early there, established by 2000 BCE (Xinying Zhou et al. 2016). However, wheat and barley did not take off as foods till the introduction of superior milling technology in Han or slightly earlier (Anderson 1988; Lander 2021). Central China did not really adopt wheat till 1500 BCE (Barnes 2015:417). Cold, dry periods inhibited their spread, after warmer times before the 2000 BCE event helped them (d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky 2018).

New Shandong and Liaoning Peninsulas data show wheat there by 2600 BCE. There is no data from Gansu until 1900. It reached the middle Yellow River and Tibet by1600 (Long et al. 2018). It was probably in Xinjiang well before 2100-1700.

Wheat and barley spread from the west at about the same rate they did in Europe, a kilometer or so a year, reaching China 3000 (northwest China)-2000 (north-central) BCE (Spengler et al. 2016). Millets spread the other way, but more slowly, reaching India and Europe around 2000 BCE or later. Agriculture came very slowly to the northern central Asian reaches, where the climate is hostile. Flax came to China from Europe, but not until the Han Dynasty. Going the other way, peaches and apricots reached northwest India and Pakistan by the second millennium BCE, having been domesticated in China perhaps as early as 4000 BCE (Stevens et al. 20).

These food habits persisted. The more nomadic area of Goukou in Xinjiang subsisted rather steadily on meat, dairy foods, millets, and some wheat and barley from the Late Bronze Age right through the Tang Dynasty (W. Wang 2017). In fact, the area subsists on those foods today, with less millet and some recent growing of maize.

Oats came to China from western Asia by 3400-3000 BCE (Barnes 2015:417), but remained an extremely minor and obscure crop in the far north and northwest (see Buck 1937). Elsewhere, millet outcompeted them as a high-protein, easily boiled grain.

Jiu (liquor)

Best of all, ale residue and brewing equipment have been recovered from the Qiaotou site at fully 9,000 years ago (Dartmouth College 2021). It was made of rice, Job’s tears (a grain still used for beer locally in southeast Asia), and roots (unidentified). The pottery in which the residue was found was painted red and white—some of the earliest painted pottery in the world. Ale then occurs Mijiaya site at 5000 years ago (Wang et al. 2016), as well as from the better-known Jiahu site. The ale from there is something of a fruit mead, including the earliest honey so far noted in China; it comes from the east Asian honeybee Apis cerana. Broomcorn millet, barley, Job’s tears and tubers were fermented together. This is the oldest barley in the traditional lands of China, though equally old barley has turned up in what is now Chinese Central Asia.

From Taixi near Xi’an came other early drinks. A good deal of yeast was found in a jar; another contained peach, plum (?), and jujube pits and sweet clover, as well as jasmine and hemp (!). The earliest known  brewery in China was near the Wei River, at about 3400-2900 BCE. Beer was brewed from barley w broomcorn millet, Job’s tears, yam, lily, snake-gourd root, which occurs in other early brews (McGovern 2017:60). Monascus and Aspergillus molds were and are used as well as yeasts.

Li Liu, one of the top archaeologists studying China, has done a major study of brewing in the Yangshao period (Li Liu 2021). Neolithic farmers brewed using what is now called caoqu, “herbal starter,” of herbs and moldy grain. Most important as a fermenting agent was the worldwide brewing yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is most diverse in East Asia (there are fascinating ancient strains from Hainan Island). She looked at brewing of millet ale with sprouted wheat or maize starter in steamed millet flour, and found mostly that species. She gives a quite amazing list of ingredients in 19 Neolithic beers, almost all including snake gourd (Trichosanthes kirilowii) root, often other tubers, and sometimes foxnut (Euryale). Barley shows up late, but Yangshao at 5000 BP is the oldest known in China. Many of the Yangshao vessels look almost exactly like Mediterannean amphorae (and are called so in this paper). The narrow necks are easy to seal.

At Jiahu in the Huai River area, fruit and honey were used to produce fermentation of a rice beer. At Lingkou and Guantaoyuan in the Wei Valley, and Qiaotou and Xiaohuangshan near Ningpo, Aspergillus and Rhizopus spores indicate a great deal of brewing of millet and rice beers. These fungi in cooked rice produce qu, the ferment basic to brewing in China ever since. Monascus, the red mold that makes the famous red ferments of Fujian and Zhejiang, was found at Xiaohuangshan at 9000 BP. The other sites are roughly contemporary. Rice was already domesticated at Xiaohunagshan (Liu et al. 2023). Brewing there was done in globular jars, and appears to have been served in ritual contexts, possibly to the ancestors.

The northern and western Neolithic ales are made from millet. Beer at Jiahu and Xiaohuangshan was made of rice. Often other grasses (many Triticeae) also appear. Glutinous broomcorn millet was preferred because the amylopectin has a higher conversion to ethanol rate. (Modern millet ales generally use foxtail.)  Li Liu quotes a late Han source on stages of fermentation (from a commentary on the Zhou Li). She has photographs of modern Qiang doing zajiu, a ritual that involves drinking with straws from a communal jar. (This is also very widely found in modern Southeast Asia, among highly traditional small-scale societies.) Few drinking cups occur in Yangshao, so she suggests they used the communal-straw ritual then, and she found marks on amphora necks that look like rubbing by straws, hollow grain stalks whose silica granules leave a distinctive smooth spot. Zajiu is mentioned in the Huayang Guo Zhi of 348-354 CE. Some modern groups have associated dances similar to ones shown on Yangshao bowls. At some point that red Monascus ferment came, probably from east, and spread with rice—even in western China, rice and probably the associated semisolid ferment technique were used.

Ale has also turned up at the great late-Neolithic town of Shimao, in the loesslands of northern Shaanxi. It was made with millet, plus snake gourd root, rice, lily (possibly L. lancifolium) bulb, ginger, some sort of barley-like grass, and beans, all in one lot. It was served in pitchers, whence residue was recovered for analysis. Shimao survived the 2200-2000 BCE cold dry event, but finally gave way at the end of it, around 1800, and was abandoned. However, the ale went right on. It survives today as hunjiu, rather porridge-like, made from barley and broomcorn millet, and using a yeast called Pichia kudriavzevii along with the familiar Saccharomyces cerevisiae (Y. He 2021).

It should be repeated that ale is fermented but not distilled grain-based alcoholic liquor. Beer is the same with hops or other additives to protect it from spoilage; and wine is fermented, undistilled alcoholic liquor made from fruit, flowers, roots, or the like. All are covered by the Chinese word jiu, which was expanded to include distilled alcohol when that came along (probably in the Tang Dynasty). Jiu includes any alcoholic liquid, even tincture of iodine. Sinologists love to mistranslate it as “wine,” and even get defensive about this flagrant error. This could be excused as a “cultural” thing, since ale in old China had the association with song and romance that wine does in European lore, but unfortunately mistranslation is an infuriatingly regular thing in Chinese studies, and carries over from bad biology to mistranslation of basic philosophical and social concepts (“peasant” for free farmers, “caitiff” for villainous enemies, and so on endlessly).

Red yeast remnants have been found in a Peiligang culture site, from around 8,000 years ago—by far the earliest evidence for this classic Chinese fermentation source (Facebook posting by Keith Knapp on Facebook, Dec. 23, 2021).

Other early plants

Peach pits showing evidence of cultivation go back 7500 years in the Yangzi Valley (Griggs 2014). Archaeological records of canarium use have been reviewed by Deng, Huang, et al (2019). One wonders. This tropical tree barely reaches south China and was rather uncommonly used in historic times.

Hemp, a.k.a marijuana (Cannabis sativa), originated in China, though the Indian form (var. indica) may be an independent domestication (see Metcalfe 2019, but his claimed domestication date of 12,000 years ago is preposterous; the truth may be closer to 7,000). A huge amount of it was found in what was suspected of being a shaman’s grave from 700 BCE (Nature 2015b).

The rise of agriculture came slowly in China, especially in areas with rich nut tree forests, because acorns were easier to get. This was even more true in Japan. Agriculture spread surprisingly late there. The reason was the extremely successful adaptation to a tree-nut and fishing economy. Forests of chestnut, acorn, hazelnut, and similar trees were drawn on from earliest times. These were obviously being managed, probably by selective burning, and clearing undesirable seedlings, in the Jomon period (Barnes 2015:112). More evidence is accumulating that there was also management of, and some planting of, annuals. There was also intensive fishing and shellfishing; by analogy to the Pacific Northwest Coast, the shellfish too were probably being intensively managed. All this kept the Japanese from bothering with serious agriculture until massive immigration from Korea brought the joys of rice agriculture around 1000 BCE, with the first known rice paddy in Japan dating to the 10^th century (Barnes 2015:271; see also Graeber and Wengrow 2021 on Jomon’s deliberate avoidance of agriculture). Cultural and skeletal remains had already made the Korean immigration clear, but DNA has fixed it beyond doubt (Robbeets et al. 2021).

Domestic Animals

            Brian Lander and coworkers have written a history of pigs in China that extends from the Neolithic to today (Lander, Schneider and Brunson 2020). Pigs were exceedingly important in China from earliest agricultural times onward. A recent study by Ningning Dong and Jing Yuan (2020) shows that they rapidly increased from their first appearance at Jiahu in 8600 BP to the difficult period from 4200 to 3800, when the climate turned cold and dry, largely due to volcanic action. This was probably the worst climatic period China faced from the end of the Ice Age up to 536 CE. Up to that point, agriculture had been rapidly developing in north China, with Yangshao sites recording up to 90% pig bones among all animal bones, as at Xipo (5800-5500 BP). From 7000 to 5000, the pigs show more and more C₄ diet, i.e. millet feeding as opposed to just foraging.

            A related study by Tao Shi et al. (2022) surveyed animal remains in the entire frontier zone between farmland and what was historically grazing land, from far northeast Tibet (Qinghai Province) to the Liao River area. Agriculture was widespread in the moister parts by 5000 BCE, but wild animals dominated; pigs and dogs were domesticated, but not heavily used. Wild steppe animals prevailed in the southwestern parts of this transect. The northeast was still dominated by forest and little-grazed grassland. Sheep and cattle came around 3000 BCE, horses and goats around 2300, and these came steadily to dominate animal assemblages in the Longshan period. By then, they surpassed pigs as stock and food.

A history of cattle in China by Brunson, Lander and Schneider (2022) notes a rather equivocal jaw find from the northeast dating to 2500-2300 BCE, and more clear evidence soon after, with earlier dates in Central Asia. Wild aurochs were still around as of 1900 BCE. At some completely unknown point, zebus came in from India, and managed to hybridize with regular cattle, producing hybrids in the south and especially southwest. These species do not easily hybridize. In the far southwest, even banteng (Bos javanicus) and gayal (Bos frontalis), local semidomesticated species, got into the mix. Yaks were also domesticated at some unknown point, and hybridize more freely with cattle, producing cattle with more altitude resistance and yaks with more varied coat colors. The hybrids are very commonly created today and in the past, because of their mule-like hybrid vigor, including superior milk production. At Xiaohe in Xinjiang, lactose-destroying fermentation is demonstrated very early.

Sheep/goats and cattle came to China along with, or shortly after, wheat and barley, about 4000 years ago. They probably came via the Hexi Corridor (and possibly elsewhere), and no earlier dates are found there (Ren et al. 2022).

            It now seems even carp aquaculture can go back 8000 years (Archaeology News Network 2019; Nakajima et al. 2019). Many common carp (Cyprinus carpio and C. longzhouensis) up to 75% larger than normal have been found at Jiahu in central China. The local carp is mostly crucian carp (Carassius sp.), a different species, so somebody was raising those common ones, probably from fingerlings caught and transferred to a rearing pond. For further notes on early domestication, including those carp as well as cats, see Dodson and Dong (2016).

Chapter 4. Earliest History: Xia and Shang

Yu the Great tamed the Yellow River by diverting it into many channels and shoring these up, thus eliminating extreme flooding. According to legend, he was a giant, with powers enough to rechannel whole rivers. He was said to pass his parents’ door repeatedly without stopping in to greet them, a breach of filial piety that showed how desperate the floods were. He then, according to tradition, founded the Xia Dynasty. Extensive flooding at the time he supposedly lived confirms at least that part of the story, and the rest seems a greatly exaggerated but not unreasonable record of early accomplishments. One assumes that various unsung leaders tried hard to do what was alleged, and their stories were combined into one superhero (see Li Min 2018:400ff for the latest information).

            At about the time Yu supposedly lived, the site of Erlitou on the middle Yellow River reached urban size and sophistication. Bronzeworking, large-scale architecture, urban planning with districts, and sophisticated crafts mark it as a city. More and more evidence goes to confirm that the Erlitou culture was indeed the Xia Dynasty, with Erlitou itself as capital. The Central Plains Metropolitan Tradition was born.

Erlitou depended largely on pigs and millet, but already had much rice, as well as “small quantities of soy and a few wheat seeds” (Jing et al. 2020:912). A woven grass basket from the time produced residue of soured milk—either yogurt or cheese (Xie et al. 2016). Fruits were known, probably including peaches and cherries.

            “The presence of large, dangerous game such as tigers, rhinoceros and water buffalo suggests the practice of elite hunting known from later Central Plains Bronze Age sites” (Jing et al. 2020:911). Brian Lander (2021) chronicles the enormous amount of hunting in neolithic China and the steady reduction afterward, with game already getting scarce by Xia times. Sika deer, hunted with abandon in previous eras, were more carefully managed, with only adult males being taken—partly because their antlers were prized, for tools and probably for medicine (C. Zhang 2021). They were evidently getting rare enough to make hunters more careful about killing females and young.

            Erlitou was the first city and culture in China to cast bronze ritual vessels, which dominated Chinese art and monumental display for centuries. The city had an inner royal quarter with extremely lavish royal tombs—an ancestor to the “forbidden city” of later times. The city was no larger than the huge late-Neolithic sites, but had 18,000-30,000 people. High-quality kaolin clay was brought from the nearby site of Nanwa, showing that local trade in important materials was well established (Campbell et al. 2022).

            The first city of the Shang Dynasty was Zhengzhou, which still continues as one of the greatest cities in China. The ancient city is under the modern center, making archaeology difficult. One memory I can never stop repeating is from my seeing and photographing beautiful ash-glazed pottery kettles with three small, stubby feet in the marketplace there in 1978—then going to the city’s Shang Dynasty museum and seeing identical kettles, literally unchanged in 3500 years. They may be the oldest ash-grazed pottery in the world. Ash-glazing is simple: as I have seen it in traditional kilns, one takes the ashes from the kiln fire, mixes them with water and usually some dissolved pottery clay, and whirls the vessel around quickly to get an even coating. Then the vessel is fired; the ash-clay-water mix turn to a beautiful green-brown glaze. These were the universal cheap pots of my early days in east Asia; they are now collectors’ items.

Population estimates for Shang Zhengzhou run from 39,000 to 65,000 or even more (Campbell 2022). After a brief time in another city area, the capital moved to Anyang, much more available to the modern spade and now one of the best-known ancient cities in the world. It served as capital around 1250-1050 BCE. It grew even larger, covering 30 square km and reaching 100,000 people. There were many specialized craft areas. Trade flourished; spiced millet ale was identified with merchants. Royal tombs included many sacrificed human victims, totaling many thousand over the term as capital (Campbell et al. 2022). The Chinese city was set in a pattern that lasted for centuries, and, without the sacrifices, for millennia.

            The Shang oracle bones allow a good, if unbalanced, ethnography of Shang China, and the great oracle-bones scholar David Keightley provided one (Keightley 2000). The oracles were often taken in response to disasters, from floods to locusts. Typically, one of the former Shang kings or royal family members had been slighted in the latest round of sacrifices, and was causing trouble to send a message; put another way, the oracles were good excuses to rack the farmers for more food to sacrifice and consume in elite feasts. The focus on disasters led Keightley to conclude that the Shang “may have been nature worshippers [sic]—or, more precisely, worshippers of certain Powers in nature—but they were unlikely to have been nature lovers” (p. 116). On the other hand, many oracles simply asked about hunting, rain, crops, and other mundane and more nature-loving concerns. Cattle were important as food and for transport, and naturally their shoulderblades were popular oracle bones (Brunson et al. 2016; Brunson et al. 2022).

            One king, Wu Ding (1250-1192), did not speak for three years, meaning that communications to and from him were written, leaving us with an enormous record of the time (M. Li 2018:276).

            Officers of the court included a Many Horses Officer and a Many Dogs Officer, in charge of the royal stables and hunting hounds. The latter title was duochuanshi (in modern Mandarin), using an Indo-European term that may have still been recognized as an elite foreign word. (Chuan from something like *kiwon in early Indo-European, the source of our word “hound”; the indigenous Chinese word for “dog” is gou. Both are probably meant to represent the sound of a bark.)

            Jiu of the time was sometimes flavored with such things as peach, plum, jujube, sweetclover, and jasmine; more interesting perhaps was jiu infused with cannabis (M. Li 2018:285-286). By this time, jiu was enormously important in society. From the early Neolithic on, it had grown in importance and ceremonial use. Li (M. Li 2022) has studied the libation ritual as it grew from late Neolithic times into Shang and Zhou. It was the all-important unifier of Bronze Age rule, bringing together the king and the elite. His landmark study draws on contemporary research into food and drink sharing in ritual contexts to produce a major work of alcoholic-beverage research. The complex microbiology of Chinese food, including the ale, and also sourdough millet bread, was already established (Warriner 2022).

Further lore on early foods is found in Adam Schwartz’ study of Shang sacrifices (2019). The vast majority are the usual domesticates, as well as turtles, but wild boar are noted, and—more strikingly—chi, a term later referring to a mythical creature, but here considered to refer to ling, Tibetan antelope and gazelle (Schwartz 2019:40-42), largely on the basis of stylized but identifiable representations on Shang bronzes; the taotie monsters on those bronzes are modeled after real creatures, and some display the long, thin horns and long, thin faces of the Tibetan wild fauna. Bulls were sacrificed, leaving the cows, who had to do the heavy work (M. Lin 2022).

Sika deer were heavily hunted in Shang, but no notable decline was evident, showing the hunt was more or less sustainable (Y. Li et al. 2021). Later loss of the deer may owe more to deforestation than to hunting (see Lander 2021; Mostern 2021).

Cheese dating to about 1615 BCE has been discovered in the Taklamakan Desert, in association with mummies. The material was excavated years ago, but only recently tested. It is a low-lactose cheese made with a bacterial and yeast starter, not rennet (Archaeology, online, Feb. 26, 2015; Harris 2014; Warriner 2022).

Chopsticks have been found in Yin Xu, capital of the Shang Dynasty, dating from later Shang, over 3100 years ago (Warrant and Honten 2008). Chopsticks now have a full, detailed, excellent history of their own (Q. E. Wang 2015).

Chapter 5. Zhou and Warring States

            In the Zhou Dynasty and the centuries of disunion that followed it, millet, pigs, and greens were more and more universal and basic. A few foreign spices seem to have come in late in the time; cloves and black pepper are mentioned. In eastern Zhou, in the central Yellow River plain, women ate more of wheat and barley, still a bit strange and uncommon, while men ate more millet and meat (Y. Dong et al. 2017). The significance of this is obscure; no such gender difference has been noted from earlier periods.

Taxes were low, but not as low as they often became in later times. Mencius held they should not go as low as 5% of agricultural product, since that level was too low to sustain much of a government (Li Feng 2013:193).

Fertilizer in the form of animal manure and plant compost was used. It was later to become a major concern. Human waste, the “night soil” of later times, was probably already used. As David Bello puts it, “China’s urban population, and its attendant rural domesticates, stimulated agricultural production not just by consumption, but by digestion” (Bello 2022:260).

Food was a highly political matter in China. The statesmen and political writers of Zhou and its disunited final centuries constantly emphasized this. The great 4^th century philosopher Mencius said of the common people:  “Those with constant means of support will have constant hearts, while those without constant means will not have constant hearts” (Mencius 1970:97). “The common people cannot live without water and fire, yet one never meets with a refusal when knocking on another’s door in the evening to beg for waer or fire. This is because these are in such abundance. In governing the empire, the sage tries to make food as plentiful as water and fire. When that happens, how can there be any amongst his people who are not benevolent?” (Mencius 1970:187; “benevolent” translates ren, literally “humane”).

            Yan Ying, somewhat later, had a different but revealing insight: “The lord said, ‘Are harmony and unison different?’ Yan Ying replied: ‘They are different. Harmony is like a stew. Water, fire, jerky, mincemeat, salt, and plum vinegar are used to cook fish and meat. These are cooked over firewood. The master chef harmonizes them, evening them out with seasonings, compensating for what is lacking, and diminishing what is too strong. The noble man eats it and calms his heart…. Thus, it says in the Odes, ‘There is a well-harmonized stew….’” (Durrant et al. 2020:217-218; the “Odes” refers to the Shi Jing, “Classic of Songs”, compiled supposedly by Confucius in the 5^th century BCE, and consisting of folk and court songs from Zhou; shi means “songs” specifically not “odes” or “poems”).

            The philosopher Xunzi, a cynical but sharp-minded counterfoil to the ever-optimistic Mencius, gave a memorable definition of nature (ben xing, lit “basic inborn”): It “is what is impossible for me to create but which I can nonetheless transform” (Xunzi, p 199).

            Yet another thinker, Mozi, advocated frugality and thrift. He could be downright puritanical about such matters as wine, meat, and feasting in general (Mozi 2010). China rejected Mozi, with even the relatively abstemious Confucians arguing that eliminating grand feasts would also eliminate society as they knew it. Feasting, or at least good food, were necessary for hospitality and good fellowship. America’s Puritan tradition, by contrast, strongly discouraged such pleasures as good eating. Raised in that environment, I found the debates around Mozi to be quite liberating.

A very different light on food and culture was thrown by Lü Buwei: “One adept at learning is like the king of Qi who, when eating chicken, was satisfied only after he had eaten a thousand feet; if he were still unsatisfied, there would always be another chicken foot to eat.”  -Lü Buwei, from his Lüshi Chunchiu, ca. 220 BCE (Lü 2000:129).

            Food was also a religious matter. Roel Sterckx has carved out a niche as authority on its use in Zhou. His book Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China (2011) has a self-explanatory title; it covers religious uses of food and philosophical issues deriving from those in the Zhou period. Also, Sterckx, with Martina Siebert and Dagmar Schäfer, have edited a major work, Animals in Chinese History (2019). It includes data on sacrifices, cats (probably new in Han), pigs, and other animals, but most of the articles are on cultural issues, not food. An interesting exception is David Pattinson’s article on bees (2019). He notes that bees and wasps were lumped as feng in old China, species were not differentiated. The larvae were eaten. Honey was poorly known. It became known around Han times and popular since Tang, possibly under Buddhist influence. Bees were (and are) known as mifeng, “honey wasps”; significantly, mi for “honey” is an Indo-European loanword, cognate with miel in French. Honey became important medicinally, but has never caught on as a major food, though China now produces much of the world’s honey. The native bee Apis cerana has been domesticated for the purpose, but I think (but do not know) the standard west Eurasian A. mellifera dominates today.

            Francesca Bray, later in the same volume, notes that domestic animals figure less and less large in Chinese agricultural manuals and similar books throughout history, showing an increasing shift to dependence on vegetable food. There was a “golden age of animals” between Han and Tang, when north China was dominated by Turkic and Mongol peoples, with their fondness for animal-keeping and animal foods. Thus the Qimin Yaoshu has considerable material on this. Beef avoidance was popularized by Buddhism, maintaining an uneven but notable role from Song (Bray 2019b; Brunson et al. 2022). Many people still avoided beef to at least some extent when I worked in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Japan almost totally avoided it until very recently. The Qimin Yaoshu also describes a milk drink fermented to destroy lactose; it sounds like modern soured buttermilk (Brunson et al. 2022).

Armin Selbitschka (2018) has contributed an exhaustive and extremely important study of food sacrifices in tombs in Zhou and early Han times. He finds that the usual assumption that food was for the individuals’ consumption in the afterlife is too simplistic. Food was indeed offered for this reason—typically, small amounts, or even empty but labeled vessels, were left, evidently with the assumption that they would turn into an endless supply in the other world. Sometimes, food was simply sacrificed, either to feed the spirit or simply to placate or console or pay respect to it. Food was apparently both sustenance for the dead and respectful homage to their spirits. Sometimes food was explicitly offered to other deities, those that guarded or were otherwise involved with the dead. What does not stand out is any evidence for feasting at or in the tombs. Food in tombs is neatly placed in proper vessels, rather than being the litter from a feast. Feasts may have been held outside the tombs, but there is only thin and equivocal evidence for that. There is also no good evidence for sacrifices outside the tomb.

            Production of food was also complex in ideology. “Overgrown courtyards and tilled fields” occur as a frequent image in Warring States texts, and Tobian Zūrn (2018) has found that the more Daoist-leaning texts tend to use these as symbols of proper rule. Mengzi uses carefully tilled fields as a frequent symbol of civilized life and good governance. The Zhuangzi material includes some cynical comments indicating preference for a more anarchic, wild, unmanaged state.

From the early Zhou Dynasty comes a bronze vessel from around 800 BCE with a fascinating inscription that records the myth of Great Yu and goes on to record ideas about filial piety, virtue (de), the Way of Heaven, and resulting blessings of longevity and blessings (Chen 2013, esp. 153-154). These ideas later became foundational in Chinese philosophy; apparently they were already foundational that early, and in remarkably “modern” phrasing.

            Zongzi, China’s equivalent to tamales, had already appeared. A Chu tomb from the mid-Warring States period, around 300-400 BCE, contained 40 more or less intact and some broken ones. They consisted of rice wrapped in oak (Quercus) leaves. 39 were stuffed with unhusked raw rice, one with millet. They were uncooked, presumably to turn into properly cooked food in the afterlife (China.org.cn, June 21, 2023).

Eastern Zhou infant feeding has been studied by archaeologists, focusing on the site of Xinzheng, a city near Zhengzhou. They found a shift toward more introduced grains, notably wheat, and the tendency of men to eat more millet and meat while women ate more wheat. Teeth show that breastfeeding was universal (in their sample, and probably in general). Weaning was gradual, and at different ages in different individuals. Children, like adult women, ate more wheat and other foods (possibly beans), less millet, than adult men. One suspects that the preference for wheat among women and children indicates that flour milling was already important, since if the grain was being made into whole-grain porridge, millet would surely have been the choice, since it cooks much faster and becomes softer and easier to eat and digest.

Meanwhile, in Yunnan, where civilization was just beginning and spectacular bronzes were coming into style, food was rice, millet (probably foxtail), acorns, and some water plants, barley, and beans (N. Zhang et al. 2017). Wheat became more popular between 1600 and 300 BCE, at least at the Haimenkou site, probably due to drying climate (Xue et al. 2022). The same site revealed many Chenopodium (goosefoot) seeds, probably gathered for food, as well as perilla and cannabis seeds and peach and apricot kernels.

In central Asia, urbanization began in the Tarim Basin around 750 AD, with the usual crops of the time: wheat, barley, and the millets (Dang et al. 2022).

            Critically important is a new tea find: 2,400-year-old tea, a good lump dried up in a cup from the capital of Zhu (Jiang et al. 2021). This shows tea was definitely known and drunk long before Han, and the connection with the southwest is probably significant. Tea shows up in tombs in Tibet and near Xi’an by early Han (Farrer 2017).

Chapter 6. Han and Just After

High-tech wheat milling came to China in Han, allowing the production of dumplings, noodles, fermented wheat sauces, and the like. Wheat noodles appear around 100 (Huang 2000). Thus, wheat began to gain against the classic millets. Sheep, goats, and cattle were slowly gaining against pigs.

The Simin Yueling, an agricultural book from around 160 CE, describes making qingjiang from fermented grain and soybeans—an ancestral soy sauce.

The famous Mawangdui tomb of a marquess contains a final meal: meat skewers, grain, jiu. She was buried with meats, fruits, vegetables, millet, herbs including Sichuan pepper, sugar, salt, pickles, sauce, and various other items (Dunlop 2019b:123).

Water control in Qin and Han included moderately large-scale public projects, including irrigation canals for the dry but fertile Wei Valley, but newly discovered wood and bamboo slips show that small-scale local works were common and that the government took care of repairs in many cases (Lander 2022b). However, the vast majority of waterworks would have been local rice-paddy systems, not yet known to be maintained beyond the very local level. Local maintenance is the rule in wet rice, since fine-tuning at small scales is critical.

Starting from Han but continuing through Qing is a record of famines, assembled and analyzed in the Chinese literature and recently analyzed by Yan Su et al. (2018). They found 4186 famines in the 2117 years of their study—about two per year. The famines were slightly worse in colder areas, but nobody escaped. Cold areas were more than twice as likely to report economically depressed years, partly because they depended heavily on one or two species of millets, usually reliable and tough but vulnerable to bad years. Far more famines were reported in bad harvest years, but even the best years had a few local ones. Periods of sharp improvement (from famine to good times) were 70-90 CE, 580-590, 1140-50, 1280-1300, 1400-1410, 1680-1760 (note that the last is much longer, but after it conditions steadily deteriorated). Good governance was almost as important as climate in making a decade good. Note, however, that all but one of those recovery periods come shortly after a major cold spell (536-580, 1120s, 1300s, early and mid 1600s; see Anderson 2019). The exception, 1280-1300, was an exceptionally warm period. Cold years were deadly.

An ambiguous Han tomb painting shows a kitchen process that may be the making of tofu, or perhaps mash for an alcohol brew. Alcoholic drinks were very well known and widely used (Elias 2020), though drinking was not as fashionable as it later became. Actual tofu is first unequivocally mentioned in the 10^th century by one Tao Gu, in “Anecdotes Simple and Exotic”; he says a magistrate recommended it as a cheaper substitute for meat (Dunlop n.d.:67). This implies it was already well-known and common enough to be cheap, so it had obviously been around for a long time. As Dunlop there points out, it was probably invented as a substitute for cheese. That commodity was familiar in the Tang Dynasty because of heavy Central Asia influence.

            More old tea has just been identified in the tomb of Han Jing Di, 141 BCE (Keys 2016). It was buried with him, along with some rice, millet, and, oddly, chenopod seeds (not known as a food at that time). Victor Mair (email of Jan. 11, 2016) thinks the tea was there as a medicine.

In Han, a large maritime trade developed, extending to India and thus indirectly to Rome via the India/Rome shipping pathways. A major terminus was Hepu, on the Guangxi coast, near the Vietnamese border. It is a good deal closer to the Nanyang than Guangzhou. But Guangzhou had access to the hinterlands via the Pearl River system, and soon ecliped Hepu. A number of fine trade beads made from Indian and other foreign stones are found at Hepu (Xiong 2014). Foods must have been exchanged too. The Indian Ocean was a very busy thoroughfare by then (Beaujard 2009, 2012). Boivin et al. (2013) report on a huge range of domestic and wild animals—including pests stowing away on ships—that spread at this time or soon after it all round the Indian Ocean.

The Huainanzi, predictably enough, combines Confucian and Daoist ideas on government and food supply. The good ruler is removed and “acts inaction” (wei wuwei), stabilizing the universe by his presence but acting as little as possible, even to allowing his courtyard to be overgrown with brush and weeds. The common people, in this idyllic near-anarchist state, will till their fields with great care and diligence. The Huainanzi, an amazing and until recently a most underappreciated work, was compiled by the group that very likely put the Zhuangzi in a largely final form, at the court of Liu An in the middle early Han. The Zhuangzi got its final editing by one Guo Xian (d. 312 C.E). The same group seems to have done the same for the equally underappreciated Guanzi material. What might have been the beginning of really serious science in China was cut short by the rebellion, or alleged rebellion, of Liu An against Emperor Wu (Sima Qian 1993:321-346.) The whole body of materials apparently assembled in Liu An’s court comprises a brilliant and underappreciated collection of political-economic works (Anderson 2014; Liu 2010). Having treated them elsewhere (Anderson 2014), I quote only one line: “when people are in the majority, they eat wolves; when wolves are in the majority, they eat people” (Liu 2010:650). It should not escape the reader that the wolves are not necessarily the four-footed kind.

            Monica Zipki (2018) has shown that the goddesses important in the Chu Ci, an early song collection from late Warring States times, lost ground steadily as male commentators reduced them to commoner or mere symbolic status; the male deities suffered no such demotion. The Chu Ci, “Songs of Chu,” originated from a state probably heavily Thai in culture, far less patriarchal than the Chinese. They came up against a “Han Confucianism” that “consistently elevates yang over yin, heaven over earth, the ruler over the ministers, and male over female, and tends toward strong gender essentialism” (Zipki 2018:345). This connects to food via the intense absorption with foods, tastes, flavors, scents, and sensations in the poems.

Han Confucianism was itself a striking creation. Thinkers at the Han court combined Confucian ideas with Legalistic ones (Sima 1993), producing something of an “iron hand in velvet glove” ideology. Combined with traditional sacrifice cults that shored up imperial power, it was elaborated into a full-scale ideology of expanding empire. Han Confucianism remained the ideology of empire, and still colors Chinese thought today.

             The cynical and realistic Han thinker Wang Zhong provided some insight into Han food in a line about not wasting effort and skill on minor matters: cooking mallow pods with onions does not require Yi Di or Yi Ya, and “to the Village Mother one does not sacrifice a whole ox” (Wang 1907:69, as “Wang Ch’ung,” translation by Alfred Forke). The mallow pods with onions would be the most humble side-dish imaginable; small mallows (Malva verticillata complex) were the coarse but flavorful and nutritious food of the very poor, and I remember nibbling on the pods when I was young. The Village Mother was also a humble and rustic deity, deserving of a small pig at best. The insight into animal sacrifice is worth note: Han continued the vast sacrifices of earlier times, but was beginning to realize they were an awful waste, and cut back. Human sacrifices, already on the wane in much of China, became infrequent.

            Less believable, but still possible, is the hermit described in Liu Xiang’s Shuoyuan (Garden of Eloquence; 2021:219): “In the winter he lived in the mountain forests and subsisted on chestnuts; in the summer he lived in the marshy lowlands and subsisted on lotus root and water chestnuts.” Liu also retails a story from the 7^th century BCE (but almost certainly invented long afterward and embellished by Liu himself): a Lord Xian blew off advice from a poor man with the comment (via an underling, at that): “Those who eat meat are already looking after these matters; of what concern are such matters to those who eat vegetables?” The poor man, Zu Chao, responded with such a brilliant lecture on listening to everybody that Xian made Zu a court tutor. This is very much in line with Liu’s constant emphasis on the importance of listening to everybody, even the poorest, and selecting the good advice. Anyone can be a teacher.

            At the other extreme of credulousness is the tallest story I have encountered in Chinese food lore: Liu An’s discovery of bean curd when he was eating soybean mush in a cave and a stalactite dripped limewater into the dish, precipitating the bean curd (Joo 2022; Dr. Joo is a first-rate food anthropologist and does not take this story seriously). Almost as tall is a story that dumplings were invented by the great medical authority Zhang Zhongjing about the same time. Frostbite, especially of the ears, was common in a hard winter, so he wrapped chopped mutton and healing herbs in dough skins and boiled these dumplings in soup (this odd tale was ferreted out by Jenn Harris of the Los Angeles Times, 2022). Of course, there is no actual record of this, and it implies the dumplings and skins were already known. Some types of dumplings are still called “ears.”

Another fantastic legend about dumplings concerns the origin of the word mantou. According to the Three Kingdoms Romance (uncertain Ming date—long after the episodes it describes, or invents), Zhuge Liang intended to sacrifice 49 people to calm a storm. He was too humane, and made heads of dough instead (Tang and Yue 2013:6-7 quote the whole story; H. T. Huang 2000 also relates it). Of course, the real origin of the word is from Turkic manty, and steamed cakes were well known long before, but a good story is still a good story. Apparently this particular story arose after mantou had become large and unfilled doughballs raised with sourdough starter or equivalent; in Tang they were the small, meat-filled ones we now call baozi (large, raised buns) or jiaozi (small dumplings). Mantou still refers to stuffed buns in Japan, Korea, and some parts of North China. These filled dumplings became baozi in the center and south. (Katy Hui-Wen Hung, Facebook posts, Jan. 4 and Feb. 2, 2021).

Another tall tale concerns the founding lineage of Han: Liu Lei, according to legend the founder of the lineage that later became the Han royal one, not only raised dragons but made fine stews from them (Cook 2013:76).

An entire genre of rhapsodies on imperial hunting parks developed, with famous writers like Sima Xiangru, Pan Yue, and Yang Xiong contributing. These were collected in the Wen Xuan, an anthology dating around 530 CE (Knechtges 1987). These give long and much exaggerated accounts of the beasts and birds in these parks, the enormous size of kills from hunting, and the variety of trees. Imaginary beings reminiscent of the west’s phoenixes and unicorns appear. More to the point is the fact that the writers condemn tying up so much land and resources for sheer luxury, and praise the emperors whenever they release land for farming. Thus Yang Xiong writes in praise: “He opens the forbidden parks, Distributes the public stores…releases pheasants and rabbits, Stores nets and snares; Elaphures and deer, fodder and hay, He shares with the common folk” (Knechtges 1987:135). A later, beautiful ode on a ruined city laments the replacement of exotic luxury items like ostriches by “marsh moss…wild kudzu…snakes and beetles…deer and flying squirrels…field rats, wall foxes,” and overgrowth by poplars, grasses, scrub (Knechtges 1987:257). These poems exhibit what Karen Laura Thornber (2012), in writing about more recent Chinese literature, calls “ecoambiguity”: love and appreciation of the wild, but seeing the need and moral rightness of taming it when people need food and security. The love of both wild and tame, and the regretful awareness of necessity when the wild is sacrificed, has always characterized Chinese literature, though admittedly the “wild” is often a hunting park rather than a wilderness.

            Han developed the changpingcang, “long-level(ed) storehouse,” borrowed by the United States as the “ever-normal granary” in the 1930s—rather a long lag for a desirable cultural borrowing. Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s liberal expert on agriculture, introduced the idea. Wallace got the idea from a Columbia University thesis by Chen Huan-Chang, “The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School” (his Ph.D. thesis, 1911). Chen returned to China in 1912 and worked there. He was a militant Confucian (Bodde 1946).

            Some “mispronunciations” turn out to be more interesting than they seem. Sharp-eared foodies may have noticed that wolfthorn berries, now so popular in the western world as an antioxidant “nutraceutical,” are called either goujizi or gouqizi (American markets sell them as “goji berries”). This is reflected in, and may in fact come from, the fact that the phonetic element of the character for ji is actually pronounced qi, even though the full character (the phonetic plus the “tree” radical) is pronounced ji. The linguist David Prager Branner discusses these cases and others (Branner 2011:107). The same misreading, or perhaps simply a dialect variant that is reflected in the character, affects some other food plants:  qianma “nettle” gets read as xunma, jicai “shepherd’s purse” (a very good cress-like vegetable) as qicai, and pielan  or piela “kohlrabi” as pilan—in all cases the variant pronunciation following the phonetic without the “plant” radicals.

            Goji berries now come from the desert species Lycium barbarum and are produced largely in Ningxia, with rapid expansion, spreading into other dry areas (Dunlop 2019a). There is now even a ceremony for them in Ningxia (Newman 2017b). L. chinense, the common garden plant of the rest of China,is now grown mostly for leaves. Goji berries are literal vitamin pills; they have among the highest vitamin and mineral values of any plant material, as well as being high in antioxidants. They are therefore thrown in handfuls into traditional Chinese strengthening and healing foods. They expanded worldwide as a major “functional food” in the early 21^st century, thoiugh this has leveled off now. Lycium species with superb berries—some as flavorful as raspberries—abound in the United States, and could easily be domesticated; they grow easily in gardens (personal observation). They are said to have less vitamin content, however.

A fine collection of papers edited by Isaac Yue and Siufu Tang (2013) is especially good and complete on “wine” (jiu, actually ale, as the writers know, but they follow the common translation that pays more attention to its cultural status—more comparable to “wine” in Europe than to “ale”). Several papers focus on the rise of drunkenness as an ideal state for the proper sage. Laozi and Zhuangzi did not have this idea, except for brief references to people whose basic nature was to drink and thus did it in spite of social conventions. After 250, the conventions changed, and drunkenness was the expected and idealized behavior of poets; the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, Tao Qian, and other poets of the early interregnum started this, and Li Bai perfected it and modeled the sublime drunkard for all time. Few went as far, even when imitating him—he seems to have been a genuine alcoholic—but later writers from Su Shi to the Korean and Japanese imitators of Chinese verse all immortalized their muzzy states. One hopes for further work on the social aspects of this; Yue and Tang provide much excellent social history of it. Charles Kwong’s paper in their book (2013) is particularly noteworthy not only for its history but for Dr. Kwong’s translations of drinking poems; he gives us a whole anthology of them, genuinely well translated (Chinese poetry is notoriously difficult to turn into readable English).

Three Kingdoms and Northern and Southern Dynasties

            To begin on a light note: “When the first emperor of Eastern Jin set up his government in Jiankang, there were no luxuries; when a pig was slaughtered, the neck meat was reserved for the emperor, the ‘forbidden fillet.’” (Stephen Owen, in footnote on Du Fu’s collected poetry, Du 2016, vol. 5, p. 391). So the emperor was happy with pork neck bones—the stereotypic black poverty dish (along with chitlins) in my childhood!  I love them, whether Chinese-style or African-American-style.

            Early in the period, Ge Hong wrote: “It is not that the Dao is located [exclusively] in mountains and forests, but one who would seek the Dao must enter the mountains and forests, drawing near to their clarity and purity, in his earnest desire to distance himself from the rottenness” (Campany 2001:130-131). Strange stories of the period record immortals feeding humans on moutain-goat jerky, sesame seeds, and the like, and describe thoroughly shamanistic visions, soul-travels, and transformations (Campany 2015).

            And yet another story, told here by Fuchsia Dunlop: “The name of the soup, ‘thinking of perch and water shield’, refers to an old story about an official from these parts, Zhang Han, who was posted to north China in the 4^th century AD. There, surrounded by dry millet fields, an entirely different landscape and foodscape from those of his native Suzhou, he became so consumed with yearning for the sliced fish and water shield of his hometown that he abandoned his post. Ever since, ‘thinking of perch and water shield’ has been not just a poetic name for a soup, but an expression of homesickness” (Dunlop n.d. 59).

We know domestic ducks were common from the fate of Wang Sengda (423-458), who was fired for shamming sick so that he could go to watch a duck fight (Wallace 2017). Duck fighting was not uncommon at the time.

            More serious was drying up of some west Chinese oases in the 500s, probably after 536, when volcanic eruptions massively affected the whole Northern Hemisphere. They were not reoccupied till wetter times in the Medieval Warm Period (K. Li, X. Qin and L. Zhang 2018).

Albert Dien’s work Six Dynasties Civilization (2007) discusses tomb finds, including some notes on food (pp. 359-363). As usual, millet, millet ale, greens, and pork dominated. Bread like Persian nan and dumplings similar to mantou were found in a tomb.

The first Turkic record in China is a single sentence of the otherwise lost Kir language, from the fourth century CE (Shimunek et al. 2015). The authors of the study that reports this find suspect that Turkic peoples, not the Xiongnu, were the “Huns” of early medieval Sogdian record, though the word “Hun” (Hunnu) is almost certainly derived from the word now written as “Xiongnu” (with characters giving it an unsavory meaning, as “slaves”) in Chinese.

            Around 300, Shu Xi (263-302) wrote the famous Bing Fu—a long, rhetorical poem. Bing today means “cakes,” but David Knechtges in his new study and translation (2014, in Swartz et al. 2014) finds it covered all kinds of flour foods in Shu Xi’s time. Thus Arthur Waley’s famous translation of this poem as “Hot Cake” (Waley 1946:86) is too narrow. Shu Xi walks us through the seasons, with filled dumplings, bread, boiled noodles, flour cakes, and all, and then climaxes with a mouth-watering recipe for making the filling and stuffing the filled dumplings—what were mantou then but would now be called jiaozi. Shu notes that bing are of recent origin. Knechtges (2014:449) finds the first reference in the Warring States text Mozi, but the Mozi has had various bits and pieces inserted in it over time, so this could be as late as a Han reference. Shu lists a great number of obscure flour-cake terms, in obvious parody of the arcane and obscure language of more formal fu. (He was criticized for his “vulgar” fu, for which he established a style.)  As he says,

            “some of these names originate in the villages and lanes,

            and some of the methods for making them come from alien lands.”  (Knechtges 2014:453.)

            He reports sifting the flour twice (as my mother used to do, to take out bits caked by moisture), and then describes making filled dumplings by chopping mutton with ginger and onions, spicing with cassia and Chinese brown pepper, adding salt and black beans (presumably fermented soybeans), and stuffing this mix into skins. (Knechtges refers to “thoroughwort” but thoroughwort, Eupatorium, barely occurs in China. A species of the genus occurs, but, like thoroughwort elsewhere, is used as medicine rather than food. Thoroughwort is useless as a spice. Possibly artemisia was meant; it is still used to stuff dumplings in Korea, and it resembles thoroughwort and is related. Less likely, but a known spice of the time, is smartweed, Polygonum odoratum.)

            Knechtges notes that many varieties of bing were already described in Han, as well as ci, dumplings of rice or millet flour. Shu introduces more of the wheat dumplings and cakes. He notes some come from foreign lands, and a couple have strange names, angan and butou (small dumplings like spaetzle pressed out into strips), that may be loanwords from some unknown source (Knechtges 2014:450). Shu describes seasonally eaten cakes, including what may be pancakes for summer and leavened bread for autumn. Spring is for mantou. This is actually the first certain mention of mantou. Coming at a time when western influence was strengthening, in a poem with foreign influence acknowledged, this Turkic loanword (Turkic mantu, manti) is not a surprise. Winter brought tang bing, noodles. Shu waxes ecstatic over laowan, meat-stuffed dumplings. These have the spices noted above, and their wrappings were made with meat stock instead of water. They were eaten with hai, fermented meat sauce. Bing were also made in the shape of pigs’ ears and dogs’ tongues, like the “cow ear” cookies of today.

            Another treasure is a festival and ritual calendar (Chapman 2014) from around 550. It describes all the seasonal festivals, often with the foods traditional at that time. New Year began with sacrificing chickens, then progressed to drinking peppered wine, eating eggs, drinking peach soup, and eating teeth-gluing toffee—teeth knocking together might bring trouble (p. 475). Others prepared the five pungent vegetables: garlic, leek, garlic chives, mustard, and cilantro—Zhuangzi said these opened the viscera, and they apparently protect against bad air. (Garlic may not have been around in Zhuangzi’s time, and cilantro almost certainly was not, coming to China much later.) But Buddhists ban them (p. 476). Cold Food Day was then two days before the spring festival of Qing Ming (it is now shortly after new year). People ate things like malt syrup, sticky rice and barley pastries, and apricot-kernel gruel (477). On the ninth day of the ninth month, people ate pastries and drank chrysanthemum-flavored wine (481).

Another area receiving attention has been the mutual mockery of southerners and northerners that I commented on in The Food of China. Lu Sidao, in the 6^th century, was mocked as a northerner; a southern poet taunted him that in the north “Elm trees thrive with the desire to feed men; Grass grows tall so as to fatten donkeys.”  Elm leaves and fruits were and are a famine food in the north. The south lacked donkeys and apparently found them derisory. Lu Sidao immediately shot back his own couplet, mocking southern stinginess:  “Sharing the rice steamer but not the rice; Using the same frying pan, each cooks his or her fish”—images of selfishness quite similar to mocking lines I have heard myself in south China. (The quotes are from Choo 2014:72.)

The Qimin Yaoshu continues to attract attention, but amazingly little considering its importance. Bray (1984) drew heavily on it for her history of Chinese agriculture. Huang (2000) and Sabban (1988) have examined its fermentation technology. I have described the cooking of the period, including the Qimin Yaoshu and the Tang dynasty, in a recent article (Anderson ms), and need not redo it here. The Qimin Yaoshu is an enormous agricultural encyclopedia, compiled by one Jia Sixie around 544. The book’s name literally translates as “ordinary people’s needed skills.” It has been variously translated and mistranslated; some translations are far from the actual meaning. The book’s accounts of agriculture are detailed and intelligent. They reveal an incredible amount of highly sophisticated, technical, accurate knowledge, comparable to but rather more advanced than such Latin counterparts as Columella. The book describes making all sorts of pickles and fermented foods, making soy sauce and vinegars. Itprovides us with the first account of oil pressing in China (Bray 1984:519), but obviously that skill was well known long before, since oil is repeatedly mentioned in earlier works. Rapeseed and less often hemp, and perhaps sesame, were the feedstocks.

Francesca Bray’s superb accounts of the Qimin Yaoshu (1984, 2019a) are among the very best studies of Chinese food. She translates a recipe for stir-fried eggs: “To stir-fry (chao) hens’ eggs: break into a copper bowl and stir till white and yolk are mixed together. Finely shred the white bulb of an onion, add a pinch of salt and stir-fry in a mixture of soy sauce and hemp [sesame?] oil. It smells and tastes delicious” (Bray 2019a:366). This is still an extremely common Chinese recipe. Green onions (scallions) are normally understood. Sesame is “Persian hemp” in Chinese, hence the question about it; it produces a much better oil than hempseed.

The work also tells us a great deal about dairying and various ways of processing milk. At this time, the north Chinese were heavy dairy consumers. Jia lived under the Northern Wei dynasty, ruled by the Tuoba (Tabghach, Taghbach), a central Asian people speaking Särbi, a language in the Mongolian family. They popularized all manner of central Asian cultural forms, including dairy. He gives recipes for brewing ale, including use of 180 bushels of grain for one batch of “spring ale,” making it clear he was writing for large estates. He lived in a world where slaves, serfs, and peasants (low-status, unfree small farmers) abounded. However, there were very large numbers of free yeoman farmers too. The popularity of his book shows that many of them could read. The old image of traditional China as a handful of Confucian literati in a vast mass of illiterate people is a cartoon. Already in the Han dynasty, common soldiers were writing and receiving letters on the frontier. Literacy in Wei times was not close to 21^st century levels, but was quite appreciable.

Huang (2000) draws heavily on the book for his history of fermentation in China. It describes bean curd, and several types of jiang (fermented pastes), made from beans, wheat, elm seeds (edible and good, from Ulmus sinensis), and meat. Zha, fermented meat or fish ancestral to Japan’s original sushi, is described. Soymilk was known. Artemisia was used then as before to preserve ale and other foods, since its strong alkaloids kill bacteria and insects. (It was also used to line granaries.)

Chapter 7. Tang and Just After

            Beginning, as so often, with a story: Perhaps the greatest insight into Chinese food, and everything else Chinese, is provided by a story from the Jiu Tang Shu (Older Tang History) by Liu Xu (887-946). The emperor found that a man named Zhang Gongyi was patriarch of a family with dozens of people, some connected by ancestors nine generations back, living happily and peacefully together in one great house compound. “When asked how his family managed to reside together for nine generations, Zhang Gongyi (fl. 665) wrote on a piece of paper the character ren…more than a hundred times” (Knapp 2003:17). Ren means “to endure, to forbear.” A similar and much commoner character, ren “humaneness,” is often confused with this in folkloric versions of this story like the English word, it is derived from the word for “person” (ren; originally it used the same character, but was early differentiated by adding the character for “two,” to indicate it is how two or more people should act toward each other). Zhang was only more dramatic about it than millions of other Chinese. The values of forbearance and humaneness are, by widespread agreement over millennia, the core of Chinese moral culture. Without them, China, including its food system, would have been very different.

Treating the Tang Dynasty must begin with citing the great work of Berthold Laufer (1919) and Edward Schafer (1963, 1967, 1977), who established the foundation of Medieval Chinese food history. However, this material was covered so thoroughly in Schafer’s books and my earlier Food of China that it needs little treatment here.

Those who write about Chinese environmental policy love to quote a poem by Liu Zongyuan (773-819) about deforestation; various translatons are cited in the Needham series, Elvin’s magnum opus (2004), and my own work. A notably better translation has appeared, done by Bill Porter (Red Pine, 2019:45-46) and is too good to miss:

“The court sends woodsmen into a thousand mountains

with orders to choose pillars and beams

in ancient groves they cut ten and keep one

shattering the axles of hundred-oxen teams

blocking roadways with piles of logs

leaving hills in ruins and mountains in flames

and nothing that remains intact

no creek or gorge survives the trampling

and most of the lumber isn’t used

Slopes are stripped and ridges left barren

then there’s an armory or a palace fire

and builders look nervous expecting to be blames

don’t you see

the great trees of South Mountain becoming scarce

and those who care even scarcer”

            The fact that this is a general comment on late Tang governance, not just on forestry, is particularly obvious from this notably literal translation. Tang readers would instantly remember Mencius’ story of Ox Mountain, deforested and ruined, used as a parable of how poor upbringing ruins humans. Forests and people have ganying, mutualresonance. This means they share some essential or vital qualities, which may be mystical, or, as here, may simply be that they respond similarly to similar management. The poem, like Mencius’ story, goes beyond simple analogy into a whole philosophy of governance. Unfortunately, the government did not listen; it is from this time that the mixed deciduous and evergreen forests of central China begin to be rapidly degraded (F. Lu et al. 2019, and see Campbell’s account below in Ming).

The indefatigable Tang and Yue quote a strange but very Tang poem I can’t miss here, a description of a pig dish, supposedly written by a monk dressed in purple (presumably a Daoist):

Its snout is long and its coat is short,

With a bit of fat it is raised on mountainous herbs;

It is wrapped in a layer of banana leaf and steamed,

When cooked it is eaten with an apricot sauce;

Its colour is red and it is served on a golden plate,

Its texture is soft enough to be picked apart by jade chopsticks;

To compare it to a dish of lamb,

The lamb is as fitting as the rattan.”

            (Tang and Yue 2013:8.)

I have no idea what the rattan is about.

      A sadder poem comes to us from Pi Rixiu, a farmer turned poet:

Deep into autumn the acorns ripen,

Scattering as they fall into the scrub on the hill.

Hunched over, a hoary-haired crone

Gathers them, treading the morning frost.

After a long time she’s got only a handful,

An entire day just fills her basket.

            The poem goes on to blame high taxes for taking all her grain and reducing her poverty (Nienhouser 1979:79-80). Ennin, the Japanese traveler, also noted acorn-eating about this time (Nienhouser 1979:79-80; Reischauer 1955), as well as eating filled dumplings then called mantou but now jiauzi. Recall that acorns were a staple food before agriculture. They are still eaten in China.

            One Huangfu Shi (777-835) was highly aware of varieties of jiu. He noted occasions (snow-viewing to flowers etc), colors, and tastes. These, following tradition, were gan (sweet), chun (mellow), ku (bitter), lie (refreshing), bo (light), and hou (heavy). He wrote:

            “As to [the taste of] drinks, those having rich but refreshing flavors and a sweet aftertaste can be compared to the sages; mellow but bitter and with a golden color can be compared to the worthies; sour and light with dark color can be compared to simpletons. [Furthermore], the hosts who intoxicate guests with glutinous rice-based homemade drinks are gentlemen; with millet-based homemade drinks are middlemen; and with unclean ashed drinks bought from the market are villains” (cited in Guo 2021). In modern terms, we might think of Belgian ale, microbrewery IPA, and “lite” beer.

            Tang did better than Han in grain production and transport (Z. Wei et al. 2018). This was apparently due to better governance, since the climate was similar.

            Charles Benn, in China’s Golden Age (2002), has provided a thorough account of Tang food. It was simple and bland by modern standards. Millet continued to be the staple of ordinary people, but wheat rose spectacularly in importance, as central and west Asian foodways flooded in over the vast complex of channels rather vaguely lumped as the “Silk Road.” Jiu also diversified, with grape wine imported and occasionally made within China, and distillation beginning to enter the picture. The height of gastronomic delight, judging from the poetry of Du Fu and others, was raw fish, sliced and variously seasoned. Freshwater fish was the usual source, at least for the poets, living along rivers and lakes (Anderson ms).

            What Tang and Yue and Charles Kwong (2013) do for alcohol, Ronald Egan (2013) does for tea in the same volume; he focuses on the Song Dynasty, when tea was particularly favored as a subject for song. His translations too are fine and readable, often being the best available, and should be duly quoted in any work on tea or on medieval Chinese food (I wish they had been available when I wrote my 2014 book, which was actually completed in 2013).

            On a different note, Han Shan wrote of luxurious recipes in terms that seem quite familiar now—as is his militantly vegetarian condemnation of them for taking life:

            “The unfortunate human disorder

            A palate that never wearies

            Of steamed baby pig in garlic

            Of roast duck with pepper and salt

            Of deboned raw fish mince

            Of unskinned fried pork cheek

            Unaware of the bitterness of others’ lives

            As long as their own are sweet”

                        (Han Shan 2000:173)

            A Shiliao Bencao “Basic Herbal of Food Cures,” was written by by one Meng Shen, 621-713. Only fragments exist. Ute Engelhardt (2001) reviewed in an outstanding article what we know of Tang dietary medicine. Nutrition was important and widely studied, but knowledge of it was young and not deep. It was to increase over time.

            An Arab source from 851-852 notes foods that voyagers encountered in China. The Arabs knew mainly Guangzhou (known to them as Khanfu):  “Their food is rice. They often cook a sauce to go with it, which they pour on the rice before eating it. Their ruling classes, however, eat wheat bread and the flesh of all sorts of animals, including pigs and other such creatures [i.e., unclean in Islam]. They have various kinds of fruit—apples, peaches, citrons, pomegranates, quinces, pears, bananas, sugarcane, watermelons, figs, grapes, serpent melons, cucumbers, jujubes, walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pistachios, plums, apricots, serviceberries [hawthorns], and coconuts…. Their drink is a wine made from rice…. Grape wine is not to be found….” (Abü Zayd al-Sīrafī 2014:37). It would appear that the ancestral form of the modern Cantonese contrast of fan “cooked rice” and sung “sauce for cooked rice” already existed. The almonds, hazelnuts and pistachios would have come from the Near East, traded by the seafaring merchants who supplied the information. Evidently they were common enough in late Tang to seem regular foods in the port cities. Weirdly, this source says the Chinese for tea is sākh (p. 49).

            Tang history relates that the Gopi kingdom in India presented “yu gold aromatic” to the Tang court in 647—the first mention of saffron in China (Yan Liu 2018). Buddhists then took to using it for scenting and purifying.

Chapter 8. Song and the Conquest Dynasties

Song saw the development of the Chinese agriculture familiar since: intensive wet-rice agriculture with improved varieties; multicropping everywhere; more use of manure; better water control (Feuerwerker 1995:54); more rationalized integration of silk with food production; rationalized, market-oriented production of such local specialty crops as sugar; and intensive urban marketing. This all led to the development of a middle class with bourgeois culture, and the famous “sprouts of capitalism” (zibenzhuyi mengya) that never grew into capitalism but did grow into a state-mercantile type of economy. Banqueting in this period and later is notably shown in art (Kwok 2019).

A detailed study of agriculture in Fujian, from Song through Yuan, is provided by Billy So (2000). The fast-growing rice from Champa came, but yielded less well than local rices, and thus did not catch on until later. Population was dense, causing people to turn increasingly to the ocean, starting Fujian’s career as a major trading center and a major exporter of people to the Nanyang (Southeast Asia) and later the world.

China fought the Xixia (Tangut) state, with no success until the great statesman, thinker, and outspoken reformer Fan Chengda was put in charge. He quickly forced the government to provide decent armor and resources. He went on to mentor the major political reformers of the following period. Fan, one of the more sympathetic characters in Song history, was a brilliant, far-traveled diplomat and scholar with superb literary talent. He also wrote important texts on statecraft, including agricultural policy, the importance of which he stressed (P. J. Smith 2017). He had an insightful grasp of ecology, seeing the erosion caused by deforestation (Bello 2022:280). The mountains of Guizhou proved particularly erodable.

Joseph McDermott and veteran Japanese Sinologist Shiba Yoshinobu contributed a book-length chapter on Song economy to the Cambridge History of China (2015). They report that this was the time when China truly became a yeoman nation. Serfdom was declining. Bondservants could now own property. Slavery was about gone. Small-scale private landholding was the rule. From this point on, it is even less correct than before to refer to China’s farmers as “peasants.” They were free farmers, not entailed cultivators with limited rights (p. 350f.).

The shift to the south continued, with some areas registering 1200% increases in population while parts of the north declined up to 10% (p. 330-332). “In 609 the four key northern provinces of Sui dynasty China had held 73 percent of the empire’s populace…in 1290 it was 20 percent” (p. 434).

Population of northern Song reached about 100 million, and the total of southern Song and Jin regained that level after conflict, reaching 110-120 by 1215 (Mote 1994). Among government measures to help with rising population and pressure on resources were issuance of important agricultural manuals. The Nongsang Qiyao, “Needed Knowledge of Agriculture and Sericulture,” was a government manual from 1273, but early editions are lost (Bray 1984:71). In 980 China had only 35 million people, according to an admittedly conservative estimate. Population reached 124 million in the 13^th century, but dropped to 75 by 1391, after the rise and fall of Yuan (Cao 2022).

The Medieval Warm Period greatly benefited Song’s enemies, making inner Asia from Mongolia to Tibet warmer and wetter. Song did not benefit. The north was warmer but drier, keeping yields down (Bello 2022:263). The south was wetter, causing floods.

Terrible famines occurred widely in north China in 1075 and the 1100s (see also Zhang 2016), often resulting from flooding perhaps associated with northward movement of the monsoon in the Medieval Warm Period. Infanticide is mentioned as a problem for the first time in Chinese history (McDermott and Yoshinobu 2015:411). Part of the problem was the famous deforestation for ironmaking and other industrial uses requiring firewood. Tools improved; the modern Chinese plow developed, and harrows, rollers, and other farm implements were widespread (p. 353-355). The fast-growing, high-yielding rice from Champa (central Vietnam) spread rapidly and was an important crop; earlier claims to the contrary turn out to be wrong (p. 394-402).

Ling Zhang (2016) has examined in detail the problems caused by the Yellow River to Northern Song. She sees the river as a major actor in a drama; the government frantically tried to control the river, but it proved uncontrollable, constantly flooding and changing its course. Centuries of deforestation and intensive farming had allowed massive erosion, which led to silt aggradation of the riverbed, filling in and overwhelming of wetlands, and flash floods from the mountains and hills. At this time, winter wheat was becoming an important crop, but need for irrigation limited its extent in most of northeast China. Famines were regular and population declined. The book is a brilliant tour-de-force of analyzing the role of rivers and of human failure in the wake of human irresponsibility. The Yellow River remains a problem today. Research by Guodong Li and associates (2019) has confirmed her story: the climate in Northern Song was slightly warmer than now, but erratic, with cold periods and erratic flooding.

Some degree of the hard times can be gauged from the fate of the Imperial family. Of the 183 recorded children of Song emperors, two died in war, 83 died young, 99 survived childhood, and one is lost to the record—a child mortality rate around 48% (Zhang 2017a). This is probably typical for imperial families, given the number of child emperors and of emperors who died without children. The most prolific Song emperor, Huizi, had over sixty children, none of whom survived. (See Anderson 2019. Modern China’s infant mortality rate is 1%. The United States is half that. Presumably the deceased imperial children did not all die as infants, but still the rate is sobering.)

One relief came from forestry. Song created enormous needs for timber, because of construction, iron-smelting, and even writing—ink was made by low-oxygen burning of pines (it later was made from vegetable oil). Creative forest communities took to tree-farming, and developed a genuinely scientific forestry, almost exactly like that which Germany developed in the 19^th century (McDermott 2013). Cunninghamia lanceolata, China fir, wasthe most valued. It grew straight and clear to 50 mt. A later book, the Nongzheng quanshu (Complete Book on Agriculture), by Xu Guangqi, 1630, tells how to plant and care for them (McDermott 2013:384). This stands as one of the more amazing cases of China long preceding the west in technical achievements. The forests also produced other commodities, including chestnuts and other nuts, medicinal herbs, orchids, wild fruit, wild vegetables, and mineral resources (McDermott 2013:278-279). Second only to timber was tea, rapidly becoming a major crop in Song.

Ian Miller takes up the story in his book Fir and Empire (2020). Tree farming continued, and does so still. This story will be picked up again in the Qing section.

Patricia Ebrey’s detailed biography of Emperor Huizong of Song (2014) has some notes on food. “1,069 cooks and cooks’ helpers working in the palace. Feeding everyone in the palace require several thousand pounds of flour a day, and each year tens of thousands of sheep and thirty-two tons of sugar” (pp. 7-8).

 “One dumpling restaurant had more than fifty ovens and dozens of workers…. Large restaurants might specialize in regional cuisine, such as the Sichuan restaurant that served ‘noodles with meat, noodles with preserved meat; noodles with various forms of meat or vegetable topping, stewed meat, fried giblets of fowl, and rice served with toppings both raw and cooked’” (p. 23; the quote is from S. West in the Hawai’i Reader).         

            In late Southern Song times, Wu Zimu listed the absolute necessities: “the things that people cannot do without every day are firewood, rice, oil, salt, soybean sauce, vinegar, and tea. Those that are just slightly better off cannot do without hsia-fan [xiafan, ‘food to help get the rice down’] and soup.” (Freeman 1977:151). Another list says “oil, salt, soy sauce paste, salted fermented beans, ginger, wild pepper and tea” (Wang 2016:83). Tea may have been “essential” only to well-to-do people in tea-growing areas, but the text does not say that, and clearly tea was widespread and popular. The phrase xiafan is interesting; it was later replaced by cai in Mandarin, sung in Cantonese. It reminds one of similar phrases worldwide, as in the American “potatoes and with-it,” the Latin cumpanagium (modern Italian companaggio), the Malay lauk, and the modest sentence that a rural cook used when he taught a particularly fine sauce to Escoffier, “it helps the bread go down.”  The references to soy sauce are probably to solid paste, but modern-type liquid soy sauce begins to appear at this time. It was then a specialized product, most popular in the lower Yangzi, and remained relatively more common in that area until modern times (Leung 2021).

Wang Zengyu (2016 [originally in Chinese, 1998]) has given a wonderful and thorough account of food in Song times, based largely on literary sources: poetry, literary records, miscellaneous discourses, and similar source materials. (I would love to know more about one called “Chicken Rib Discourses.”)  The essay is ornamented with copious quotes from these sources, reminding the reader that Song writers were second to none in their ability to report sharp observation with literary skill. Many quotes are from the intrepid Fan Chengda.

Wang finds that millets were still staple foods in north and northwest China, though wheat was widespread. Rice was the unquestioned staple in the south. Meat, vegetables, and fruit were as now, except for the lack of New World foods. (The English version mentions “papaya,” but that is a translator’s error for quince.)  Vegetables included many varieties of Chinese cabbage, as well as lettuce, spinach, ginger, scallion, shallot, chives garlic, eggplant, the usual gourds, taro, yam, burdock root, radish, wild-rice stalk, alfalfa, perilla, seaweed, wormwood shoots, fern, celery, arrowhead, arrowroot, lotus rhizome, and various mushrooms. Several wild greens were used, and were painstakingly and commendably identified in text (Wang 2016:67).

Pickling preserved most of these, especially the greens and radishes. Pickles were eaten widely, and were evidently a major part of diet. Sean Chen’s excellent translation of Madame Wu’s Song-dynasty cookbook (Chen 2023; see also Anderson 2023) confirms most of these vegetables, and the importance of pickling. In fact, the Chinese original is one of Wang’s sources. Madame Wu’s 75 recipes include no fewer than 51 for pickling and preserving, ranging from long-term preservation down to marinating to keep food fresh for a few days. Meat, fish, bamboo shoots, eggplants, and many other items were preserved, as well as greens. Clarissa Wei’s excellent cookbook of Taiwanese foodways (2023) includes a recipe for pickled mustard greens that is virtually identical to Madame Wu’s. Sean Chen envisions the Song kitchen as well stocked with jars of all sizes, to hold all the preserved goods.

Fruit included many forms of apricot and peach, a huge variety of pears (including very large ones), apples, cherries, pomegranates, mei, lotus, loquat, tangerine, kumquat, orange, pomelo, wolfthorn berries, grape, chestnut, hazel, ginkgo nuts, jujubes, carambolas, melons, quinces, torreya nuts, water caltrop, water chestnuts, and the like (Wang 2016:74). There was a modern-sounding gourmetship of tea and alcohol. Distilled alcoholic drinks were known (Wang 2016:80; the “not” is a mistake) and included some known today, such as “rose dew” (rose-flavored vodka). The usual ales were made, but true wine was made from grapes and several other fruits. Tonics included alcohol infusions of rose, chrysanthemum prickly ash, foxglove, wolfthorn berries, and even vipers (Wang 2016:80); these survive today. Malt sugar and cane sugar were both widely used and sometimes mixed. Varied and wonderful sweets were produced. Sugar milling was highly developed (Mazumdar 1998).

Cooking methods were as today. Court cuisine was famous, and famously expensive. Restaurants and catering flourished. Holidays were celebrated with fine foods, as usual. Many have noted that China’s elaborate, meticulous, diverse cuisine began in Song. Tang records show no trace of it; from Song onward it is everywhere. In fact, a self-conscious counter-tradition arose, influenced by Buddhism as well as Chinese thought, that idealized elegant simplicity. Andrea Montanari (2020) has recently written a superb study of simple soups from Su Shi onward in Song thought and ideal. She quotes many poets of the time on the virtues of a simple soup of shepherd’s purse (a tasty but minor roadside herb) and the like.

Wheat foods were important everywhere. Baked cakes were shaobing, boiled ones (similar to modern year-cakes) were tangbing, steamed ones zhengbing (Wang 2016:60). Dumplings were already as important and almost as varied as they are today. Stuffed buns, mantou-like solid breads, wontons, and baozi abounded (Wang 2016:62). Noodles were particularly creative: there were noodle soups with pork, lamb, chicken, bamboo shoots, and others. Shaobing (a.k.a. hubing, “Iranian cakes,” removing all doubt of their Iranic origin) could be stuffed with anything from pig pancreas to sesame to marrow (Wang 2016:61).

The custom of feeding sweets to the kitchen god two weeks before New Year, so he would say only sweet things when he went to Heaven to report on the family for the year, was already established; it is recorded by Fan Chengda (Wang 2016:418-419).

Duck fighting was common at the time. Somewhat outside the range of food, but important, is the note that, while constructing the town of Pingxia, “residents saw three lizards there and built a shrine for them.” The lizards eventually became the “Marquis of Favourable Resonance, Marquis of Favourable Bestowal, and Marquis of Favourable Protection….. It is certainly beyond modern people’s imagination that three lizards could be apotheosized and given noble titles” (Wang 2016:423).

Pregnancy involved a whole realm of avoidances, to prevent marking the child. If the mother ate rabbit meat, the baby would have a harelip (a common belief in the west, even within my memory). If she ate lamb, the baby might be weak. If she ate turtle, the baby would have a short neck. If she ate donkey meat, the pregnancy would go on too long (donkeys carry their foals for about 11 months). And so on (Zhang 2017a:266). After a death, people were supposed to fast for three days, then avoid meat and alcoholic drinks for 25 months—into the third year (Zhang 2017b; he relates a non-ghost story of a skeptical monk who was detailed to guard a house against ghosts, and saw none until a strange creature appeared out of the dark, moaning, and capped by a pottery jar; he soon discovered it was the house dog, who had got his head stuck while foraging in a food jar).

Minorities in the south ate what they could get, especially the usual grains and root crops, and fish along rivers and coasts. There were already boat people in the far southeast, living on their watercraft and subsisting largely on fish and seafoods, often eating the fish raw (Wang 2016:91).

The custom of “buying water” from the river, to wash the corpse of a parent, was already established, among the Zhuang (Zhang 2017c:348). This recalls an experience from my field work in 1965. We had to purchase water from a nearby pumped well. When asked the standard Cantonese greeting “where are you going?” I at first said “to buy water.”  I got very strange looks. Obviously, something was wrong, so I asked my field assistant. I learned that one uses the phrase “buy water” (maai seui) only when one is obtaining water to wash one’s parent’s corpse!  This now turns out to be a Zhuang custom, carried right over into 20^th-century Hong Kong; the Cantonese are basically Sinicized Zhuang, after all.

To Wang’s survey, there is rather little to add. Crabs were the subject of two works, Monograph on Crabs in 1060, Discourse on Crabs in 1080; neither has recipes, alas, but Jacqueline Newman has made up for it by providing a huge number of wonderful ones in her article noting those books. Such monographs were known as pulu, and were a genre beloved of Su literati. They further inspired a subgenre of punned accounts in which the description of sea food, or other commodity, could also be read as a description of a human. Possibly the ultimate in this form was achieved by the great writer Su Shi. In his time, scallops were popular enough to inspire him to create a fictional discourse in which the scallop appears as a human scholar. The ambiguity and frequent double or multiple meanings of classical Chinese allow the entire essay to be read two ways: as a description of the scholar’s career and as an actual description of a scallop. Such perspective-taking is not unusual in Chinese fiction (Mai 2020), but few if any could do such a sustained and perfect job of it as Su.

A Song work, Records of Home Cooking by one Madame Wu, said to be from Pujian in Zhejiang, was the first cookbook by a woman (probably in the world). Her cookbook has received an able scholarly translation by Shen J. S. Chen (2023), who we will meet again below as translator of Yuan Mei’s famous food book. Madame Wu’s given names are unknown, and even her existence has been questioned, her name being perhaps a pseudonym.

In any case, she wrote a fine food book. It is not simply a cookbook; 51 of the 80-odd recipes are for preserving food, not preparing it directly for the table. Most of the recipes are as simple as those of Tang, but a few reflect the more elaborate, spicy cuisine that was emerging in her time. Six recipes are for central Asian wheat-flour items, one even bearing the name saboni, from Greek sapouni “soap” via Arabic sabuniya “soapy” and Turkic sabuniye—a very unusual linguistic chain for Chinese, though typical of Central Asian medicinal name borrowings. Wu’s book also has several fish, shellfish, and crab recipes (Newman 2016a).

            The great poet Lu You gave us a poem about eating sheep yogurt with cherries in Hangzhou, thus showing that yogurt, a thoroughly northwestern food, was eaten even in the lower Yangtze (Miranda Brown, Facebook posting, Aug. 28, 2021).

            Pure Offerings in the Mountains (Shanjia qinggong) by Lin Hong (1224-1263) is “the only extant book-length text devoted to food appreciation with detailed descriptions that has survived to the present” (W. Wang 2024:94) from the Song. It includes recipes, anecdotes, descriptive appreciation, and poems by Lin and his friends. Like many Song gourmets and aesthetes, he idealized the plain, natural, and simple. Wandi Wang, in a noteworthy article on his work, quotes this couplet:

            “Delicately I chew apricot buds by the little window,

            Fresh verses issue from my mouth, every word fragrant.” (Wang 2024:110, corrected). This article was extracted from a longer Ph.D. thesis (Wang 2025), filled with details on food writings in Song, with historical references from earlier and follow-up notes from later dynasties. Lyrical cookbooks—books with brief recipes in rhyme—were a rare but noted feature of the period. The recipes are not very adequate for preparation, but the poetry was liked in its time. Wang notes that these cookbooks merged into miscellaneous-note collections, occasional verse collections, and other somewhat casual formats. Still, Wang feels they deserve consideration as a separate genre. The thesis also includes a long passage on qing, “pure,” a fascinating word. The character by itself means cool and pure colors (green, blue, gray); with the water radical, “pure, clean, simple”; with the grain radical, “nature”; with the word radical, “please” (the standard word for “please” in Chinese); with the ice radical, “cool”; with the heart radical, “true feelings.” These are all etymologically related, but the links need more teasing out.

The flowers of the mei (sour apricot) have a wonderful carnation scent, and can perfume the breath. These flowers were much in vogue in late Song poetry. Hans Frankel (1952), in his excellent and valuable monograph on this plant in Chinese poetry, says “practically every poet felt obliged to devote some poems” to them (quoted Wang 2024:110). Lin goes on to provide a dozen recipes for the flowers and fruit. The flowers were infused in water to flavor various recipes. They were actually eaten, not just sniffed. The great Song poet Yang Wanli loved to eat them, candied among other ways (Wang 2025:114). We will later meet  Cao Xueqin’s description of making tea with melted snow that has fallen on these flowers. Snow did once fall on a flowering apricot of mine, and I was able to try this. The carnation scent does indeed come through. Lin Hong gives a recipe for the flowers and fruit macerated and fermented together in snow water (Wang 2025:124).

Lin’s recipe for fried imitation meat recommends decorating this vegetarian pleasure, and one’s home, with apricot flowers. Other recipes are equally simple, such as rabbit slices cooked hot-pot style in boiling water and eaten with the resulting soup (Wang 2024:112). Not even one peppercorn. Another recipe involves “green essence rice” (qingjing fan), plain rice flavored with the juice extracted from stems and leaves of an obscure wild plant (Wang 2024:114-5), or other green items, including “green stone fat,” which I take to be green algae growing on rocks; it has an earthy savor. He was not averse to real meat; he gives what may be the first clear reference to hotpot in China, in his poem work. Rabbit, pork or lamb slices were marinated in jiu, soy sauce, and brown pepper (presumably ground), and held by the eaters in boiling water till done. Then as now, much of the pleasure came from the communal activity (Wang, quoting Lin, 2024:151). A modern “influencer” whose public name is “Between Mei and Food” (Meishijian—homophonous with “no time,” a deliberate irony) has re-created Lin’s recipes on social media (Wang 2025:230).

            Wandi Wang also deals with the Chinese olive (Canarium album). This fruit was an exotic item of the far south in Song times, and to some extent still is. The fruit is pickled, resulting in something like a Greek olive, but with a sharper, more bitter, more complex taste and aftertaste.

“Olives” 橄欖

江東多果實，East of the River, there is an abundance of fruit,

橄欖稱珍奇。Olives are regarded as precious and rare.

北人將就酒，Northerners pair them with ale,

食之先顰眉。Eating them first leads to a furrowed brow.

皮核苦且澀，The rind and seed are bitter and astringent,

歷口復棄遺。And they pass through the mouth, then are cast aside.

良久有回味，After a while, there is a lingering taste,

始覺甘如飴。Eventually sweetening like malt sugar.

我今何所喻，What now shall I compare them to?

喻彼忠臣詞。To those words of loyal ministers—

直道逆君耳，Direct words which oppose the emperor’s ears,

斥逐投天涯。Resulting in banishments to the ends of the earth.

世亂思其言，In a chaotic world, their words are recalled,

噬臍焉能追。Gnawing one’s navel, it is too late to turn back.

寄語採詩者，A message to those who gather poems:

無輕橄欖詩。Never underestimate the poetry of the olive.

Wang Yucheng (954-1001). Gnawing one’s navel is a Zuo Juanism for facing the impossibility of fixing a missed opportunity. Tr. Wandi Wang (from Wang 2025). She adds that Ouyang Xiu compared Mei Yaochen’s poetry to olives:

“Recent poetry is especially antique and hard,

when you chew it, it’s bitter and tough.

It’s also like eating olives,

the true flavor grows richer with time.”

Huang Tingjian also wrote a similar couplet: “Just like tasting olives, / only after the bitterness does the flavor endure” (Wang 2025:102). The kernel of Canarium spp. is also edible, and is a choice food from southeast China throughout southeast Asia and Indonesia.

“Coarse tea and insipid rice” were snubbed by the elite, but praised by some devotees of simplicity and plainness, an aesthetic convention of the time, stimulated by Daoism and Buddhism (Yue 2017). Plain, simple food was adulated by hermits, Buddhists, Daoists, and poets at mountain retreats. The latter were possibly recovering from the great feasts that pleased the affluent.

            In Song, one Zhu Yijong was took on a hermit persona, calling himself dayin weng (great graybeard hermit), and wrote a lot on booze. His instructions for brewing are interesting. Tumi was boiled and mashed rice or similar grain; qu and maybe some wheat malt were added to it; then a sweet rice paste made; then the whole refermented (touru) together. Cocklebur (canger), spicy knotweed (laliao), or golden hop (shema) could be added [presumably to keep from spoiling, though the knotweed would flavor it]. He noted that dianle meant failed fermentation (Guo 2021).

Toward the end of Song, one Wu Zimu wrote a book called Menglianglu, “Account of a Gruel Dream” (1274; the reference is to an old story of a man who dreamed he had a long and adventurous life and awoke to find it had all taken place in a time so short that the gruel that was cooking before he went to sleep was not cooked yet). Wu also recorded the above list of necessities, and also recorded foods in the pleasure houses of Hangzhou: they “sell unusual teas and curious soups…powdered tea, pancakes, onion tea, and sometimes soup of salted beans.” In summer “plum-flower wine with a mousse of snow,” and cooling herbs (Lane 2019:83).

In Central Asia, the Turpan Depression (where temperatures range up to 49 C and rainfall is less than 2 cm./year) in Tang and Song was consuming wheat, barley, millet, grapes, walnuts, and desert plants and animals. It now raises cotton, melons, sorghum, and jujubes as well, most of those appearing and developing as crops during or soon after Song (Li-Feng Yao et al. 2020).

The Khitan, Jurchen and Tangut (of Liao, Jin and Xixia respectively) ate wheat products and meat, and especially reveled in dairy products. (See Franke and Twitchett 1994.) They did a great deal of hunting and fishing. The Khitan first-fish rite was famous—a vitally important state ritual. The fish was a huge sturgeon caught by ice-fishing (Wang 2016:95). Game meats included deer, raccoon dog, bear, marmot or ground squirrel, and game birds. Wild fruits and nuts included hazelnuts, chestnuts, pine nuts, cornels, pears, and the like; salt could be used to preserve foods (Wang 2016:97).

Surprising detail exists on Liao and Jin foods and feasting, since Song courtiers often traveled to and from their courts, recording useful or interesting lore. A Song travel writer named Fu Bi described a feast held near Liao’s southern capital:

“Decorated wooden bowls brimmed with [slavish] food. First came camel gruel, consumed with a ladle. There was stewed bear fat, mutton, pork, pheasant, and rabbit, and there was dried beef, venison, pigeon, duck, bear, and tanuki [raccoon dog], all of which was cut into square chunks and strewn onto a large platter. Two hu youths in pristine clothing, each holding a napkin and a knife and spoon, cut all of the various meats for the Han envoys to consume” (Tackett 2022:143). “Slavish” here translates lu, a traditional slur-word for central Asians. Hu is another word for central Asians, less derogatory and implying more urban, less nomadic people.

Yuan

            The Mongols at first had little respect for the Chinese. Yelu Chucai, a descendent of Liao  royalty, took on the role of advising them on how to deal with their conquests. A commemorative stela to him provides a surely exaggerated account: “Thus, the imperial commissioner Bekter and others all said, ‘Although we have conquered the Han men, they are really of no use. It would be better to get rid of them all and let the vegetation flourish to make pasture grounds.’  Yelu Chucai answered: ‘So large is the civilized world, and so rich are the lands within the four seas, that there is nothing you might seek that you cannot obtain. But you simply do not seek it. On what grounds to you call them useless?’” He pointed out that those Chinese farmers could pay a great amount of taxes, and thus memorialized for more taxes on them! Also, he quoted from the story of the first emperor of Han the advice given him by a sensible minister: “You conquered the empire on horseback, but can you rule it from horseback?” (Atwood 2021:140). The Mongols got the message, and though they were harsh masters, they did not convert north China into pasture.

            However, the conquest was deadly. Population dropped to 60 million by 1290, and did not recover unitl well into Ming (Mote 1994:661). The siege of Kaifeng in 1234 led to at least a million deaths, with epidemics, possibly including plague, breaking out. Famine was so great that people exhausted their leather goods and turned to eating the dead, possibly even killing children for food (Hymes 2021). Actual bubonic plague was spread by the Mongols into Europe, as is well documented, but Robert Hymes shows it was part of this story too, breaking out in China in the 1200s; only one book, little noticed, describes it well enough to identify it, which is why many scholars (myself included) did not see it as epidemic in old China (Hymes 2022; cf. Anderson 2019 and references there).

            Stephen Haw (2006) has written a notably well-researched study of Marco Polo. Among other things, it ends forever any serious argument that Polo never got there. Haw notes many details that Marco could not possibly have known without seeing them. I might add that Polo’s descriptions of cranes are perfectly identifiable to species, which would be impossible unless he was speaking from direct observation (Anderson 2016b). The types of “mice” eaten by the Mongols are also described in the travel literature, and I have identified them (Buell and Anderson 2020).

            A social change involved considerable restriction of women, tracking Neo-Confucian thinking in late Song and then Mongol introduction of west and central Asian policies, influenced by Islam and more restrictive. Women lost rights to property, among other things, with ramifying bad effects on food in the coming dynasties; they followed the Yuan code (Birge 2002).

            Irrigation associations existed before; they flourished under the Mongols. They were locally organized, often with help of the monasteries and other religious institutions, which were big landowners and major local forces for political and economic organization (J. Wang 2018:166-214). They were organized in ways similar to village-level irrigation systems elsewhere, from Peru to Yemen (see my post, “Water,” www.krazykioti.com). The village or group of villages owns the water. Elders are charged to administer it, with, in the Chinese case, help from literate people—scholars and clergy. The clergy were largely Daoist and Buddhist, worshiping high deities, but they bent here to worshiping local water gods, and often the monasteries were turned into water god temples. Water bosses and, if necessary, seconds-in-command are designated to patrol the system and open or close sluice gates. Major gates open or close canals. These branch into feeders, ultimately reaching every field in the village. Individuals are allowed so many hours of water, generally controlling their own beds. Since everybody depends on the system, and neighbors in particular depend on each other, the incentives for everyone to police everyone else are great. Such bottom-up systems can work smoothly for centuries, surviving disasters and reorganizing after wars. This was a time when “village worship associations, Buddhist and Daoist temple communities, popular cult shrines, and large kinship associations had begun to compete for swealth and influence” (Wang 2018:281, citing Joseph McDermott), with the water gods showing more cooperation than competition with the Daoist and Buddhist ones. Yuan heavily favored the latter two faiths, freeing them from taxes. Yuan also decentralized control, allowing the monasteries to step into the power vacuum and wield great power. Ming reversed all this, and the religious institutions shrank. Irrigation systems, however, have to be managed, so the water gods and village societies went right on delivering. Wang notes in passing that all this refutes Wittfogel’s long-dead “irrigation civilization” hypothesis; it is mercifully too thoroughly buried to need much refutation any more (see Anderson 1988 for the full story of its downfall in China).

            Yuan loved to compile food and agricultural books. Wang Zhen’s enormous Nung Shu (“Agriculture Book”) of 1313 summarized farming knowledge of China, but has been little studied (see Bray 1984:59-61 for an easily-available account in English). Other works followed.

            Sources on Mongol food have been enormously expanded by Christopher Atwood’s book The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources (2021). Zhao Gong, in “A Memorandum on the Mong-Tatars” (pp. 71-92), describes their staple foods: “They live only by drinking mare’s milk to slake their hunger and thirst. The milk of a single mare can satisfy three people. Whether going out or staying home, they only drink mare’s milk or slaughter sheep for food. [This is flagrant exaggeration; horses foal in spring, the milk must be saved for the foal till it can graze, and then dries up in fall, so mare’s milk is only available in summer.] [T]hey shoot rabbits, deer, and wild boar for food…they have seized as slaves people from China who must eat grain to feel full, and therefore they seize rice and wheat as plunder…Their country also has one or two places where black broomcorn millet grows, and they also boil this to make gruel.” (More exaggeration. The Mongols grew a good deal of it, and had other sources; they always ate a good deal of grain; Atwood 2021:83.) Zhao also noted that they rarely wash, wiping their greasy hands on their robes. Like European writers on the Mongols, he maintains they wear clothes till the cloth falls apart (Atwood 2021:87). They foretell the future by scapulimancy. When he left Mongolia, he and his companions were told by the Prince of State: “Whenever you come to a good walled town, stay a few days longer. If there is good wine, drink it, or good tea and food, eat it, or a good flute of a good drum, blow it or bang it” (Atwood 2021:92).

            Peng Daya and Xu Ting provided a particularly detailed account as early as 1233, “A Sketch of the Black Tatars” (Atwood 2021:93-130). They noted the stock, including the camels, and the dependence on milk—but they are not so ignorant of the variety and processing methods of milks. They provide detailed descriptions of the ger (the Mongol felt house or “yurt”). They did not kill their cattle, saving them for milk. They used dried dung for fuel, referring to it as “steppe charcoal.” They even used it for lamps, adding sheep fat to make it burn well. They called scapulimancy “burning the lute.) Those who illegally broke grazing land for cultivation, or allowed fires to escape, were executed. “Those who, when pouring out milk or kefir, empty the vessel completely are said to be cutting off their descendants” (Atwood 2021:115). They begin to ride at three years of age, a fact still observable in modern Mongolia. Their arrows can pierce armor. Ting observed a Mongol woman give birth, wipe off the infant, wrap it in a sheepskin, sling it in a cradle, and go riding off with it . For mountain or stony ground, their horses were shod with iron or wood. Stirrups were made carefully to allow full range of motion in the saddle. Provisioning the army involved being very sure there would be enough milk; a great deal of detail is supplied on mare’s milk, with clarified milk for the elite. (From other sources, we know that Mongols traveled to war with a string of milk mares when possible, thereby tending to restrict campaigns to the summer. Winter campaigns were appalling, and spring was lambing and foaling season and the herds needed care.) They had some grape wine from central Asia. Ting describes melons “two men’s arm spans in circumference,” which must be a misunderstanding or exaggeration, though watermelons were coming in at the time,  and were strange to north Chinese, who never saw such gigantic melons in the homeland (Atwood 2021:100-120, 127).

            Related is a study of Mongol-era distilling, including of kumys (Luo 2012). At this point it is appropriate to cite the history of soju, Korea’s vodka (Park 2021). It appeared about this time, very likely learned from the Mongol conquerors, since the traditional Korean still is similar to that of the Mongols. It has become a gourmet drink in recent years.

            Back in Mongolia, a noble lady had consumed yak milk. She was found, richly dressed in a five-clawed dragon robe indicating nobility, and duly analyzed (Ventresca Miller et al. 2023).

            As was true throughout Chinese history, food was used as medicine. Thus, studies of medicine in the day, including Reiko Shinno’s excellent The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule (2016) as well as Paul Buell’s and my work (Buell and Anderson 2010, Buell et al. 2020), discuss food at great length. In particular, our work Arabic Medicine in China (2021) provides a translation of the Huihui Yaofang, a Mongol-era encyclopedia of western medicine translated into Chinese for Chinese use. (The Chinese text and good annotations are given in Kong 1996.) It did not catch on; almost no influence from it is traceable in Chinese medicine.

Chapter 9. Ming

Brook (2005, 2010) has chronicled the development of rice in Ming, including vast construction of polders, even in inhospitable north China. He also provides a thorough account of the disastrous climate events associated with the Little Ice Age that terribly stressed the dynasty (Brook 2010, 2016). The worst was in 1645-1715, the Maunder sunspot minimum that produced probably the coldest weather since the Ice Age. Extreme famines occurred with droughts in 1450 and 1625-50 (Lee and Yue 2020). A final fatal blow was a huge volcanic explosion in the Philippines, which darkened the skies and caused the worst drought in recorded Chinese history, 1641-43 (Chen et al. 2020). Poyang Lake fluctuated wildly in extent, more than at other times, with all these dynamics of precipitation (He et al. 2022). The treeline in Tibet dropped by a huge amount in the Little Ice Age, and has not recovered even now in places (K. Li et al. 2019).

New World food crops entered China in the 16^th century, coming from the Portuguese in Macau, the Spanish in the Philippines, and across the southwest mountains from India. Tobacoo was probably the first to spread, showing that people often prefer drugs to food. Maize, chiles, peanuts, sweet and white potatoes, and other crops revolutionized agriculture and food, but did so slowly; they did not become widespread and important until Qing, perhaps not until after 1700 (Anderson 1988; Bello 2022; Mazumdar 1999; Pomeranz 2022).

Zheng He’s famous voyages to explore the Nanyang and onward throughout the Indian Ocean brought back many spices, popularizing them and helping to fuel a huge spice trade and consumption; the imperial court used “over 3,500 kilograms of spices every three years on religious rituals and sacrifices to gods and ancestors. In 1456, the Imperial Hospital made a one-off request for 2,500 kilograms of spices for use in medicines” (Yan 2023).

            The timing of the horrible droughts and famines from 1625-50 spans the fall of Ming and rise of Qing, a point whose obvious significance is remarked on by Brook, Lee and Yue (2020), and many others (Anderson 2019). This is one time when weather did have a share in bringing down a dynasty, though Ming was rotting and giving way already, and famine was probably more a last straw than a full cause (Anderson 2019).

            Wars, rebellions, and civil uprisings followed floods, and in wheat areas also droughts (Lee et al. 2017). The team of Harry Lee and David Zhang, with their students, notably Qing Pei, have rewritten the history of China, from the point of view of climate and its effects. They have produced an incredible number of brilliant articles and books, showing correlations of climate with famines, wars, and epidemics (see Pei 2021; I drew on them heavily for my book on dynamics of Chinese history, Anderson 2019).

            Beginning in Ming and continuing to the present, the vast Dongting Lake in the lower Yangtse area has suffered increasing loss of area and wetlands, through reclamation for agriculture. Only 5.7% of it was lost by the end of Ming, but now three-quarters of the wetlands are gone, and the lake is reduced to a narrow, dyke-circumscribed shadow of its former self (Y. Li et al. 2020).

            In Ming and Qing, epidemics were frequent, and correlated with famines, locusts, and droughts; all these were notably more common in cool dry times, of which there were many in this Little Ice Age period (H. Tian et al. 2017).

            Li Bozhong has argued (e.g. 2003) that the coming of the famous Champa rice and other new varieties of crops only slowly made a difference. This is contradicted by McDermott and Yoshinobu (2015), but the difference may be a matter of “glass half full vs. glass half empty.” New technology, including better pumps to dry out paddies quickly for crop rotation, had to come in. Yields 2/3 to 1 shi of rice per mu, occasionally up to 2; they rose during Ming from an average of 1 to 1.6 in the Jiangnan region. Population grew after the disastrous Song-Yuan-Ming transitions.

            The Xuande Emperor (r. 1426-1436) imported from Korea many “female cooks to satisfy the emperor’s appetite for Korean delicacies” (Chan 1988:301).

            Pig-raising and pork-eating in Ming and Qing have been studied and monographed by Chung-Hao Kuo in a meticulous study (2013). Then as now, most of the world’s pigs were probably in China. He notes, though, that pigs rose greatly in abundance, and lamb relatively declined, with the progressive southernization of China after Han.

            Gao Lian’s detailed on medicinal uses of foods includes a long section of Central Asian sweets, including halwa under that name (transliterated hai luo, lit. “sea radish”). Paul Buell and I have used this material, quoting the main sweets recipes, in Crossroads of Cuisine (2020, with translations by Sumei Yi; see also “Gao Lian” on my website, www.krazykioti.com). Diverse and contested attitudes existed toward alcoholic drinks in late Ming and early Qing, ranging from Gao Lian’s purity to Yuan Mei’s more hedonistic take to outright banqueters and revelers. Gao Lian called himself a shanren, a “man of the mountains,” but one Li Zhi (1527-1602) said the shanren were a bunch of hypocrites. Wandi Wang has discussed this in her thesis (2025:207-8). He was not alone. Gao’s encyclopedic Zunshen Bajian (Eight Treatises on Following the Principles of Life, 1591) was thus rather lowly regarded. Gao retooled some of Lin Hong’s refined recipes, and pieced together some instructions for preserving mei flowers so that they would open beautifully in tea long after flowering season (Wang 2025:207). This was the sort of preciousness that got him judged for being a bit over the top. Gao and one Tu Long ate flowers, cited Lin Hong’s Pure Offerings phrase, and lived simple, refined lives, building a reputation for it, to the ironic scorn of others (Wang 2025:210-212).

            The first mention of chiles in China is in this work, according to Wee Kek Koon (2019) writing in the South China Morning Post. It is described as having “white flowers and a fruit that resembles the blunt tip of a writing brush. It is spicy in taste and red in color. It looks very attractive.” He notes that it was well established in Sichuan and Hunan by the late 19^th century. Little seems known of it otherwise (Dott 2020).

There is a Shiwu Bencao (“Food Things Basic Herbal”) from 1550, with many later editions. A huge work, Nongzheng Quanshu (“Agricultural Complete Book”) by Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), surpassed even Wang Zhen’s earlier work, and includes some new lore from the west; it describes sweet potatoes, on which he wrote a short separate work, now lost (Bray 1984:64-70).

            The greatest of all herbals—the one that became definitive in Chinese medicine—was the Bencao Gangmu, by Li Shizhen (2003; Chinese original, 1593-96). Li’s careful scholarship was enriched by his personal observation and experimenting, and his judicious and balanced insights. In addition to a workmanlike translation by a Chinese team (Li 2003, a more scholarly translation by Paul Unschuld and his group is ongoing. They began with Vol. 9, Fowls, Domestic and Wild Animals, Human Substances (2021, P. Unschuld, tr.) More volumes are appearing. Zhang and Unschuld (2015-18) have produced a dictionary of the work, with their considered translations of Chinese medical and biological terminology.

Portuguese observers added greatly to our knowledge, as recorded by C. R. Boxer (2004, orig. 1953). He quotes Galeote Pereira as writing (in translation from his time): “the Chins are the greatest eaters in all the world, they do feed upon all things, specially on pork, the fatter that is, unto them the less loathesome” (p. 9).

Deforestation continued, and Aurelia Campbell (2020), in What the Emperor Built, a rather amazing monograph on Ming megalomaniacal building, showed that taking huge nanmu trees (Phoebe nanmu) for the capital opened up the forests, established logging infrastructure and finance, and led to massive deforestation of all sorts in the wake of the imperial despoilers. The conventional wisdom on China’s deforestation is that it was done for agriculture to feed the starving masses, but in fact a great deal of it was done for imperial construction, for ironworking, for ceramics firing, and even for ink (formerly made by closed-in combustion of pines for soot—fortunately rapeseed oil replaced this).

In Ming, as in Song, there were those who idealized simplicity and remoteness, and of course had to eat accordingly. The Buddhist mountain hermit known as “Stonehouse” wrote a great deal of excellent eremitical poetry, beautifully translated by Red Pine (Bill Porter; Stonehouse 1999). He may well be exaggerating for effect, or at least recording only his most abstemious moments. He reports eating wheat-bran gruel and pigweed soup (p. 39), and a lunch of preserved bamboo, “blue-cap mushrooms fried in oil, purple-bud ginger pickles,” and rice (p. 35). He ate parched wheat, pine seeds and meal, and buds of local vines (63). He grew or gathered all these, as well as some vegetables. Not surprisingly, he reports being thin and unable to resist cold weather very well.

            Drinking was rampant (Jackson Guo 2021, 2023). One Gu Qiyuan (1565-1628) chronicled a whole range of drinks: yellow millet drink (huangjiu) from Beijing, Cangjiu from Cangzhou, yiyi jiu (pearl barley or possibly Job’s-tears liquor)from Jizhou, autumn dew white liquor (qiulu bai) from Jinan, lychee drink from Guangdong, lamb liquor (yanggao jiu) from Fenzhou, wujiapi jiu from Gaoyou, and snow drink (xue jiu) from Yangzhou (presumably white in color, not made from snow), sanbai jiu (three whites—made from wheat, rice, and clear water) from Suzhou, honeyed crabapple drink (milinqin jiu) from Yangzhou, and plain baijiu from Hangzhou. There were several more. By this time distilled spirits—shaojiu, baijiu, alaji (or halaji) were well known and widely appreciated. Alcoholism was well known. Lamb liquor and other medicinal tinctures were known.

            A mid-Ming story tells of a poet, Zhang Yuyuan, who was asked at a banquet to write poems for the peonies. He dashed off 50 and said he was running out of inspiration; the host gave him distilled liquor and he dashed off 50 more. Another mid-Ming drinker, Song Xu, made a cocktail with 40 catties of liquor (apparently distilled), 100 walnuts, 200 red jujubes, and four catties of cooked honey. One Xu Guangqi records making brandy from mulberries—apparently real brandy, not just baijiu flavored with mulberries. Another record describes fermenting grain and lychees, then distilling.

            Drinking was connected with courtesans and sex, of course. Food items were compared by rather uncouth drinkers to the classic Han Dynasty ideal of beauty, Xishi. Globefish were compared to her breasts, oysters to her tongue, and both consumed at singing-house drinking parties. This was usually at the opposite end of the spectrum from connoisseurs like Yuan Mei and reveling but elite banqueters like Zhang Yuyuan (Guo 2021, 2023).

            Not directly connected with food, but too important an insight into Chinese culture to miss, is the journal of Huang Xiangjian (1609-1673). He was caught in Suzhou in the horrors of the Ming collapse. At the time his father was serving at a government post in remote Yunnan. Huang, a filial son beyond even Chinese norms, set off through the horrific chaos of dynastic transition, into an area so wild and remote that even locals barely dared to venture on its roads. A soft city aesthete, he endured travel hardships that would have killed almost any hardened fieldworker. He survived, found his father, and they returned together; his father, in fact, survived him by a few years (Kindall 2016). This is as amazing a record of sheer human toughness as anything I have read.

Chapter 10. Qing

            Under Qing, China’s population grew spectacularly. It had risen during Ming to about 150,000,000. The fall of Ming came with appalling bloodshed and famine, leaving a population not much over 100,000,000. Under Qing, it rose to the famous 400,000,000 of American stereotype in those days. Readers may recall Carl Crow’s infamously titled book 400 Million Customers (Crow 2008, orig. 1937), which is actually a quite knowledgeable and sympathetic work, but clearly aimed at American businesspeople!

            In late Qing, China became known in the west for its “teeming millions” and “population pressure.” Grave thinkers calculated that famine would simply worsen, as the dense population rose more. They theorized that democracy could never come, or endure, in such a mass society. Today the United States has almost exactly the same population density as late Qing, and indeed its democracy is in desperate shape. Meanwhile, China’s population has more than tripled, and almost everyone is eating well. Democracy, however, does not exist except in Taiwan.

            China’s great accomplishment was to maintain fairly constant levels of income, per capital agricultural production, and even life expectancy from Song to 1800, in spite of this huge increase in population, and the levels of living were higher than the all too familiar picture of famine and desperation after 1850 (Chen and Peng 2022; Pomeranz 2022). Only the interdynastic wars and a few other major catastrophes (such as the floods of the early 1100s and 1300s in north China) temporarily disrupted this pattern for the worse. They may have provided Malthusian relief, but ultimately China coped with its huge and increasing population.

Chinese were well aware of the Song historian Sima Guang’s line: “The wealth of heaven and Earth is fixed in amount” (Zanasi 2020:18). In the late 18^th century, Hong Liangji wrote: “Nature cannot stop the people from reproducing. Yet the resources with which Nature nourishes the people are finite”; land and resources “have only doubled, or at least, increased only three to five times, while the population has grown ten to twenty times…M. Nature’s way of making adjustments” were “flood, drought and plagues” (Bello 2022:298). Such views earned him the name “China’s Malthus,” though he differed somewhat from his English contemporary.

            This was actually far too bleak. China had in fact kept up with rising population (Bello 2022; Chen and Peng 2022). However, the increase in population led to agricultural involution (Huang 1990), as more and more people tried to make a living off less and less land by working harder and harder. Average farms shrunk to the size of an American suburban lot (about 1/6 acre, roughly a Chinese mu) in the most densely populated areas. “Popular wisdom had it that it required 4 mu of land (about two-thirds of an acre) to feed one person. With rapid population growth, this ratio had worsened under Qianlong from 3.5 mu per person in 1766 to 3.33 mu [half an acre]per person in 1790” (Elliott 2009:148). Of course, it was even smaller in the 19^th century. This forced people to focus on silkmaking and to export workers to cities (Bell 1997). Mulberry trees to feed the silkworms grew on the levees between rice paddies.

            Desperate hardship ensued, leading to rebellions in the 19^th century, and also to emigration from southeast China to southeast Asia and then in the 20^th century to the entire world. North China suffered less crowding, but had major famines, partly due to rain-based agriculture (Huang 1985). Lillian Li’s Fighting Famine in North China (2007) is a definitive history. Mallory’s classic China, Land of Famine (1926) remains indispensable. Even difficult climate, including the Little Ice Age in the 1600s and 1700s, did not slow this growth, “owing to the tremendous increase of subsistence brought about by land reclamation policy and the introduction of foreign food crops” (Lee et al. 2016), as well as excellent famine relief provisions, among the best in the world for that time (Will 1990; Will and Wong 1991).

            Lee and Campbell (1997) traced the microdynamics of life, death, and reproduction in northeast China, finding an incredible amount of complexity and resourcefulness instead of the grim tale of inexorable famine and rampant overpopulation beloved of western colonialist observers in the 19^th century. Chinese controlled their births, planned for the children they had, coped by diverse and rational methods when famine struck, and lived their lives successfully in spite of all.

            At the other end of the socioeconomic scale, the same team researched the demography of the Imperial family (Lee et al. 1993). They found a depressing, even appalling, fact: the infant mortality rate was as high as in the general population, which in old China was extremely high. Even the Emperor was not isolated from epidemics; in fact, the Emperor was at high risk because of the thousands of people that circulated through the court. The Imperial diet may have been luxurious, but it was not well-balanced nutritionally, and if there was any problem with breastfeeding, the baby was apt to be fed on rice congee, a fairly good predictor of quick demise. Also, most of the Imperial children were the offspring of concubines, who got rather cursory care and attention. The tough farmers of the remote northeast could thank their lucky stars that they were better equipped to raise strong children.

            The same group summarized their early findings in One Quarter of Humanity:  Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (Lee and Feng 1999). The key finding is that Chinese controlled their population fairly well and were proactive about food management, famine relief, and expanding food producting, contra the early Malthus and his grim idea of population inevitably outrunning food supply. China was well fed for an agrarian empire in 1700 and a great deal better fed in 2000, in spite of population increase—which itself was under control by then.

            The cause of this huge population growth is under some debate. China had 60 million people by 2 CE, but that was when it controlled much less of the region than now; the total population in what is now China would have been 70-80 million. There were only about 100 million at the start of Ming. The huge increase in Qing seems largely due to peace and order, allowing longer lifespans and more trade and commerce. New World food crops, however, also had a huge role. They may have been the major cause (see e.g. Mazumdar 1999). Maize, sweet potatoes, and white potatoes allowed great expansion of cultivation into previously low-production landscapes. Peanuts, chiles, and various fruits and vegetables added critically important nutrients that had been scarce in many diets (Anderson 1988; Zhohong Shi, Agricultural Development in Qing, 2017).

            Matthew Sommer (2015:151, 160) reveals that in late Qing “a shi [133 lb.]of unhusked rice…cost about 1100 cash,” with an exchange rate of about 750 cash per tael (1.3 oz) of silver.  Rice was up to 1700 cash per shi by 1827 (ibid.).between 1703  Silver today (Jan. 2016) costs $14/oz., so a tael would be worth $18.50. 1100 cash would thus be about $28, enough to buy 56 pounds of white rice at today’s bulk-retail prices, and thus several times that much unhusked raw rice, wholesale. Thus, prices are roughly comparable then to those today. Sommer notes that a day laborer could work for as little as 50 cash per day (Sommer 2015:161). A man would need at least 1 1/3 lb./day to survive, and more than that to do any work. He would thus need to spend 11 cash for minimal food, plus whatever surcharge there was for husking and milling the rice. We also learn that a wife (bought from another man, usually in desperate straits) would cost an average of 24 taels, or $442, a low enough price. A magistrate might get 30,000 taels, a governor six times that (Sommer 2015:162), but these huge sums were more in the nature of budgets than of salaries, for these officials had to pay many expenses—including paying lower-level staff—out of the sums.

            Another interesting note is that between 1753 and 1908, revenue from land taxes almost doubled, [but] its share of total revenue fell from roughly 73.5% in 1753 to a mere 35% in the twentieth century” (Dykstra 2022:3, citing figures from Wang Yeh-chien). Nonagricultural enterprises had risen from comprising a small minority of the economy to making up the majority of it. Dykstra points out that this led to more political power by merchants and other local entrepreneurs, with consequent decentralizing form the Qing state.

            A huge literature, with many debates, has emerged on the rise of Qing economy, which rivaled Europe’s by 1700, but then fell behind (Anderson 2016a; Pomeranz 2000; Wong 1997). Kenneth Pomeranz (2000, 2022) held that China still had about the same per capita income as Europe at that period, a claim challenged by others (see Huang 2002) and hard to resolve. Some think China fell behind as early as late Song (which seems extremely unlikely, given all other sources), or in Ming (The Economist 2017). The proper comparison is also debatable, since Holland and England, certainly far ahead of China by late Ming, are much more comparable with the lower Yangzi than with all China: “In Qianlong’s day, Jiangnan accounted for 16 percent of the total agricultural land in the empire, but provided 29 percent of the governments land tax revenue in cash (paid in silver) and 38 percent of its revenue in kind (paid in grain), as well as 64 percent of the tribute grain sent to feed the capital” (Elliott 2009:78-79). A Europe that includes Russia seems much more comparable with the whole Ming or Qing empire, in size and development level.

            Land ownership and power over workers was complex. Mio Kishimoto (2022) explains the land tenure system, which included an increasing tendency for landlords to lease out cultivation rights on long terms, with the tenant able to buy and sell his rights and acting almost like a freeholder. The system is confusingly known in English as “subsoil” and “topsoil” rights, “topsoil” being a bad translation of the Chinese term tianmian, “field face.” Even tenants on short lease or rent had considerable rights. Often they paid rent on only the first crop, though double-cropping was now the rule in much of China (Pomeranz 2022).  Humans could be held in different levels of bondage, from debt service down to real enslavement of criminals and a few others (Kishimoto 2022).

            Qing economic thinking also paralleled Europe’s, as shown by Margaret Zanasi in a landmark book, Economic Thought in Modern China (2020). Sophisticated ideas about the free market were close to those of Adam Smith. Economists were aware that consumer spending drove the market, and advocated liberalism at first, but the population increase without much chance of increasing cultivated land led to need for more and more government intervention to deal with famine. Chinese are relatively free of the “limited good” or “zero-sum” view of the world so common in other traditional and modern societies, but they certainly are not unaware of it. A tension between free markets and government planning and aid was always there, intensifying with population growth in Ming, Qing, and after.

A debate between free-marketeers and statists developed in the 18^th century (Dunstan 1996, 2006, 2022). The statists had the better case, and ultimately won, but not until many modern-sounding free-market arguments had been made, and had had some effect. The ever-normal granaries (changping cang, lit. “long-leveling storehouses,” i.e. leveling prices over the indefinitely long term) were somewhat scaled down and freer markets locally allowed to flourish in grain and in copper/silver conversion in money. Hoarding was discouraged by any and every means possible. Debates also dealt with the quality of rice for salaries: low-level functionaries had to make do with shaky-quality rice (chengse mi) or even “old and suo [low-grade] rice” (Dunstan 2006:65).

Qing toyed with many versions of the “free market” philosophy, including testiness toward welfare recipients and expressions of cold free-market morality (Dunstan 1996, 2022). Old-fashioned Confucian caretaking of the poor prevailed, but was never enough, given the corruption and pigheadedness of much Qing government. Indeed, China governed with a lighter hand than the west, partly because it could afford to; China did not have dozens of little rival states at its doors.

Local officials could be incredibly hard-working at Confucian causes, however, such as Yang Tingwang, who rearranged several rivers to help his district. In his few spare minutes from flood and irrigation control, he repaired the local hall of learning, so that “the wine jugs, the vessels, round and square, for holding sacrificial rice or millet, the serving dishes for the salted vegetables and meat, and for the pure meat broth..and fresh meat” were all pure and properly arranged (Dunstan 1996:39). Other officials provided famine relief and memorialized about it to the emperors. (The subject of famine relief in late imperial China is complex and specialized; see Y. Deng 2020. Suffice it to say there was a huge effort, not at all unsuccessful but eventually overwhelmed by the levels of population and catastrophe in the 19^th century.)

These debates influenced the west. Missionary reports in the16th and 17^th century made Chinese policies familiar to learned readers. François Quesnay in the mid-18^th century coined the term laissez-faire (Von Glahn 2022:109), presumably with some reference to the Chinese free-traders. He was convinced by the Chinese focus on agriculture. He began the physiocratic school of economics, taking agriculture as the basis of the state and of all human economy. The school did not last long, but its influence is still felt. Among others, Thomas Jefferson was influenced by it, taking the family farm to be the basis of American society. The United States indeed became an agrarian society. Agriculture remains disproportionately important today.

            Business, trade and commerce enormously expanded through the 18^th century (Rowe 2009:132ff.). The old idea of international trade as “tribute”  and internal trade as minor and repressed is largely wrong. Trade continued to expand after 1800, but, especially after 1840, trade with the west incurred increasing disadvantage.

This was in large measure because of opium, long known but explosively expanding its tentacles in the 19^th century. It was used moderately and reasonably before the 19^th century, but then the British began “dumping” it on China in order to get silver and to get a local foothold on trade. David Bello has recently updated the history of this drug (Bello 2003 and references therein—a comprehensive bibliography). The Qing Dynasty tried, not without success, to prohibit it, but the western powers—finding little else they could sell at a profit—forced it on China. By the end of China’s last dynasty, in 1911, millions of Chinese were addicted to this debilitating curse. The result of the British pressure was a rise in demand and in addiction, and eventually a serious problem, as I had plenty of opportunity to observe in Hong Kong in the 1960s.  The effect on food production was serious, as more and more laborers succumbed. Attempts to eradicate opium in the early Communist years were quite successful, but, with the opening of the market after the 1970s, heroin and other hard drugs flooded in (Dikötter et al 2002).

China began to fall behind as Europe conquered and exploited much of the rest of the world. This not only brought riches to Europe, but, more importantly in the eyes of many, stimulated science, learning, and progressive thinking there. It brought little but misery and suffering to the conquered peoples. China certainly fell behind once the Industrial Revolution really set in, but it did not start improving livelihoods till after 1800. James Lee and collaborators (2004) also found welfare often comparable to Europe as late as 1700, but a great deal of desperate poverty, often among widows, who could not normally remarry. Larger farms did not make much difference, since farm size was by this time generally set to keep a small family alive; bigger farms were in poorer areas.

David Bello, in Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain, chronicles the westward expansion of Qing and its many contacts with central Asians. The Manchus felt kinship with the Altaic and even Tibetan peoples, though this did not stop them from colonialism including the ruthless genocide of the Dzungar Mongols. The Manchu emperors kept huge hunting grounds in northeast China, and had hunting parks in north China too. Ecoambiguity continued; criticism of these parks and liberating them to farming went on (p. 70). Game continued to decrease. Pine trees were being cut down to harvest pine nuts, a behavior condemned then as now, with the Jiaqing Emperor himself intervening in 1796 (104). Expansion of pioneers into the southern mountains, typically poor Han Chinese referred to as “shack people,” greatly spread maize agriculture (185-244). A group of Torghut Mongols fleeing Kazakh attacks settled in Xinjiang in 1771, were directed to farm, and settled into poverty and hunger, not being familiar with the trade (Bello 2018).

The Qing embarked on a colonialist program, occupying Tibet, southern Siberia, Mongolia, and above all the area that had been known as “eastern Turkistan” in most of the world. Qing conquered as far as Tang had done, but took over and occupied the whole vast region, rather than controlling only the strategic Silk Road routes and oases. This became Xinjiang, “New Borders.” Qing conquest involved genocide of the Dzungar Mongols, a radical (though not wholly unprecedented) departure from China’s usual policy of subduing and assimilating minorities without exterminating them. The government tried to “civilize” the Xinjiang people, i.e. make them like Han Chinese, without much success; they rebelled instead (Schluessel 2020).  The project goes on, brutally.

The new lands produced vast amounts of fruit and vegetables, from the riverine oases, as well as grain and livestock. The whole story has been told in Peter Perdue’s China Marches West (2005), a classic in Qing studies. Zuo Zongtang, the general and statesman for whom “General Tso’s Chicken” was named, was active in Xinjiang in the late 19^th century, stimulating agriculture and sericulture (Lavelle 2020).

Among new features that now became part of the Chinese food-producing world were karez, the qanats of the Arab and Persian worlds. These water tunnels were dug back into river outwash fans, where flowing rivers from the mountains disappear into the vast deltas of dirt, rocks, and sand that they develop when they debouch into the valleys. The water is still there, flowing underground, and the near-horizontal wells tap it. Qanats are difficult to make, requiring expertise—one reason they are dying out, now that anyone that expert in engineering can get a good urban job instead of working in the dangerous, uncomfortable qanats. In China, they are especially common in the Turpan (Turfan) Depression. On Google Maps one can easily find the long, straight or sinuous lines of doughnut-shaped holes ringed with guard mounds that provide access to the underground tunnels. Zuo Zongtang led the reconstruction of many karez in the Turpan area. Attempts to spread the technology more widely failed, because soils in much of the area are crumbly, not strong enough to hold up when tunneled (Lavelle 2020:126-140).

            Qanats used to abound in Iran, central Asia, much of the Arab world, and even (thanks to Moorish occupation) Spain. Converted Moors carried them to Mexico, where they possibly still exist in the Tehuacan Valley. Thanks to immigrants from there, “water tunnels” even made a brief appearance in San Bernardino, California, according to old-timers I have known.

            Relatively good times could be found in the far northeast (Feng et al. 2010), because the former Manchu grazing and hunting lands were opened to cultivation. People had sizable families and populated the realm rapidly.

            Meng Zhang has produced extremely careful, thorough, and interesting studies of the timber industry in Qing China (M. Zhang 2017, 2021). Once again we see Karen Thornber’s “ecoambiguity” at work, with the Qing government trying to save forests while encouraging logging. Some selective logging and silviculture saved small areas. Timber was especially easy to get in the Yangtze River areas, such as up-country Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui. Often it was rafted down the rivers. Huge rafts could be assembled, and floated down to lower Yangtze markets. These could be “more than 100 feet wide, hundreds of feet long, with a draft depth of 7 feet” (M. Zhang 2021:116). The raftsmen would live for months on these, raising chickens and even taking some soil on board to grow vegetables. (An American parallel occurred in the early 19^th century in the Ohio-Mississippi drainage, when timber rafts floated down to New Orleans, chickens and all.) One Chinese raftsman even wrote a book about his life (M. Zhang 2021:125). Private plantations and silviculture were ahead of the west until the late 19^th century. Collectivization and rampant exploitation under Communism finished the destruction of the forests. However, reforestation has substantially restored them in recent times.

            Tree farming continued, and we pick up again Ian Miller’s story in Fir and Empire. The business by Qing was a multi-million-dollar enterprise.Speculation in tree futures, litigation over rights, feudal-type family holdings, temple and fengshui groves, and other complications entered the picture. This attracted a wave of petty lawyers and sharks, nicknamed “hairpin-brushes” because they held their hair up with their writing brushes. One writer on tree matters called himself (literally translated) “small peach-stream revealer-of-lies mountain-man,” or as Miller translates it “the falsehood-revealing hermit of a small utopia” (p 94). He concludes: “Ultimately, the institutions that emerged were not inevitable, nor were they the simple products of high-level decisions; they were compromises, conditioned by the communities they governed and the repeated attempts of rulers to graft and prune these local forms into a coherent whole” (p. 170). Food enters the picture via tea plantations and other agroforestry.

A fascinating insight into early Qing environmentalism is provided by Wang Hongdu, in “A Record of Comprehending the Essentials of the Yellow Mountains,” translated by Jonathan Chaves in Every Rock a Universe (2013). The mountains in question are in central Anhui, and are among the peaks that are famous through Chinese landscape paintings. The larger, older pines were so revered that they had traditional names. Wang lovingly described every step of every trail, every peak, every spring, all with full attention to the spiritual and religious dimensions, from Zen temples and monks to visionary dragons and Immortals seen in the swirling mists.

Unfortunately, “ignorant woodcutters cut the pines down for firewood or charcoal…. Yes, the unfortunateness of the pines’ fate has reached such a point!  Would one not rather that before the mountains had been opened up, their light could have been sheathed in the primordial beginnings…even if the pines had never come to be known at all” (p. 108). In other words, better have the pines unknown to the world than to have them cut. This level of preservationist sentiment is almost unknown anywhere in the world before Thoreau and Emerson, and is certainly rare in China. Wang also laments the travelers who miss the Yellow Mountains, or who go there but merely gawk without deeply entering into the spirit of the place. “For human life is like that of a louse living in somebody’s pants. Few are the good aspects of it.”  We should therefore fully experience the beauty we can find. “Sirs, if you do not love the place, then either simply cover your mouths and mock, or, if not, hang your heads in shame and depart!  Ah, one wishes they could put aside their petty-mindedness…. What difference, indeed, is there between what they do and exchanging the Black Dragon’s Precious Pearl for a dung-beetle’s dung-pellet!” (p. 130). This view of the mountains, rooted explicitly in Daoism and Zen, corresponds surprisingly closely to the Romantic view that was to develop in Europe in the early 19^th century. Daoism has been described as “China’s green religion” (Miller 2016; see also Miller et al. 2014 for major considerations of religion and ecology in China).

Game abounded in the 18^th century. Matteo Ripa, one of the Jesuit missionaries, wrote in the early years of the century of the vast amounts of incredible cheapness of stags, boars, pheasants, and fish. Others added similar accounts, including an incredibly precocious eleven-year-old Manchu boy who recorded masses of deer, boar, pheasants, hares, geese, and ducks, and notes his own fondness for sturgeon and crane (Schlesinger 2017:40-41; the boy’s journal also has insightful comments on the politics and culture of the time; see Schlesinger 2018). Of course it was all too good to last, and China’s expanding ring of destruction—which has now encompassed Africa—eliminated the cheap game long before 1900.

Fish suffered also. Muscolino (2009) tells the story of declining fisheries. On the other hand, China and its seas still had plenty of fish by 1900. These were devastated by overfishing and pollution by 2000. China now depends on sending fleets around the world, where they are decimating local stocks, leaving nothing for local people.

Huge rebellions—the Taiping, Nian, and Hui rebellions—devastated China in the 1840s and after. The Taiping Rebellion devastated central China, leading to tens of millions of deaths, largely from famine due to scorched-earth warfare and destruction of supply lines. The ground was said to be white with bones in many areas, and greatly exaggerated reports of packs of “thousands” of wolves circulated (Lavelle 2020:67-80). An illustration of the time shows not only dogs and pigs, but also rabbits, eating unburied corpses, while gravediggers work to keep up (Lavelle 2020:70). The rabbits show that the illustrator had no idea of animal fooways, but they give a surrealist, macabre touch to the scene.

            An unprecedently devastating famine in 1876-79 followed, pursuant to the famine-ruined landscapes and a sharp drought (Janku 2018). International attention followed, leading to stereotypes of China as desperately poor, famine-ridden, overpopulated, and ruined by environmental overdraft. The missionary Timothy Richard was a relief administrator in the years 1876-1889, organizing and providing help (Bohr 1972). He noted people eating husks, clay, roots, buckwheat stalks, grass, and worse, and even selling them. Prices rose substantially,grain up to four times the usual price, but generally less than one might expect, since the poor were already unable to buy decent food. Suicide was common and cannibalism reported. Drought was a main part of the problem, and it not only ruined the crops but dried up the canals, making both flight and relief impossible for many. At least nine and a half million died, probably many more, in the north Chinese core provinces (Bohr 1972:113). Officials not only tried to relieve the famine, but even developed plans that sometimes anticipated Chinese Communist practice. Richard himself advocated economic development and modernization, water conservation, industry, science, and education, with some attention to China and its realities but a tendency to echo standard western lines.

Yet, in spite of all this, China’s cities were quite modern, having active trade and commerce that naturally led to food imports and a wealth of teashops, restaurants, and attendant food-related amenities. Trades were organized into guilds that did considerable urban management (Rowe 1984, 1989, 2002).

Commonly-owned lands were widespread, involving much area. Usually they were lineage-owned and managed by lineage elders. Village ownership and management was also common, and caused conflict over different use and management strategies. Wesley Chaney (2020) records fighting due to different ideas of rights to common lands in the far northwest.

Among the first New World foods to become popular was the chile pepper. The name comes from Nahuatl chilli. It spread to China along with other New World foods in the 1500s. Its record there has been told by Brian Dott in The Chile Pepper in China (2020) and by Gerald Zhang-Schmidt in Red Hot China: Cuisines, Chillies, Culture (2022). By 1621 it was in the Shiwu Bencao, “Basic Herbal of Foods.” It is first mentioned in Hunan in the 18^th century, but was surely there earlier. It fit into an already-spicy cuisine, and found a true home; Hunan food makes Mexican seem bland. The Hunanese general Zuo Zongtang (1812-1885) surely deserved the honor bestowed on him when a Hunanese chef in Taiwan named a blazing-hot dish in his honor in the 1950s (Dott 2020:170). “General Tso’s Chicken” is now worldwide, with countless blander variants, usually given imaginative parodies of the name to avoid infringement of rights.

Many varieties soon appeared, but our record of its spread and early use is poor. Chiles normally get called by some variant of la jiao (hot brown-pepper), but the vernacular name in Taiwanese is huana kiun, “barbarian kids’ ginger.” (Huan, Mandarin fan, means “barbarian”; –a is a slangy Hokkien diminutive, exactly equivalent to the idiomatic use of  “kid” in English, as in “Billy the Kid.”) Katy Hung, expert on Taiwanese food, assures us that the term huana is not derogatory on that island, but it certainly is in Malaysian Hokkien! In any case, an entertaining name.

Chiles soaked in oil produce chile oil, a flaming-hot condiment. Many sauces are made with chiles, including the famous doubanjiang of Sichuan, necessary for the cuisine of that province. Every firm and many a restaurant has its own variant of this and other sauces. The idea of a chile-enriched fermented sauce has spread widely, notably to Korea and Vietnam, where excellent ones are made. Thailand, Indonesia, and other southeast Asian countries have their own equivalents.

A standard sauce in China today is made of dried chile flakes fried quickly and mixed with oil and flavorings. This is identified with Laoganma (“old grandma”), commemorating its invention by Tao Huabi of Guizhou (Zhang-Schmidt 2022:144-148). Countless variants of it now exist. Many have been invented in Chinese diaspora communities such as the Los Angeles area.

The other standard newcomers from America spread widely in Qing, with major effects on nutrition. Maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts were the most important in this regard, but tomatoes, squash, frijol beans, pineapples, and many other crops began to enter the food system. They were usually named by combining fan (“barbarian”) with the name of the most similar local crop; pineapples, for instance, were fan bolo, the latter word applying to jakfruit. Tomatoes were barbarian eggplants, maize was barbarian millet, papaya was barbarian quince, and so on. Often, the fan was dropped in common usage, leaving later writers confused about the ancient Chinese origins of plants like maize and papayas. Not all coinages were so derogatory. Mexican squash became nan gua, “southern gourd.” Allspice, another newcomer from America, became known as gan jiao, “sweet pepper.” The spectacular Maya cactus fruit became huolongguo “fire dragon fruit,” or just “dragon fruit.” Largely after the fall of Qing, the more complimentary yang “ocean” was used instead of fan.

Jiu continued to be a source of solace and trouble. Jackson Guo’s recent Ph.D. thesis (2023), hopefully to be soon published, chronicles further connections with literati, artists, actors, taverns, singing girls, prostitutes, and the underworld. Alcohol allowed mediation between these realms, which should have been kept strictly separate according to Confucian puritanism. The Hongli Emperor tried hard to ban shaojiu (now called baijiu), distilled liquor, which was having serious impacts on life. It was connected with working-class people, the underworld, and rough living in general. Alcoholism became common as shaojiu became more and more cheap and available. Guo records a long history of crime, violence, family fights, and other social pathologies involving alcohol and drunkenness. Chinese tend to be mellow, happy drunks, as readers of classic poetry and prose know well, but when they become angry they can be as violent as “mean drunks” anywhere. Alcohol and sex were a particularly deadly mix, as elsewhere in the world.

Western alcoholic drinks made slow headway at first, but were popular in the early 20^th century. Loyal Chinese, and brewers whose loyalty in this case was predictable, argued strongly for China’s own jiu, but spoilage, quality control, and spotty availability of good jiu made the effort a hard sell until more recent times (Guo 2023). One notes that baijiu that sold for a few cents in the 18^th century was only up to about $2.00 by the 1960s, but the best grade now commands prices in the hundreds of dollars per bottle, comparable to fine brandy.

            Tea has its own stories. Robert Gardella (1994) compared China’s smallholder production with the rise of plantations in the colonial world; Qin Shao (1998), in a fascinating article, showed that China vilified teahouses as dens of freethinking and other iniquities—just as Turkey and later Europe attacked coffeehouses, and just as “espresso joints” were attacked as hotbeds of “beatnikism” in America within my own memory. Exports of tea to England “grew exponentially, from around 200 pounds eper year in the late seventeenth century…to over 28,000,000 pounds in the early nineteenth century” (Rowe 2009:166; see also Mair and Hoh 2009), with the average English household by then spending as much as 5% of its income on tea. England at first paid in New World silver, but eventually only opium was valuable enough to trade to offset the buying of tea, porcelain, cloth, and so on. So opium spawned the famous colonialist wars, which had much to do with “underdeveloping” China.

China kept developing more and more elaborate dishes, and became more and more committed to what we now recognize as “Chinese cuisine”—no more Central Asian and Near Eastern borrowings (Anderson 2005b).

The great Chinese gourmet Yuan Mei (1716-1798) flourished in Qing (Anderson 1988; So 35-43; Waley  1956). His birthday, set at March 25 in the western calendar, has recently been declared International Chinese Food Day. It could be an arbor day, too; he planted a tree on his 70^th birthday, saying:

“Seventy, and still planting trees….

Don’t laugh at me, my friends.

I know I’m going to die.

I also know I’m not dead yet.”   (Tr. J. P. Seaton, 1997:92.)

His cookbook is thoroughly Chinese (Schmidt 2003; So 1986; Waley 1956). No central Asian or western influences here. It has finally been translated, in a superb bilingual edition by Sean Chen (Yuan 2019)—a major and long overdue event in Chinese food history.

Food receives attention in A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule, by Jonathan Schlesinger (2017). Qing vastly expanded the size the Chinese empire, especially into Siberia—only to lose most of that expansion to the Russians in a series of unequal treaties. Especially before the loss, the Manchus, Mongols, and Han Chinese mined the Siberian and Mongolian frontiers for steppe mushrooms (Tricholoma mongolicum, Agaricus bisporus, and possibly others), furs of all sorts, game, fish, and other wildland goods. The Manchus tried to keep much of this realm wild. Many of their nature reserves and hunting parks are now national parks in China and Mongolia. Unfortunately, they could not keep from depleting the resources drastically. They almost eliminated the larger fur-bearers and the pearlshell freshwater mussels. They almost elminated wild ginseng, to the point of being forced to farm it, producing what was (and still is) thought to be an inferior product.

While the exploitation was good, they had a fine time. Before conquering China, Manchu rulers ate “tiger, bear, roe deer, elk, montain goat, boar, wild duck, and pheasant; recipe books record how palace staff cleaned a cut the meat into big hunks, then prepared it in stews of sea salt, soy sauce, green onhion, ginger, Sichuan peppers, and star anise (Schlesinger 2017:22). After conquering China, they tried to keep up their habits. The Kangxi emperor advocated that, and wrote that older Manchu people should eat “’unrefined milk, pickled deer tongues and tails, dried applies, and cream cheese cakes’”; deer were almost totally used, from antlers (for medicine, when in velvet) to tail (Schlesinger 2017:23). A recipe for steppe mushrooms with deer tendons includes, also, soy, salt, hot bean oil, white sugar, distilled alcohol, flavor powder (a spice mix), onion tips, ginger, and starch, the whole to be sprinkled with fragrant oil for serving. The recipe reads quite like a Yinshan Zhengyao recipe, and shows that Central Asian foodways were still alive (Schlesinger 2017:25).

At this point I may mention two great historians of sugar in China: Françoise Sabban (1994) and Sucheta Mazumdar (1998). Mme. Sabban is the leading western expert on Chinese food history, and needs no introduction. Her work on sugar placed it in world context, with Central Asia and Portugal being relevant. The Portuguese influenced Chinese milling technology. Sucheta Mazumdar is something of a one-book historian. Her work Sugar and Society in China (1998) is one of the greatest studies of food history in all world literature. In addition to providing a thorough history of the commodity over time, she showed that China escaped the sugar trap of high-capital processing but low-paid workers. This trap led to plantations owned by the rich but worked by enslaved or virtually enslaved and impoverished people everywhere but China. China maintained small farms, on which farmers did their own work, cutting and preparing cane; it was then hauled or shipped to plants. In the Canton Delta, processing plants were based on boats, which cruised the channels from farm to farm. (A side note is that my city, Riverside, California, was started as an orange-growing community, and the growers found that orange-growing experts could be brought in from one such community, known to the growers as “Gom Benn,” from Cantonese kam ben “sugarcane bank,” Mandarin gan bian.)

Imperial cuisine has received a good deal of attention, including a good book with many Qing court recipes, assembled by Zheng Tingquan (1998).

The great novels, notably The Story of the Stone (Cao and Gao 1973-1986) and The Scholars (Wu 1957), are full of food images (Anderson 1988). Classical cookbooks appeared, to be mined in our time (e.g. So 1992). The Qianlong Emperor loved birds’ nests, though, oddly, Li Shizhen did not refer to them (Rosner 1999:7).

Many Qing scholars developed a surprisingly strong feminist streak in its early popular culture (see esp. Idema and Grant 2004). Male writers like Cao Xueqin, Zheng Xie and Yuan Mei extolled the value of women, their intellectual equality with men, and their potential. Yuan Mei not only advocated educating women along with men, but actually educated many of them himself, serving as tutor and mentor to over fifty women—a whole generation of brilliant female writers (Waley 1986). Cao Xueqin’s great novel The Story of the Stone (Cao and Gao 1973-1986) portrays elite women who had the benefit of such education and often turned out to be brighter and nobler than the men in their lives. (On these matters see Idema and Grant 2004; Widmer 2006.) Obviously this all had significance to food, since such men were not only gourmets themselves but fully conscious of the trials and triumphs of women as cooks and food providers. This informed their writings.

There were various motives involved. Cao and Zheng were intensely moral men, were concerned with fairness and ending abuses, but Yuan, who had the mores of a tomcat, made no secret of a less moral motive: he wanted lovers he could talk to. Women themselves wrote countless poems, stories, and especially tanci, prose-poetic works thought to be largely a female medium; not surprisingly, tanci routinely portray women as “smart, learned, physically active, and the equal of any man in the examination field, imperial court, and sometimes even in physical combat” (Epstein 2011:7). They also pulled no punches on the cruelty to women that occurred in China as elsewhere. One tanci, Tianyuhua, has a familiar plot: a father who is well-meaning but excessively moral to point of cluelessness and a daughter who is brilliant, beautiful, and winds him around her finger (Epstein 2011). It will be recalled that women did not get this kind of fair shake in western literature until the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. (Sappho anticipated the trend by a few millennia, and Christine de Pisan by a few centuries, but two swallows do not make a summer.)  One wonders, as so often, why China did not go on to parallel the west. Neo-Confucian morality reasserted itself.

A significant insight into both Qing tolerance for minorities and Qing acceptance of women:  A Muslim Uyghur concubine in the court of the Emperor Qianlong in the 1760s and 1770s managed to avoid pork, eating mutton instead, and to eat sweets—probably with a Central Asian flavor (Millward 1994:435).

An odd sidelight into food in remote Taiwan comes from the career of He Bin, an outrageous rogue in the grand tradition of scoundrels (Andrade 2007). Among other things, he misappropriated the taxes on mullet, very popular common fish that could be caught wild or farmed. Working for (and simultaneously against) the Dutch, who occupied Taiwan in the 17^th century, he managed, among other things, to channel a great deal of the mullet tax into his pockets. A tax of 10% on mullet and their roe, during the season for fishing them, was charged, and little of it got past He Bin.

            A final note from late Qing has to do with a major destroyer of good nutrition. The rice polisher was invented by Sampson Moore in 1861 (Wikipedia). Earlier, polishing had to be done by hand, laboriously, with grinding substances. Moore’s machine and later ones used talc to grind and whiten the rice, hence need in old days to wash rice very carefully. Careful souls still wash it, to get loose starch off, and because in the old days rice often came with a good deal of dirt and insects in it. One must still freeze imported rice to kill meal moth eggs, though modern processing has generally eliminated such passengers. Far more serious was stomach cancer caused by the talc, and even more serious still was the damage to nutrition by grinding off the last vestiges of the nutrition-packed seed coats of the rice. Beriberi—lack of Vitamin B1—and other vitamin-deficiency diseases followed the rice polisher. The problem was discovered in Indonesia around 1900, when scientists and others noted that well-to-do people were getting beriberi but not the prisoners in the jails. They were fed on a miserable diet, without polished rice. Scientists fed polished rice to chickens, who promptly became ill; the chickens were then fed rice polishings, and even water in which the polishings had been soaked, which cured them. Thus came about the first realization that food was more than protein, carbohydrates, and oils.

Chapter 11. Modern China

Republic, and Hong Kong

            Farming in the Republic era was classically described by Fei Xiaotong, who reflects on it in a final book (Fei 1992). The great scholar of agriculture Li Bozhong has updated the analysis (B. Li 2020).

The leading anthropologist of Chinese marketing systems, G. William Skinner, got his start by studying rural Sichuan in the 1940s. He had a difficult time dealing with warring Nationalist and Communist forces. His field work was increasingly hampered and eventually shut down. However, he got much detail on agriculture, and also lists of foods available in local shops, from noodles and dumplings to swan eggs (Skinner, ed. Stevan Harrell and William Lavely, 2017).

            I have described in some detail the success of the old south Chinese wet-rice ecosystem at producing incredible amounts of food in a broadly sustainable way (Anderson 1972, 1973, 1988). This system lies behind Permaculture and many other modern systems of more or less sustainable. scientific agriculture. (Of course, nothing in sustainable forever—the sun will explode in about two billion years and vaporize the earth—but meanwhile anything that helps prolong feeding people is a good idea.) The traditional system was best at conserving nutrients, especially nitrogen. Hugh Baker, who did superb studies of social structure in old Hong Kong, in a review of The Food of China (1988), commented that south Chinese agriculture “must make nitrogen atoms unfortunate enough to be in other parts of the world feel unloved” (Baker 1989).

A story that spans Qing and the Republic, and especially the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, is told by Sakura Christmas (2019), as a parable for the time. In one of those amazing articles that starts with a tiny subject and expands to comment brilliantly on the world, she describes the fate of Chinese farmers who displaced Oirat Mongols in the 19C. “The reclamation that had started with Bagmedorje led to a sinking spiral of renting and selling Mongol lands in order to rescue banner finances, but these pastures had been the very source of economic wealth for the area. Less land meant fewer herds and a diminished income; as debts mounted, so too did the pressure to rent or sell property, and this cycle would begin anew” (p. 820). The Chinese turned range into soy fields, but the soil was selenium-deficient, and human deficiency problems started showing up. Then the Japanese took the area and greatly intensified the soy farming, almost entirely for export, so the selenium was lost to the entire system. Disease then flared up, especially tuhuangshui (“vomiting yellow-water”) disease, an extreme selenium deficiency that leads to death, especially of women and children. The sex ratio got as bad as 5:1. People were misshapen and dwarfed from bone non-growth and pathology. The Japanese tended to see this as mere proof of the degeneracy of the Chinese, and treated people as animals—taking photos including topless photographs of women to show breast pathologies. Nothing was done; the deficiency was not understood or investigated. The author makes this a parable of dispossession followed by ecological overdrive, and then colonialism at its worst leading to real system collapse.

            Hong Kong’s oyster industry has received a superb, comprehensive, wonderfully detailed historic study by James Watson (2021), covering its development and practice as far as he could trace it along the Guangdong coast.

            Francesca Bray et al. (2015) have updated us on modern production and trade of rice.

Among other things, soymilk was promoted in the 20^th century, from the Republic on into Communist decades (Fu 2018). It remains popular, but cows’ milk is now common and widespread, and sometimes contaminated with melamine and other dangerous adulterants.

This may be the place for some rustic proverbs:

In a melon patch don’t tie your shoes; under a plum tree don’t adjust your hat (Rohsenow 2002:G167). (The instruction here is to do nothing that will arouse suspicion.)

Better one mouthful of heavenly peach than a whole basket of rotten apricots. (N50)

When people hit bad luck, a mouthful of cool water will get stuck in their teeth. (R31)

If the country has no muddy legs, in the city starvation kills the oily mouths. (S35; no farmers, no eating rich food in the city.)

One day no work, one day no food. (Y254; the classic Zen monastery commandment.)

Communist Period

            Mao initially bought the Marxist line about the innate backwardness and hopelessness of peasants, which Marx memorably compared to potatoes in a sack (Mitrany 1951). Mao called Chinese farmers by the proper term nongren, “farmers,” but in Communist English they were always “peasants” unless they were relatively well off, in which case they could be rich farmers or, worse, landlords—having a tiny farm but producing enough to require some hired labor was enough to make one a landlord. Of course, China by then had no peasants, but Marx always talked of “peasants,” and his word was divine. Mao initially dismissed them. Fortunately for them, he came to learn better, but still never developed very rational views about them or how to revolutionize them (Day 2013). Overly fast collectivization led to the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. More recent Chinese scholarship does not fully correct the mistakes of the past. They may be hostile to such western economic bad ideas as xin ziyouzhuyizhe (neoliberalism; Day 2013), but they usually maintain loyalty to Marxist dogma.

            An important history of the Great Leap Forward, Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone (2012), calculates 36 million died, a minimal figure. Frank Dikötter (2010) calculated 45 million, a much more likely sum. Harrell (2020, 2023) has also weighed in on the mindless bureaucratism that shored up Mao’s wild ideas, and turned disaster into total catastrophe. Part of the problem was that Mao ordered families to stop cooking their own foods and to eat in canteens, in 1958. This led to theft, cheating, and other problems.

Worst problem for the whole nation was the constant overestimate of production, because Mao wanted to hear only high figures. Food fell more and more short. People resorted to bark and other famine foods. The canteens have been re-created in a perverse outbreak of nostalgia, or perhaps shuddery tourism (Wong and Thuras 2021:123). Science was not wholly banished, as shown in detail by Sigrid Schmalzer (2016), but it took a back seat. Chinese counties and districts continue to exaggerate their agricultural production, sometimes up to 100% (G. Liu et al. 2020).

Mao’s properly Marxist “struggle against nature” (Shapiro 2001) almost succeeded in destroying China. It was fortunately stopped after Mao passed. Nature has all the cards in that game. Bryan et al. (2018) record in detail the reversal of Mao’s insane policies and the recovery of much of the country since. Stevan Harrell (2023) sounds a darker note, showing how much the lunatic policies continue. There are still enormous problems with coal-burning, desertification, pollution and poisoning of soil and water, wetlands loss, and biodiversity loss (see R. Smith 2015, 2020). Wing-tung Ko (2022) records much of this, including the murderous campaigns against pet dogs, sparrows, tigers, and all sorts of other animals; China was devastated with very little benefit. Nothing now can stop the tailspin of tiger and reptile populations, and many small bird species were virtually wiped out by the sparrow campaign, which went far beyond actual sparrows to kill every small bird that could be easily eliminated. Many reptile species are rushing to extinction. One ironic threat is their popularity; the pet trade is wiping out whole species of geckos.

At least the country is actively moving in some better directions. Reforestation is especially impressive (my personal observation in China and by surveying satellite images), but sadly balanced out by China’s plundering of Southeast Asian and African forests. China is outsourcing deforestation.

As of 2021, China uses 32% of the nitrogen fertilizer in the world, allowing a 44% increase in crop production between 2000 and 2018. Even so, China still imports a great deal of its food, notably 83% of its soybeans. These come largely from Brazil, and have led to massive deforestation there, including destruction of the unique and biologically diverse and important cerrado areas. China uses 13% of the agricultural water (i.e., basically irrigation) in the world, at 48% efficiency, far less than Europe’s (H. Zhao et al. 2021). China spares water in the north by bringing more and more rice and other food from the south, where water is abundant for growing it (X. Zhao et al. 2015). Like many other countries, China wastes about ¼ of its food (Nature 2021).

China continues to try to be green yet affluent, but sorely underinvests in preserving natural capital (Ouyang et al. 2016). Sensible environmental measures, such as local recycling, conserving water, and keeping food safe, are common (Schmitt 2016), but still far from universal. China surpassed the United States as the leading greenhouse gas producer in the world in the mid-20teens, with dismal results, but, again, much is being done to change this (Fang 2018).

            An important collection of papers on the environment, including excellent studies of food production and land cover, was assembled by Abe and Nickum (2009). Robert Marks’ study of the formation of the Pearl River Delta is particularly valuable for food studies; he assembles meticulous detail on the vast extent of land extension by creating polders (sha tian, Cantonese sa tin, “sand fields”), shellfish farms (which slowly fill in), and other devices. A further study by Ma Jianxiong et al. (2016) adds much detail. Many of the polder creators were former boat-dwelling fisherfolk. These boat-dwellers were often the descendents of shoreline farmers who lost their land; from Qing on well into the 20^th century, they began to get it back, or rather to create new land for themselves.

            China’s water is depleting. Rampant withdrawal of groundwater goes on in the dry areas and is not being replaced. Dalin et al. (2015) recommend giving up irrigation entirely in areas where it depends on groundwater overdraft, notably around Beijing and in Inner Mongolia. China spares water by importing water-demanding products like beef from elsewhere, but its dryland areas are still facing collapse.

One lake, Dianchi in Yunnan, was totally ruined by mismanagement and pollution, but a monastery saved the golden barbel, a choice fish worth more than $100/kg, while other agents saved a few other items such as some mussels and the edible water plant Ottellia, making restoration possible (Stone 2008). In Sichuan, the Sichuan taimen (Hucho bleekeri), a huge relative of salmon and trout, is critically endangered; a proposed dam will wipe out its last spawning grounds, dooming it to extinction (Di Tong 2022). (There are 5 species of taimen, all in Eurasia, all in desperate shape; being big, slow-growing, and eminently edible, they are even more overfished and poached than other game fish.)

Overfishing gets worse every year, as Chinese fleets scour the world’s waters, taking virtually anything and everything, leaving extreme depletion. This often devastates not only the economic future but the present nutrition of countries that allow Chinese fishing or cannot stop illegal fishing. This even extends to aquaculture.  Glass eels—larval forms of edible eels—are imported and raised to adulthood on fish farms in China and Hong Kong. Critically endangered European eels (Anguilla anguilla) come from North Africa and maybe Europe, are imported illegally under CITES. A. japonica and A. rostrata, treated similarly, arealso endangered but not critically. Oyster reefs cover 1904 ha of China’s marine foreshore, but are under the usual attacks, and are vulnerable (Wei et al. 2023).

The future may be bleak, but much more hopeful are the statistics on what China is currently doing to feed its people today. China manages to feed itself—almost—by combining traditional, modified traditional, and new agricultural methods. Aquaculture has exploded, producing most of the world’s aquacultural production. China has also maintained the traditional silk-fishpond, rice-fishpond, lotus pond, and other water/land interface methods, so unique and brilliant. China’s fine-tuned carp farming system, involving several species with complementary feeding habits, was developing by Qing or earlier (Anderson 1988).

Stevan Harrell’s magistral work An Ecological History of Modern China (2023) gives many statistics on the stunning successes, as well as grim details of the environmental costs. “In 1952 ‘coarse grains’ were estimated to constitute around 70% of the grain eaten in China, but by 1992 they had decreased to 16%” (Harrell 2023:232, with citations), and they continue to decrease today. The main coarse grain that has paid the cost is maize, now an animal feed almost exclusively, but sorghum, sweet potatoes, and other items shrank too. Millets were already a relic by 1952; they are being nostalgically revived in some places, being really quite tasty and nutritious (see below). Still, from 1952 to 2008, they shrank from 9.8 million tons produced to 814,000, but increased again to 3 million tons. Sorghum shows a parallel track, 1.1 million tons to 183,000 and back up to 2.5 million), but the recovery is mostly for animal feed. As of 2021, China produced 213 million tons of rice and 137 of wheat, largely for human food, and 273 million of maize, almost entirely for animals or industrial uses (figures from Harrell 2023:232, 242).

Other elements in the diet increased faster. As of 2015, 86 percent of surveyed adults had eaten red meat within the previous three days; 20% had had some poultry; 29% seafood (Harrell 2023:233, quoting Chinese figures). An accompanying table (p. 234) shows China eating more pork, seafood, lamb, and eggs than the United States, per capita—an astonishing figure to any old China watcher. The US continues to eat more poultry and beef, but the gap is closing. Vegetable consumption is not up very much since earlier times, but the vegetables are much more varied and of much better quality now (my personal observation, as well as Harrell’s). Fruit has increased much more, with orchards expanding from 1.6 million ha in 1998 to almost 11 as of 2017 (Harrell 2023:237); they had already expanded greatly by 1998, though extensive orchards already existed before 1949.

Harrell records the changes in several local regions, from Xinjiang to his own research areas in the southwest; diets vary with local culture, but the same overall changes stand out. Restaurant, takeout, and packaged-food eating has expanded spectacularly, from a luxury of the affluent to a near-daily experience for the vast middle class and urban working class.

Feed for animals requires major imports of maize and especially of soybeans, with Brazil the major supplier. This has caused devastation of millions of acres of forest and savannah in that unfortunate nation, all to supply the Chinese meat industry. Countless species of animals and plants face extinction there, and the very climate is changing, with the country facing hotter and drier conditions as the forests disappear; they produced rain and coolness from transpiration. Eventually, lack of tree roots bringing nutrients to the surface will lead to major soil degradation.  Importing of alfalfa for cattle feed led to major water losses in California (Harrell 2023:242), and this has become a political football in that state, as the government desperately tries to deal with drought.

Efforts are being made to stop the conversion of farmland to urban uses (Harrell 2023:243-44), a step the United States and many other countriesdesperately need to take. The Chinese government wants to maintain at least 120 million ha under agriculture; as of 2021 there were only 128 million ha (Harrell 2023:244, using government figures). The danger is clear. As elsewhere, the best land is first to go. Ironically, cities naturally develop where conditions are best for producing food (though not only there). Thus, from Shanghai and Chengdu (especiallyhard hit; Harrell 2023:244) to Baghdad, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, urban sprawl takes out the very best land.

“From antiquity through the 1980s, feeding China required the labor of the majority of Chinese people” (Harrell 2023:246). Harrell goes on to tell of a rapidly diminishing segment of the population is involved in farming, as China follows the world in subsituting machines and chemicals for human work. Direct genetic modification is the latest to come, following much of the developed world with a lag of a few years (Harrell 2023:250).

There is considerable pressure to follow the Euro-American model of huge monocrop farms managed by very few people. Experience shows, however, that small diverse farms are much more efficient, productive, flexible, and able to withstand stresses, if they have decent access to capital (see e.g Wood 2020, to cite only a particularly good source on a well-known fact, but my own research and experience in this area, in China, California, and Mexico among other places, are quite enough to make the point). Large-scale industrial agriculture often pays only because of the massive subsidies, direct and indirect, that it receives, and the major disadvantages that this and other government policies impose on smaller, more intensive farms. Certainly Harrell’s accounts of rising specialization go dramatically against the huge advantages of diversity recorded from Frank King’s early and memorable studies (King 1911) down to the present.

From p. 256, Harrell details the increasingly awful effects of industrial agriculture: soil contamination, water loss and pollution, huge algal blooms in lakes, siltation of reservoirs and channels, and the rest, and meanwhile increasing diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases of worsening nutrition. Statistics on inefficient use of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals show that China’s high-tech farming is poorly managed. For instance, about 10 to 14 percent of nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice just runs off, polluting the water (Harrell 2023:258). Pesticides are an even worse problem. As elsewhere, farmers often “used many times the amounts that pesticide manufacturers recommended” (Harrell 2023:260). Often they do not realize the dangers, lulled into a false sense of security by both government and manufacturer minimization of the risks.

During most of the period since 1949, China’s slogans included the line “First rich, then green.” The idea was that countries like the United States had not worried about conservation or pollution until they were rich and everyone was well off. This was a deadly belief for two reasons. First, it was flatly wrong. Conservation rose along with waste and pollution in the United States. Forest conservation got serious at high governmental levels in the 1880s. Wildlife conservation was a national cause, with major legislation, by 1904, when the Migratory Bird Act was passed. Pollution control was a serious issue even before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1910. These and many other major pollution control measures were passed before 1920. Further legislation of the US was passed in the 1960s and 70s, well before the US reached its current levels of affluence. Second, the pollutants of the 1800s and early 1900s were not even remotely close to the levels of amount or of deadliness seen in modern industrial and agricultural production. Even without the major legislation that did in fact occur, the US could not have done the damage that China has done.

Animal diseases, especially viruses, have always been a huge problem in China. The spread of flu from ducks to pigs to people is the most familiar, since it has worldwide effects, generating new strains of flu every year. The combination of ever-changing strains and the total helplessness of traditional cures probably explains the focus of Chinese medicine on strengthening the body rather than on identifying and fighting disease (Anderson, ongoing research). In any case, swine flu, poultry diseases, and many other viruses are rampant in China’s industrial production system (Harrell 2023:262-264).

World fishery depletion by ruthless Chinese fleets has long been documented, and is mentioned here (Harrell 2023:269-270), but the reality is worse, with Chinese fleets poaching or corrupting governments, either way getting ruinous access to fisheries of small, defenseless countries. The atoll countries of Oceania, which control vast areas of ocean but have tiny populations and helplessly frail governments, are especially victimized. Coastal countries with small populations also suffer.

Food safety issues include the world-famous case of milk powder contaminated with melanine. Animal foods full of deadly ingredients have also been exported, as well as poisoning pets at home. Adulterated and contaminated foods are hard to control (Harrell 2023:271-278).

In response, organic, small-scale, and safe-food movements are flourishing, having started recently but proving very attractive in a country that now has a high standard of education, literacy, and awareness (Harrell 2023:278-283). It remains to be seen whether this will succeed. Departing from Harrell’s book and working from wider political findings, experience with other countries shows that to the extent that a country falls into dictatorship—as China has done under Xi Jinping—it suppresses such efforts, since the giant agribusiness interests can easily corrupt an apical, authoritarian government, and insist on having any opponents crushed. If China reverses course on what can only be described as a drift into fascism, these movements for better farming and food may yet save it. Continued centralization of government, agribusiness, and power can only worsen the situation.

A beautiful, detailed, but thoroughly propagandistic article by Janus Dongye Qifeng (2019) gives the Chinese government view, including some gratuitous and dishonest swipes at Tibet—said, for instance, to have subsisted entirely on milk and meat till the Chinese got there and brought vegetables. The article fails to mention the fact that massive intensive agriculture is unsustainable as currently praticed, due to the huge pollution it generates both from chemical inputs and from agricultural wastes such as pig manure. Even so, the article is worth investigating for the photographs alone. Some statistics there:  China eats 45% of the world’s consumed seafood—65 million tonnes (metric tons; 1000 kg) a year; 50 million of these are from aquaculture, including shrimp, crabs, fish, shellfish, and so on. China produces 66% of the world’s farmed fish. The integration of silk-raising with water fields (mulberry trees grown on the dikes, as of old) allows China to produce 84% of the world’s silk. Much of the power is solar; China produces 25.8% of the world’s solar energy. China also produces 90% of the world’s lotus rhizomes (miscalled “roots” in the article), unsurprising since almost no one but Chinese eat them. China produces 22% of the world’s rapeseed (this presumably includes traditional Chinese oil mustard as well as canola), using much mud from ponds.

            China produces about 30% of the world’s honey—543,000 tonnes. This honey is sometimes polluted (as even Qimeng admits).

China produces 79.2 million tonnes of watermelon, out of the total world production of 111 million. I recall some of us asking a group of ordinary Chinese at a market in 1978 what they would do with a yuan; they all answered “buy a watermelon.”  China leads in many other fruit, but quality control remains a major issue. China produces 56.3 million tonnes of tomatoes

            China has 1,086 million hectares of agricultural land to India’s 1,579; USA 1,631; EU 1,091. 208.l million tonnes of rice are produced; 257.3 of maize; 134.3 wheat. The USA figures are 9.2 (we aren’t a rice culture), 366.2, and 47.3. However, this otherwise relentlessly upbeat article admits that China is losing about 3,000 square km of agricultural land a year, to urbanization and degradation. The article notes this problem is being addressed by soil conservation, but that devoting marginal land to reforestation instead of farming produces yet another cost to agricultural land—though with an overall increase in welfare as the trees grow and fix carbon.

            China now leads even in beer, with over 46 million kilolitres produced per year, about twice the US level. Some 13.6 kilolitres of baijiu (Chinese vodka) is produced, with the article (inevitably) singing the praises of baijiu as superior to vodka or whiskey. (This is a matter of taste.)  China, as always, has most of the world’s pigs, and produces 54,650 million tonnes of pork, vs. the USA’s mere 12,166.

Schneider, Lander and Brunson (2019) bring us up to date on pigs in China, with discussions of the pork factories of modern China, where American-style factory farming has unfortunately taken root. China’s wonderful, tough, flavorful landrace pigs are being replaced by western varieties that put on fat and meat fast but have low quality.

Dairying is rationalized similarly: Mongolian milk is sealed in tetrapaks and sold as “green,” though current policy is destroying the grasslands and the Mongolian way of life (Tracey 2013). Beef production has increased greatly, but dairying is even more successful, with vast amonts of milk now produced (Brunson et al. 2022). Apparently not enough is produced to give people doses big enough to make them sick from lactose; a glass or two is harmless to most people. The usual environmental costs of cattle rearing show up extensively.

Western pests have invaded China in vast numbers, just as Asia’s worst pests (such as the chestnut blight and the emerald ash borer) have devastated American trees. America’s pine bark beetles, for instance, are now working through forests there as they have destroyed millions of acres here (Qiu 2013).

Biodiversity continues to decline. The other freshwater dolphins are following the white-flag dolphin into extinction. The Yangtse giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) was down to three individuals, all male, in 2019, and is now extinct or doomed (H. Liu et al. 2019). Other riverine life forms are in similar danger (Jian Wang et al. 2021), including many other turtles (Jun Wu et al. 2020) and the Chinese alligator. Fishing was banned in the Yangzi River in 2020. The Chinese paddlefish is extinct. Catches of other riverine fish were down “from 420,000 tons in 1950s to less than 100,000 tons now” (Science 2020). The five species of giant salamanders, the world’s largest amphibian, are disappearing. They are apparently tasty, and thus depleted in the wild; an extremely ill-advised plan to collect wild individuals and farm them has failed (they grew but would not reproduce), leaving them in desperate shape (Yong 2018).

Even the Baer’s pochard duck, an ordinary, formerly common duck that has no exotic requirements, is down to a few hundred birds, thanks to drainage of marshes and local hunting (Tong 2020). Many mammals, birds, and reptiles are about gone. Measures are worthy but inadequate.

Under Xi Jinping, moves toward political and social liberalization were sharply reversed. Hong Kong was crushed—a leading democracy turned into a highly repressed and unhappy city. On the other hand, Xi has had the sense to realize that China was committing suicide, and not just in the long run, by destroying its environment, and he has done a great deal to reverse Mao’s insane policies (Esarry et al. 2020 and Glover et al. 2021 are collections of excellent, important accounts). The problem is that autocrats usually fall into the trap of believing they are infallible while also striving for short-term gains (Ben-Ghiat 2020). Making enormous environmental mistakes is thus normal for such regimes, from Brazil to China and from Trump’s America to Stalin’s USSR. The future is thus dusty indeed.

The Qing genocide of the Dzungars is being repeated in the genocidal campaign against the Uyghurs (Roberts 2020). Many killings have been reported, but worse is massive cultural suppression: destroying mosques and historical monuments, destroying whole neighborhoods of traditional houses, banning the language quite widely, and massive “re-education” campaigns to force Han Chinese culture on this Turkic Islamic minority. China is very quiet about it, but someone got access to the supply orders for the “re-education” camps, and discovered massive orders for spiked clubs, handcuffs, cattle prods, and other torture implements (SBS News 2018).

The Chinese Communist constitution guarantees protection of minorities and forbids this sort of discrimination, but protests have been brutally suppressed. Genocidal suppression of Tibetan and Mongol culture is only a bit less dramatic; actual genocide of Tibetans was widely practised in the 1950s.

            Mayfair Yang’s Gifts, Favors, and Banquets (1994) is one of many excellent ethnographies of modern China. It describes the political uses and manipulations of those acts. Her more recent Re-enchanting Modernity (2020) is a very detailed description of how religion—including its feasting and foodways—survives despite irregular and erratic Communist persecution. The regime blows hot and cold on religion to keep it cowed and manipulable. Directly relevant is her editorship of a collection of papers, Chinese Environmental Ethics (2021), with many exceptionally good studies. Most go well beyond the trite “China’s concepts of nature are different from ours,” to discuss actual events in anthropological perspective.

A paper by Jeffrey Nicolaisen (2021) notes that Han Chinese may have eaten parts of Taiwan Aboriginals in the old days, on the theory that they were not human. In any case, Taiwanese certainly sacrifice and eat pigs, even Buddhists who are otherwise vegetarian (Nicolaisen 2021:48-49).

The Portuguese sinologist Gonçalo Santos has summarized almost 30 years of research, including years of field time, in northern Guangdong province, in an important book, Chinese Village Life Today (2021). The village is slowly depopulating as more and more working-age people are forced to move to cities, or to farming areas close to cities, to make ends meet. Food is urbanizing in consequence. Popular influences have arrived. Breastfeeding is less long-continued, being reduced to 2 years or less from 2 to 3 or even 5 before (p. 140; I saw the same thing take place over years in Hong Kong).

            In the meantime, Western astrology has caught on in China, and many believe it, and Virgo got associated with the downvaluing of virgins above marriageable age in China, so now women Virgos are shunned and not dated. This proves that development and propagation of negative stereotypes can happen without any reality or traditional belief behind it (J. Lu et al. 2020). The application to food is that human foolishness is boundless, and lies behind countless food beliefs new and old.

Chapter 12. Modern Chinese Foods, and Ancient Foods in New Times

            We now move from more general understandings of Communist China to specific foods in the Chinese world.

To begin, as usual, with basic starches: Broomcorn millet, as neglected a major crop as the world affords, has finally received some attention, from Ruiyun Wang et al. (2016). They describe many uses. It is parched as chaomi, dry-toasted in a pan, in central Asia. It is made into suanfan “sour cooked grain,” a fermented concoction with a yogurt-like taste. It is used for the usual noodles, cakes, and buns. A waxy variety is used for gao cakes, including yougao, oil cake, a deep-fried gao traditional at the Spring Festival and at weddings. It is also brewed into jiu. Wedding uses also include limu gao, “cake for leaving mother,”and use of jars of millet in dowries(in Hequ, Shanxi; Wang et al. 2016:333). It is widely cultivated in China, but mostly in the interior north. The seeds are usually yellow or white, but can be red, brown, gray, or black. Many other traits vary too. The crop is in need of further study.     

Rice is, of course, the most important single food in China, as it is in the world today. Rice is so productive that it requires only .24 ha. of land to produce a tonne, if the best technology is used, but maize is down to .21, and wheat .34. Thus, most rice-growing countries, even incredibly densely populated ones like Bangladesh and Vietnam, can export some (Elert 2014).

            Sticky rice, miscalled “glutinous,” is sticky because it has almost no amylose; the starch it does have, amylopectin, cooks up stickier. It also brews better, and is thus the usual feedstock for rice “wines” and sakes. Rice varieties have varying proportions of amylose and amlopectin, and are thus sticky to varying degrees. The textbook separation of indica, japonica, and glutinous rices does not survive well; there are too many subvarieties, intermediates, and dubiously related sticky forms.

A major hero who, for a change, deserves every honor ever given to him, was Yuan Longping, the “father of hybrid rice.” He was born in 1930. Honors including being proposed for a Nobel prize. His rice has vastly increased yields in China, with rices now yielding over 10 tons/ha per crop (see e.g. Shellen Wu 2021; Yuan 2002). He used conventional breeding, not genetic engineering. He supported the latter eventually, however. Toward the end of his life, he was breeding up the salt-tolerant rices of China’s old-time seacoasts to produce rice that can be grown in seawater (Qimeng 2019). He passed away in 2021 at the age of 90.

Rice breeding continues apace; a gene for longer, better-quality, less chalky rice has been found, and is being bred into other rice varieties (Nature 2015, reporting an item in Nature Genetics). A gene from barley allows rice to produce starch more efficiently, meaning more grain and much less methane production; this gene could reduce world methane production 2% if it became universal in rice (Su et al. 2015). Rice is said to be getting tastier in China, especially in the fertile and well-educated southeast, where rice breeding and cultivation are at a high point (Lu et al. 2025).

            Noodles are made in several ways. As noted, low-gluten grains like corn and buckwheat are made into a rather wet dough and forced through holes in a colander, directly into boiling water. If those 4000-year-old noodles are real, this is presumably how they were made. Bean starch and some wheat/egg noodles are made into lumps or flat sheets and hand-cut. High-gluten wheat noodles are made in many ways, the most dramatic of which are “pulled” or “swung noodles” (la mian). For these, the dough is stretched and then swung like a jump-rope, then doubled and re-swung, then doubled again, and so on. This develops the gluten so much that it produces an extremely chewy noodle. Swinging the dough without having it neck down and break requires extreme skill. (Not long ago, the one expert at this in Los Angeles was a Mexican chef working in a Korean restaurant. Globalization is real.)

Closely related to noodles are dumplings, which exist in countless forms. Xiao long bao, “little dragon wraps,” are notably popoular and widespread. Dumplings became known in the western world via Cantonese wonton soup, “won ton” being a local pronunciation of hundun, “primeval chaos.” The soup with dumplings floating in it does look like a primordial cosmic scene, perhaps a few million years after the Big Bang. The dumplings, or eating them, are known as yun tun “swallowing clouds.” In Sichuan some are chao shou “folded arms” (Dunlop 2016:279). Countless other names for filled dumplings are known, but most are unrecorded so far in the canonical literature. Thick Northwest Chinese bread is mo, cf. Tibetan momo.

            Related is gluten; wheat dough is kneaded, then thinned with water to dissolve out the starch. Eventually only the gluten is left, to be made into imitation meats and other items. Seitan is wheat gluten used as imitation meat. One can get gluten powder now in the United States (Bob’s Red Mill makes it). Mix, knead, simmer in broth.

            Tangzhong is a roux-type starter for Chinese baked bread. One mixes flour and water, heats, whisks, then mixes into the flour, yeast, water, etc. for the bread. It provides the fluffy but chewy texture that Chinese prefer in bread. It may be from Japanese or possibly from Portuguese usage; Portuguese sweet bread influenced Chinese baking, via Macau.

            Chinese sweets very often turn out to be Near Eastern, as pointed out by Sean Chen (2021). Some are obviously so, from their names, such as the medieval saboni, which is Turkish saboniye (from the Arabic and Persian words for “soapy”), a flour and sugar sweet that looks like soap. Less obvious is the origin of mooncakes from maamoul, the stuffed Arab tarts or cookies. Mooncakes are said to derive from hubing, “Iranian (or West Asian) cakes,” in the Tang Dynasty. Like mooncakes, they consist of sweet paste (usually of dates in the case of maamoul) in a hand-sized wheat crust often imprinted with designs pressed onto the top. Persian koolocheh are similar. Yutiao, fried dough strips identical to Mexican churros but rarely sweet, are derived from similar dough strips in the Near East (variously lokma, jalebi, or tulumba). Chinese walnut and date candies are derived from the same general background as lukum (“Turkish delight”), but lack the thickening mahaleb gum from a cherry species (Prunus mahaleb). We have already noted Chinese halva and other obviously Near Eastern sweets. Chinese simply are not dessert-oriented; they have borrowed most of their more complicated sweets.

Jiu today includes not only mutton “wine” and “red rose dew” (vodka with rose petals steeped in it), but ng ka pei (Cantonese equivalent of wujiapi), vodka flavored with a medicinal herb, Acanthopanax, that gives it a cider flavor. Jiu is also flavored with other herbal, such as arbutus fruit. Jiu good enough to save for daughter’s wedding is known, as is done with wine in France. Er guo tou, “two pot head,” is cheap white lightning. On a different note, there are now maotais costing over $200 per bottle.

Salt in Chinese culture has been the subject of a major monograph by Hans Ulrich Vogel (2009); he reviews every aspect of its production and consumption in late Imperial times, and compares these with the contemporary European world. Vogel notes, sympathetically, that Chinese add deep-drilling—perfected for salt wells—to the list of the greatest inventions China has given the world, along with paper, printing, the compass, and gunpowder (Vogel 2009:185).

            Doufu zha is the residue from making bean curd (Japanese okara); it is  locally eaten in north China.

Eggplants, domesticated in India, were apparently independently domesticated in what is now southern Yunnan (Meyer et al. 2012; the domestic plant Solanum melongena and its purported wild ancestors, S. incanum and S. undatum, turn out to be genetically pretty much the same—all one species). They go back about as far as any plant records are found, in both China and India. The garden egg—the variety whose fruit really looks like an egg, oval and white—is apparently yet a third domestication, from southern Southeast Asia. Many other useful fruits are gathered in Yunnan (J. Chen et al. 1999).

Qing gan cai is green-stemmed bok choy as opposed to the usual white form.

Passion fuit is bai xiang guo, 100 fragrances fruit.

Luohan guo is now Siraitia grosvenorii. Gac fruit, a Vietnamese delicacy, is a species of bitter melon, Momordica cochinchinensis.

Myrica rubra, yangmei (“strawberry apricot”) or strawberry tree, is a local fruit.

Yuan Mei used gun, “turn,” a cooking time meaning a turn-over of the boiling liquid—a mere second or so. Longer timing methods in the old days included time taken to say a phrase, and above all the time taken to burn incense stick. Incense sticks were all made the same, and the time it took to burn one was thus reasonably standardized. Incense sticks were burned every day by most households, for religion or simply good luck. The old-time western equivalent was to use the commonest prayers: kitchen process durations were described by the time it took to say the Lord’s Prayer, or the Hail Mary, one or five or however many times. Illiterates and people without clocks could always use these.

Boiling and steaming remain the commonest ways of cooking in China. Stir-frying became well known in Song, and waxed commoner over successive centuries, especially the last one or two. Deep-frying and roasting/baking have become common in recent decades. The result is not always good for health; fat consumption has soared. Complex cooking involving several processes has become common in restaurants. Vegetables are more and more often parboiled before being stir-fried, instead of cut up, stir-fried, and then finished in added liquid. The latter was the traditional method, at least in the households I knew; but the parboiling step was a gourmet touch, making the result a bit more cui and thus worth the trouble. Cui refers to a mouthfeel: the vegetable is crisp but then succulent, slightly resisting but then yielding, a texture familiar to westerners in well-cooked new peas, string beans, and carrots. It is a desired height of Chinese gourmetship. Other such mouth textures include nen “soft” and lao “old,” i.e. more tough. Nuo “sticky” can be seen as a mouthfeel term (see Dunlop 2019a:25), and other mouthfeel terms cover slippery, rubbery, brightly refreshing, and so on (Dunlop 2019b:128); there is a term for every imaginable mouthfeel. This is a major side of Chinese gourmetship that is almost unappreciated in the west, even by foodies, but one eventually learns it. (I admit to finding Ms. Dunlop’s memoir fascinating because so much of it perfectly parallels my own learning curve decades earlier, from discovering the critical importance of flame height to learning mouthfeel connoisseurship.)

Food to eat with rice has its own special word in Cantonese: sung. Mandarin simply uses cai, “vegetables,” extended to mean “made dishes.” A common phrase for foods to eat with rice is xia fan, “downing the rice.” Another phrase for these foods (what Americans sometimes called “with-it”) is guo fan, “pass grain,” i.e. “helps the food go down,” the precise equivalent of the phrase “it helps the bread go down” recorded by Escoffier from rural France. This adds to the many words worldwide for “food to eat with the starch staple,” such as Latin companagium, “with bread.”

Tea is the subject of many books. There has, in fact, been a sudden explosion of books about tea, ranging from brief popular accounts to Heiss and Heiss’ encyclopedic and highly authoritative reference work (2010) and James Benn’s superb history of tea in early dynasties (2015). Okakura Kakuzo’s Japanese classic The Book of Tea (1964 [1906]) remains valuable. An incredibly beautiful book, issued in Thailand, is Tea Horse Road by Michael Freeman and Selena Ahmed (2015); Freeman’s exquisite and scientifically detailed photographs are set off by Ahmed’s unique expertise in tea ethnobotany. Another recent tea book is Chow and Kramer (1990). Victor Mair and Erling Hoh have also weighed in with The True History of Tea (2009), much better on the Imperial Chinese historic side than the other works. The art of tea implements in China and elsewhere was the theme of an exhibit at UCLA, whose catalogue (Hohenegger 2009) is a wonderful resource.

The extreme in tea books is reached by George van Driem’s The Tale of Tea (2019), an encyclopedic work, 900 packed pages on every aspect of the drink. The book starts with the origins of tea in the area from northeast India to Yunnan. It continues with the history of tea in China and Japan. Most of the book is absorbed by the European “discovery” of tea and the consequent trade and connoisseurship. The coming of coffee and chocolate and their development in the European world is added as a comparative section. The book ends with particularly valuable chapters on the chemistry and cultivation of tea.

Van Driem, a linguist and philologist, is best when he writes on philological matters: the correct words for tea in dozens of languages, the origins of our words for tea, and the classification of the languages involved. Our European words are derived from Cantonese and Hokkien Chinese, and rarely from Japanese. Van Driem has actually gotten the exceedingly difficult original Chinese words nailed down, even to tracing particular dialects of Hokkien, their correct tonal shifts from dialect to dialect, and how that fed into European languages. He is next best on biology. The sections on chemistry and on tea cultivation are magistral. Lists of tea pests (pp. 839-842) and diseases (849-850) are amazingly comprehensive. The sections on history are solid and reliable, but largely from standard sources, though the heavy use of contemporary writings—always in the original languages, with translations—is valuable. Van Driem is no political economist, and attempts to deal with such matters at more than standard-source levels are uncompelling. Summarizing the work is beyond possibility here, and most of it does not concern China, so I leave it with the recommendation to go to it for reference for all linguistic matters.

Tea continues to be more and more important as China’s drink and a major export. According to one myth, it was discovered by the ox-headed agricultural deity known as the Divine Farmer (shennong) around 2700 BCE, when tea leaves blew into his cup of hot water. He supposedly sampled all the herbs in China to tell which were good for you, which poisonous, and which neutral. An herbal under his name was produced in the Han Dynasty and edited by the great polymath Tao Hongjing in the 6^th century (Wilms 2016). It and other such sources have a good deal of material on food plants.

            An excellent book about tea, with many beautiful illustrations, is Luo Jilian’s The China Tea Book (2012). A scholarly tract is Mair and Hoh (2009). Tea has received its own art magazine:  The Art of Tea, up to issue 9 as of the end of 2010 (I have not seen it since; it has apparently gone under). Unsurprisingly, it was supported by the Taiwan tea industry. It is beautiful and detailed.

            A superb, encyclopedic book about tea by Mary Lou and Robert Heiss (2007) covers Chinese tea especially. It is by a couple who are long-established merchants of top-end tea, so the book is unashamedly promotional; no gritty reporting on the seamy side of the tea industry. On the other hand, the combination of overwhelming knowledge and deep insight into the tea business produces a quite unique account of the top side. A study of tea in Yunnan’s economy was done by Po-Yi Hung (2015).

Tea has caught on worldwide, of course, more than ever. The abstruse and esoteric language of tea connoisseurship, involving cha qi “spirit of tea” and cha yun “tea beauty,” has been unpacked by Jinghong Zhang (2023). A major art exhibit has chronicled its rise and spread over historic time and over the world (Hohenegger 2009). The latest fad, as of this writing, is for aged Puer tea from Yunnan; excellent ethnographic and historic research has revealed much about this delicacy (Yu 2010; Zhang 2010).

The tea house as ordinary people’s office, a social institution I described in the book, has finally received proper and deserved historical attention (Wang 2008).

Going well beyond tea merchandising is Frederick Dannaway’s essay (2010) on the world-in-miniature and tea in China and Japan. He notes, correctly, that the Chinese do not say “microcosm” or “world-in-miniature” for their bonsai landscapes and compressed urban gardens. In fact they simply call them mountain landscapes or gardens or even worlds, as if they were the real thing. And, indeed, they are…you need only look closely (as shown by Stein’s excellent study, 1990).

Historian Miranda Brown has sought out traditional milk processing that still goes on today. China’s love affair with dairy foods peaked in medieval times, but yogurt, soft cheese, and other products continue rather widespread. Learning from central Asia continued during Ming. Dairy foods turn up in odd places, including Shenzhen, the border town with Hong Kong, where a traditional cheese-like product survives. Brown has also reported on foreign foods in traditional Chinese cookbooks (Brown 2019) and other matters of Chinese history, and runs a very active food blog. Kumys is known in Chinese as ma nai jiu, “horse milk jiu.” Milk and milk products used in the past include butter in offerings and milk products consumed by Buddhist monks, among other things (Newman 2011a). Related are the sweets, often milk-based, in Kristina Cho’s Mooncakes and Milk Bread (2021).

Breastfeeding, formerly done till the child was two or three (or even till 5; Santos 2021:140, but this may have been a problematic case), is now sharply reduced, because of the pressures of work. Women now labor in factories and other urban jobs, leaving children with grandparents or other relatives. Breastfeeding is recommended by the government but hard to manage.

            Bean starch has an ancient lineage, and jelly made from it goes back to Song. It gelatinizes in hot water. Mung bean starch known and written about since the Qimin Yaosho described how to make the starch: boil beans, leave in water to ferment, mash, soak and stir to separate starch—fenying, “powder essence.” The jelly does not appear in writings till Song but may have been around earlier. Several good Song recipes given, including lungs stuffed with it along with ginger, nuts, sesame paste, and wheat flour. A similar mix, with pine seeds, walnuts, and dill as well as the mung beans, flour, and sesame, was made into a vegetarian “lung” by cutting it in that shape and serving in spicy sauce. Mung bean starch jelly was used in many other mock-meat and mock-seafood dishes. It was compared to jade in appearance. A Ming writer compared mung bean starch with lotus rhizome, kudzu root, and bracken rhizome starches. The jelly is now cut into broad kuanfen noodles, and fensi (bean jelly vermicelli) are common (Liang 2021).

            This reminds us of the many ways to make noodles out of gluten-free materials, a concept totally alien to the west. Forcing dough through the holes in a colander directly into boiling water is the principal way. One can also simply press out noodle shapes and then put them into the water (Dunlop n.d.:172).

Modern Chinese condiments include countless chile sauces, often with fried onions (and sometimes garlic) to make them crunchy. The flavors are variously complex and refined. The heat ranges from strong to incandescent.

Many forms of soy sauce and soy-based flavored sauces have evolved, often with back-and-forth stimuli to Korea and Japan, which have their own soy traditions.

Insects, rarely mentioned at length in Chinese food books, have been treated along with various annelid and other worms by M. Leung (2000). Cicadas, waterbugs, silkworms, and others are eaten. Caterpillars and grasshoppers, in particular, saved countless people from starvation in earlier times. Locusts were so popular they inspired a religious cult (Hsu 1969). Insects are a major component of southeast Asian fare, occupying e.g. much of the space in the public markets of Cambodia, where deepfried tarantulas are also a delicacy. Pond snails are popular, and Chinese introduced at least one genus, Viviparus, to the United States, via markets; it still is found therein, but has escaped and gone wild as well (Paul Chace, personal communication, 1987; see also Hanna 1966:37 on V. stelmaphorus). More exotic is “winter frog”—the fat, with part of the reproductive system, derived from one species of frog in north China (Newman 2000). One suspects that other frogs are used, because this and other frog dishes are available even in far Los Angeles. This is contributing to the worldwide disappearance of amphibia. Turtles are not only popular food, but medicinal, and their fabled longevity makes them a possible candidate for a long-life food (Newman 2004b). Unfortunately, turtles, like many other animals, are threatened with extinction in China because of their popularity as food and because the Communist government destroyed the traditions of conservation and resource management that had protected China’s and southeast Asia’s environment for centuries. Deer antlers in velvet may not quite qualify as a food, but are a major product of the deer-raising industry in Taiwan and New Zealand; the antlers are cut off, leading to much pain and loss of blood, but at least sustainably (Tseng 2017).

            Among the saddest cases of failure of conservation is the supply of edible birds’ nests. These are the nests of a swiftlet, Collocalia esculenta, which makes “white” nests of protein secreted from glands in its mouth. (Related species produce “black bird’s nests,” not purely mouth secretions, therefore inferior and in need of considerable cleaning.)  The nests are highly regarded as food and medicine, strengthening yin and lungs, good for digestion, and generally tonic. They actually are made primarily of indigestible long-chain proteins, but include growth stimulants and a unique glycoprotein with immunomodulating value (Kong et al 1990; Langham 1980). The supply is, however, endangered by overcollecting; increasing demand and breakdown of local social rules on harvesting have led to wiping out the swiftlet in China and making it rarer and rarer throughout its range in southeast Asia (Chiang 2011). Fortunately, the creative farmers of southeast Asia have discovered a workaround: retooling abandoned houses and buildings as swiftlet caves. This has become a big business, and is saving the swiftlets (Wong and Thuras 2021:160). China’s environment and agriculture are collapsing fast (see e.g. Johnson 2014), and failure to conserve resources is the worst of many problems.

Mushrooms of many species are important foods in China (Newman 2010b, 2011c, 2019) and especially among minorities. Many are also exported to Japan. A huge trade has developed in the Tibetan frontier lands. Daniel Winkler has chronicled this, and could not resist the temptation to refer to “mushrooming trade” (Winkler 2008, 2009). Species include shiitake, now Lentinula edodes; maitake, Grifala frondosus; enoki,k Flammuline velutipes;  bamboo fungus, now commercially raised, Phallus indusiatus; and the old usuals (Newman 2019c).

One recent article describes mushrooms of China, with references to early Chinese sources (J. Newman 2010b), and including such unusual species as chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus), enoki (Flammulina velutipes), and lion’s mane (Hericium erinaceus), and followed by an enthusiastic article by her husband Leonard on how to grow shiitake (Lentinula edodes; L. Newman 2019c). 

            An odd item unrelated to cooking as such is the use of restaurant density and quality to assess the wealth, population, and business activity of cities. Lei Dong and associates (2019) used number and type of restaurants and local ratings of their quality to assess daytime and nighttime populations, businesses, and the like, and checked this against other data. The restaurants turned out to predict the contours well, so the authors constructed a way of using such data to assess neighborhoods rapidly.

            Western concerns with lactose, gluten, “junk” food, ethical eating, and other such food issues have entered Chinese consciousness, often via food packaging. David Machin and Ariel Chen (2023) have thoroughly reviewed this phenomenon, with many photos of the packages.

Stray Notes on Foods

Cannibalism, always fascinating to humanity, continues to receive attention. As noted in my book, famine drove people to eat human flesh on many occasions, but literature fantastically exaggerated the extent of this, and Yenna Wu has analyzed the issue (Wu 1996).

The classic meat dish “Buddha jumped over the wall” (it smells so tempting that a Buddha would break his vegetarian vows and leap for it) is made by very slowly braising sea cucumber, shark fin, deer sinew, fungus, abalone, dried scallops, snow fungus, fish swim-bladder, turtle, and medicinal herbs such as ginseng. Other, less exotic ingredients are often substituted for the rarer ones.

Moon cakes are evolving; heavy, sickly-sweet, and doughy, they are unpopular today, so low-calorie forms are evolving, as well as variants using new ingredients. They too have spread to the United States and become liberated from traditional contexts (Langlois 1972).

            The Maya-domesticated pitahaya cactus is now universal in east Asia under the name “fire-dragon fruit” or just “dragon fruit” (long guo). The latest New World fruit (as of around 2010) to arrive in China is the passion fruit, bai xiang guo, “100 fragrances fruit.” 

            A mangosteen-like fruit (Garcinia sp.) of south China is monographed by B. Liu et al. (2017).

            Seafood gourmetship gets ever more arcane, and ever more fatal to the world oceans (Fabinyi 2012; Fabinyi et al. 2012). The fisheries of China and the seas around it are depleted, and a zone of extreme overfishing is expanding rapidly through the Philippines and Indonesia and out into the Pacific. Even American coasts are depleted, by overfishing of things like sea cucumbers and sea urchins. Jellyfish, both inner and outer parts of the main body, are eaten with enthusiasm.

            Vegetarianism has received some attention lately. Chinese Buddhists are supposed to be vegetarian, and some non-Buddhists are too; this has led to the development of a vegetarian cuisine. Buddhist vegetarianism and avoidance of alcohol have received noteworthy attention and excellent review in two articles (Benn 2005; Kieschnick 2005; both in Sterckx 2005). The drive to create imitation meats for vegetarians and vegans is so strong that there are even vegetarian intestines; the indefatigable Fuchsia Dunlop gives a recipe (Dunlop 2016:324). Most of the imitations strike the present writer as dreadful. It seems preferable (by far) to give up the ersatz, and simply eat vegetables for their own excellent natural tastes. There is also nothing wrong with leaving the meat out of dishes like mapo doufu.

Ducks may not be raised from the egg with loving care any more (though some probably still are), but the Quan Jude restaurant—Beijing’s classic “Peking duck” place—has flourished and even franchised out. The owners were sent down to the countryside for being bourgeois, during the Great Cultural Revolution, but they returned (Ni 2004).

Preserving eggs has received brief but thorough monographic treatment from Fuchsia Dunlop (2006), who points out that it was westerners who started calling pi dan “hundred-year” or “thousand-year-old” eggs. They are aged a few days or weeks.

Sweet potatoes are less important than elsewhere in China, but are incorporated into sweets (p. 447) and other dishes.

Basella esculenta, a green vegetable oddly known as “bean curd vegetable” (doufu cai), is eaten in southwest China.

There is also leek flower sauce, made with salt and ginger and fermented.

Tonghao cai, chrysanthemum greens from the chrysanthemum relative Glebiornis coronaria (formerly Chrysanthemum coronarium) comes in two forms: tong hao  and hao cai (Dunlop 2016:44). The species has gone wild around San Diego, CA, and in Florida, escaping (at least in the San Diego case) from Chinese gardens.

Yet another odd vegetable is the swollen stem of wildrice, Zizania caducifolia, a very close relative of the wildrice of Native North America. Note the spelling as one word, “wildrice,” to distinguish this plant from actual wild rice (nondomestic strains of Oryza sativa). The stems in China become infected with gibberellin-rich fungi (supposedly Ustilago esculenta, common smut)that makes them swell and become succulent, like asparagus. They are called lusun “reed shoots,” and thus asparagus is “foreign lusun.”

            One of the large smoky-flavored cardamoms, Amomum villosum, is distinguished (and long has been) as sha ren, not tsaoko.

A new medicinal food is snow chrysanthemum, Sanvitalia procumbens, aka creeping zinnia. It makes an excellent, flavorful tea. It grows in the Kunlun Mountains, and presumably elsewhere. It was subject to wild speculation in 2011, but quickly returned to moderate price. It benefits from the usual claims of cureall: it is said to reduce cholesterol and blood sugar, and so on.

The Golden Cicada (Cryptotympana atrata) is a popular delicacy in northern China, and is overcollected to the point of rarity. Hong Yang and colleagues report on this, and add: “Approximately 220 cicada species have been identified in China” (Yang et al. 2023). They do not mention others as food. I have seen people catch cicadas to feed chickens, and small boys catch them for noisemaking. I suspect other species are eaten. Chinese traditionally ate the silk pupae those cocoons they unreeled for silk, or fed them—again—to the chicks. Crickets and many other insects are locally eaten.

Chinese names for dishes continue to delight. Thin noodles with ground meat and oil (and lots of chile) are “ants climbing on trees,” because the bits of meat stick to the noodles and look like ants on trees—if one has considerable imagination. A Beijing sweet delicacy is “ass rolls about” (or “donkey rolling in sand”)—a sweet glutinous rice cylinder rolled in crushed bean meal. The rolling process reminds one of a donkey rolling on sand to scratch his back.

            “Across the bridge noodles” is a Yunnan dish in which noodles are poured from one pot into another to finish cooking; the name may come from that, but there is an origin myth involving an elite boy forced to study all the time, and isolated for the purpose on an island in his parents’ garden, food being brought “across the bridge” by his family (Lo and Lo 2003; see ref. in preceding section) or by his long-suffering wife (Freedman 2018, who makes this a theme of her book; also Phillips 2016:302). Such cute stories explaining the name of a dish are not to be taken on faith, since the Chinese love nothing better than to make up such tales. Another story concerns “Ignored by the Dog Filled Buns,” One Gao Guiyou, nicknamed Gouzi (a pun on gouzi, small dog), made superb buns and was so busy selling them that he ignored people (Phillips 2016:48).

            “Lonny” (Leonard Newman) has made up a whole list of wild names: “Buddha’s navel” is a sesame sweet with fruits and sweets, from Wuxi. “Bright Pearl in the Hand” is “deboned duck feet topped with shrimp paste and a quail egg, from Anhui.” “Cats ears” are “stir-fried flat pieces of wheat or sorghum pasta” from Shaanxi. “Dragon plays with a pearl” is “breaded whole shrimp wrapped with fish, from Shandong; “Dragon Playing with Cold Coins” is “eel and shrimp patties with oil, fom Beijing.” “Dragons Fight Tigers” are snake, cat, chicken, and fish-maw in a soup, from Gunagdong. I know a version of this as “dragon, tiger and phoenix”—snake, cat and chicken in a soup. “Four Stars longing for the Moon” is a carp in a spicy sauce surrounded by four other dishes, from Jiangxi. “General Takes Off His Cape”: eel stir-fried with mushrooms and bamboo shoots, from Hunan. “Hundred Birds Bowing to Phoenix: Chicken and soup with dumplings, from Hunan. Lady’s Jade Hairpin: Green stuffed chili peppers with pork and shrimp, from Guizhou. No More Time: Banana, candied orange, and melon batter-fried, from Chaozhou.”  (This is probably a pun, but too arcane for me.)  “Red Cliffs Burning: Turtle with chicken, ham, and Steamed egg cake: from Shanghai.”  (“Burning” is sure to be an allusion to the ham, which is “fire leg” in Chinese.)  “Toad Spits Honey: Sesame wrapped biscuit stuffed with red bean paste; from Beijing. Wok Brushes: Open-topped pork dumplings with frilly edges: from Guiyang. Xixi’s Tongue: Dough filled with date and nut paste and seeds; from Hangzhou.”  (Presumably a reference to the legendary beauty Xishi; “Lonny” 2016:9.)

Another great name is shenxian cai, “spirit mountain-dweller vegetable,” for a dish of radish stewed with pork. Shenxian were men—rarely women—who resorted to the mountains, cultivated spirit powers, and eventually might become immortal, fly on clouds, and otherwise transcend the ordinary. Less romantic is Dongpo pork, named after the great poet and statesman Su Shi, who once in a period of exile for speaking truth to power reclaimed a rough, weedy lot on the east side of the hill and thereafter called himself by its name, Dongpo, “east slope.” Some of his better times were spent in Hangchou, and thus the city created a superb pork dish in his name. It is a fairly straightforward variant on lower Yangzi stewed pork, with pork, onions, ginger, sugar, soy sauces, jiu, and perhaps a spice or two. (The immortals’ radishes are more or less the same dish, plus radishes.) Su Dongpo’s love of pork was surpassed by his love of looking at bamboo: “A man may become thin without pork, but without bamboo, he will become vulgar; and while a thin man may regain his plumpness, there is no cure for the scholar who has lost his refinement” (quoted Dunlop 2016:262). This reminds me of a Chinese folktale of an artist who stopped for one night at an inn and planted bamboos. Someone said: “You are staying here only one night! Why are you planting bamboos?” The artist turned to the bamboos and said: “What is the use of talking to such a person?” (Don’t ask me for a source for that one. It’s one of countless stories I picked up in the China world somewhere.)

Related, somehow, are the beliefs about food and luck. Jenn Harris (2023) counted up several in celebration of Lunar New Year in 2023. Her mother is Chinese and she was raised with these ideas. Perhaps the most widely known is the use of fish to symbolize abundance, both being yu in Chinese. She cites Grace Young for many. Clams and scallops are shaped like coins, and thus bring wealth. “Roast pig… symbolizes purification and peace.” The word for oysters sounds like “good things.” Mushrooms grow like fortune. Cilantro somehow represents compassion. Napa (Beijing) cabbage sounds like “100 wealth.” Shrimp represents fun in Cantonese culture, because the Cantonese word for them, ha (Mandarin xia), sounds like a laugh. Egg rolls look like coins. Radish cake sounds like rising fortune. Sesame balls symbolize wholeness. Long noodles bring long life. Ordinary dumplings (Mandarin jiaozi) also look like coins, or like some coins. I can add from my own experience that hair vegetable (a fresh-water alga) is lucky (various explanations given), peaches symbolize fertility (the blossoms and fruit are reminiscent of female genitalia). Citrus is lucky; the fruits were and are sacred in local traditions, probably going back to Thai beliefs. Tangerines are even called “lucky” in Cantonese (kat, not like the Mandarin word qie for the fruit) and are obligatory at New Year. Nuts and seeds represent fertility and many children. New Year rice cakes are made in the shape of old coins. Pun choi—a mixed dish of meats—is traditional, and is cooked in large amounts by men as a macho culinary thing, like barbecue in America and Australia. And so it goes. Few believe all this; the customs are fun, and there is some insurance value to them, according to consultants. One is reminded of Pascal’s (or Spinoza’s) Wager: Might as well believe in God, because if He doesn’t exist, no harm done, but if He does exist, it’s gravy for you.

Naomichi Ishige, probably the foremost ethnographer of Chinese food, has produced a fine review article on dining behavior around East Asia (Ishige 2006).

Jacqueline Newman has assembled a set of interesting etiquette notes about chopsticks:  Never knock them on the table, ‘because these are the sounds of beggars asking for food”; do not stir food in the dish with them or dig into a dish with them; “do not stand them upright in a dish” because that is too reminiscent of incense sticks or chopsticks in the bowls of sacrificial food for the dead (Newman 2017a:13).

China is, as always, quick to follow global trends. Thomas DuBois and Xiao Kunbing (2021) report on the rapid rise of supermarkets, starting with international chains (including Walmart) but rapidly imitated by locals. Similarly, MacDonald’s and KFC spawned countless imitators, franchising shops for tea, noodles, meat skewers, dumplings, and other staples, with the usual range in quality. TV cooking shows, mass merchandising, name brands, and everything else western has been enthusiastically adopted. Chinese eating will never be the same.

DuBois (2021) has also flagged the importance of culinary nostalgia. Old-time brands and local restaurants are wildly popular in China as of this writing. The items sold and the dishes in the restaurants are not always what they were, but few complain. Food nostalgia is well known throughout the world, and China was sure to follow eventually, though it lagged America and Europe.

Chinese food in Asian context is treated in a series of books by Cecilia Leong-Salobir (2011, 2019; Leong-Salobir ed., 2019).

More on Cooking Strategies:  Some Thoughts for “Slow Food” Devotees

Chinese food is the original fast food. Stir-frying takes seconds, or at most a very few minutes. Food was sliced very thinly and evenly, with maximum surface area exposed, to allow it to cook at maximum speed. Tender young ingredients are used, partly for taste, but partly—again—for quick cooking. “Small eats” (xiao shi, the collective term for snack dishes) are sometimes slow to make, but they are sold on the street for eating on the run. Even slower processes like steaming and soup-making are done fast in the Chinese kitchen. Baking was speeded up by making the baked items extremely small. Persian nan, typically about 30-50 cm long, shrank in China to become the shaobing, only about 10 cm. Baking was done at high heat in very efficient, fuel-sparing ovens or large pots (derived from the Indian/Central Asian tandur).

All this has everything to do with the incredible difficulty of obtaining fuel in the old days. I well remember the scarcity and high price of wood and other fuels, even after kerosene and bottled gas came in. All Chinese cooking is shaped by the need to cook everything with the absolute minimal amount of fuel. I have seen a full meal for a family cooked with a handful of grass. Stoves, dishes, and recipes are all exquisitely adapted to this. The Chinese traditional bucket stove has now spread worldwide into fuel-short areas; I have seen it sold widely in Madagascar, among other places. I have also seen an ancient Greek pottery stove that is almost identical; apparently it was an independent invention, but one wonders.

The only really slow cooking in Chinese tradition is the stewing and braising used for tough cuts of meat and fish. This could be very slow indeed—some restaurants kept pots of stock constantly simmering, and put into them anything that needed long cooking. According to legend, some of these stock pots had been simmering for centuries. Admittedly this is highly improbable, but certainly some stock pots had been there at the back of the stove for years.

A pair of sessions in Boston in 2018-19 (at the second of which I was present) produced a series of articles on Chinese food and society (Zhang and Schneider 2022). Jin Feng (2022) continues her detailed and insightful accounts of the food of Jiangnan (see Feng 2019), describing five women who manage (or once managed) restaurants, one of which serves French-style foie gras along with lower Yangtze delicacies. Caroline Merrifield (2022) records people in Hangzhou talking of the good old days when food was simple and not so processed, and tasted like food; today the meat and vegetables are tasteless. Shaohua Zhan (2022) provides a history of concerns over food adequacy since 1949. Alexander Day (2022) reports on tea-raising in one district. Emily Yeh and Fan Li (2022) describe the rise of crayfish raising in Sichuan, and the branding of a local rice as “crayfish rice” because it is raised as the crayfish are, on clean fresh water, thus avoiding the fear of contamination that is now general, and thoroughly realistic, in China.

Chapter 13. Current Foodways around China

Our knowledge of cooking in the various provinces of China has been enormously advanced by many culinary ethnographies.

A great deal more about Chinese food and caixi—“systems of dishes,” i.e. regional and local cuisines—has come out since 1988. H. T. Huang’s huge book—the labor of a lifetime—goes into detail on wheat products, including alum-raised ones, such as yutiao and some bao, and on flavoring pastes.

 There are also many cookbooks with ethnographic detail going far beyond simple recipes. (A few examples from a large, good literature are Lo and Lo 2003, see previous section; Dunlop 2016, 2019; Phillips 2016; Yee 1975; Young and Richardson 2004).

            Fuchsia Dunlop (n.d.:193-195) records that the whole idea of regional cuisines in China is only about 100 years old, though everyone earlier could discuss differences between north and south, and every city had its specialty dishes. The early and mid 20^th century saw lists of four or five major cuisines. Then in the 1980s an eightfold classification became popular, but it excluded deep-interior areas. Arguments go on endlessly, and cannot be resolved, since there are countless local differences and overlappings.

Carolyn Phillips counts 35 cuisines in China, classified under 5 regions: north, “elegant Yangtze River environs,” “savory coastal southeast,” “spicy Central Highlands,” and “arid Northwest” (Phillips 2016:xiii). These are simply the familiar north, lower Yangtze, south, and west, plus a far west including ethnic cuisines. Under these, the 35 are largely provinces, with some provinces divided, plus major cities, Hakka, Chaozhou, and, interestingly, “Taiwan Military Families”—they have developed their own fusion cuisine, heavily Yangtze-drainage-based. Phillips’ enormous and encyclopedic cookbook has probably the best instructions for cooking, setting up a kitchen, buying ingredients, and dining of any English-language source, but she makes all the standard errors of biology, from “plum” for mei to “lotus root” for the rhizome (though she has that one correct in the ingredients section at the end). She is also a wonderful and delightful storyteller, having provided a romantic and adventurous memoir (Phillips 2021). Her origin myths of dishes like mapo doufu and across-the-bridge noodles are good fun and historically documented.

            Local foodways are covered in a major collection of papers, edited by David Holm (2009). Sidney Cheung has edited an important volume, Rethinking Asian Food Heritage (2014), with papers on the origins and modern fates of several important, and often little-studied, local food traditions in China and south and southeast Asia; notable, for instance, is James Farrer’s brilliant analysis of the rise and decline of Western-style food in Shanghai during its golden age in the 1920s and 1930s. The western-type food available then was apparently of a very low standard, but it was romantic, exotic, and an important part of the city’s image, so old Shanghai hands clung to it. They re-created it in Hong Kong (as I well remember from my 1960s time there), only to have the rising young generation scorn it, unmoved by its hallowed tradition. Among other outstanding articles are one by May Chang and Cordia Chu on mullet roe in Taiwan.

            Particular distinguished mention goes to Fuchsia Dunlop for her stunning work on Sichuan food, Land of Plenty (2001). A “new and updated edition” is titled The Food of Sichuan (2019a). This book not only includes recipes for almost all the Sichuan specialties, but a set of glossaries that give the characters, transliteration, and definition for just about every common Chinese cooking and culinary term, as well as Sichuan localisms, including very obscure ones. The recipes are, as she says, authentic: they are the way the better Sichuan chefs actually prepared them when she was there in the 1990s. They are properly rich in garlic, Sichuan brown pepper, and chile, just as I remember real Sichuan food in the old-time cafes in Taiwan that catered to Sichuanese.

These and other works have established Dunlop as perhaps the leading ethnographer of actual Chinese food. (A later book by Dunlop, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking, 2012, goes over relatively familiar ground, but has some very unusual but simple recipes; it is, however, a photograph book, not an in-depth study.)  Dunlop has also sought out the full story of Gongbao Chicken, the “kung pao chicken” of worldwide menus. It was created for Ding Baozhen (1820-1886), the Gongbao (Palace Guardian) for “his honorary title of tutor to imperial princes” (Dunlop 2019c:F1). He came from Guizhou, one of the chile-loving provinces since the 18^th century, and later spent much time in Chengdu, Sichuan, where the chicken dish was created for him. It involves chicken white meat with dried chiles, Sichuan brown pepper, garlic, ginger, white spring onions, peanuts, and “a glossy sauce mixed to a particular degree of sweet-and-sour known as ‘lychee-flavored’” (Dunlop 2019a:F4). Today, different forms of gongbao chicken and many other gongbao dishes are made in Guizhou, in honor of Ding’s memory. The chicken there can be made with dark meat; it uses the local ciba chiles, in red oil, without the peanuts or Sichuan pepper. Fuchsia Dunlop continues to produce blogs, recipes, and articles at a monumental rate.

Dunlop also confirms my long-standing point about the sexual double meaning of brown pepper. The berries grow twinned at the base of a short stalk; the whole appears like miniature male genitalia. This symbolism is obvious in the Book of Songs, (Song 117) and the Songs of the South (Chu Zi). Ms. Dunlop reports this symbolism is still vibrantly alive in Sichuan (Dunlop 2008:220). Pepper is even exchanged as a love token.

In The Food of Sichuan (2019a:475-478), she lists fully 56 recognized and named ways of cooking a dish—a wonderful folk taxonomy. Many are variants on such basic terms as hungshao “red cooking” and baishao “white cooking” for stewing in liquid, but some are regional terms new to my south-Chinese training. I learn that mapo doufu is not stir-fried (as I thought it was) but du, cooked in a wok in a more stew-like way, so it makes a noise like “du-du-du.” She also provides taxonomies of sauces, flavors, and almost everything else. Thus, flavor types include xiang “fragrant,” extended to more sensory experiences than the English word; yiwei “odoriferous”; xingwei, “fishy”; sauwei “foul”; shanwei “rank, muttony.” (Wei means “flavor”; Dunlop 2019a:23. Xiang means “fragrance,” and appears in the name Hong Kong, local Cantonese for Xianggang, “fragrance harbor”; incense, called “fragrance” in Chinese, used to be exported from it.) The last of these is one of the Five Flavors of Chinese medicine, along with our more familiar salt, sweet, sour, and bitter. This brings it close to the umami flavor now added by Japanese taste scientists to the classic Western four. One famous flavor is yuxiang, “fish fragrance,” a mix of ginger, green onions, Chinese jiu, and other flavors usually used on fish. (Dunlop 2019a:24 lists some other possible origins for the term, but the standard one is clearly correct. The dishes called yuxiang do not taste at all like fish, but they use that mix of ingredients.) Dunlop lists even more, a full 23 flavors, late in the book (471-474). This work bears serious analysis as a taxonomy of sensory experience, comparable to very few descriptions in literature. Complex, detailed taxonomies of flavor, scent, and mouthfeel are rarely noted worldwide.

Another taxonomy applies to slicing. Cooks in China in the old days started their career by learning to slice properly, a skill taking years to perfect. (Having spent many years trying to slice food with a Chinese cleaver and with western knives, I can attest to the difficulties.) Dunlop (2019a:57-41; 2019b:84-85) gives one of her thorough taxonomies of slicing types, culminating with “horse ears,” slicking long thin vegetables into horse-ear-like diagonal slices. Types of fire and flame also receive attention, with due attention to the fact that ancient writers already worried about this (Dunlop 2019:105-6). Good cooks attend to the sound of the food; shrimps, for instance, slightly change their hissing in the pot when properly done, as I learned in Hong Kong in the 1960s.

Fuchsia Dunlop’s books go well beyond cookbooks and provide both a total regional ethnography of food and a personal record. Dunlop lists the standards of Sichuan cuisin (2019a:44-58), and gives recipes for the main dishes, as well as many highly obscure and local specialties.

 The numbing and spicy taste of Sichuan food is known as mala, “hemp and piquant,” the hemp referring to the numbing quality of marijuana; the drug side of the hemp plant (China’s Cannabis sativa) is not as pronounced as that of its Indian relative C. indica, but was quite well known in ancient times. The classic mala dish is mapo doufu, a dish that began (probably in the 19^th century) in Sichuan and as swept the world (Erway 2020). The name may mean “the beancurd of the Ma family women,” but there are countless other theories. Ma means “hemp” and can refer to smallpox marks, which are vaguely similar to hemp seeds, and perhaps the commonest story says the dish was invented by a pockmarked woman. It appears that “a pockmarked woman (which is what mapo means) named Chen invented this bean curd dish at her stand outside the northern gates of Chengdu” Phillips (2016:268). Dunlop also tells this story (Dunlop 2019a:245). Dunlop locates Ms. Chen to “the Bridge of Ten Thousand Blessings in the north of Chengdu.” That cooking stall would surely have received a Michelin star if such things had been known then. (A Bangkok back-alley cooking stall lady had one, as of 2020.)

Chongqing hot pot involves a stock (based on bones unless vegetarian) so spicy that 30 dried hot chiles qualifies it as “medium,” coupled (often) with a healthful stock without chiles but with goji berries and red jujubes. One dunks uncooked food in these to cook it, and then eats it with various sauces even hotter and more rich in Sichuan brown pepper than the stock. Crushed garlic is one standard, and the whole cuisine is redolent of this ancient import from western Asia. Black tofu, made from black soybeans and looking and tasting like gray chalk, is a staple. Various “variety meats” are standard and popular for this dish. Desserts, pickles, and snacks are available on the side. The whole is a memorable feast, but the tastes of chile, brown pepper, and garlic overwhelm most others, so they are of interest primarily for texture. Fuchsia Dunlop reports a very high density of hot pot restaurants in Chongqing and Chengdu. She provides a long ethnographic description of hot pot and its rituals in Sichuan (2019:404-412). However, she laments the replacement by hot pots of actual chef expertise in cooking.

Rabbit is a common food, but newly so. Traditionally eaten as an usual game find, it was farmed in the early Communist period because the USSR wanted the fur and meat. As relations with the USSR cooled, the Sichuanese took to eating the rabbits themselves, and the taste continues (Dunlop 2019a:116; other meats are monographed on pp. 126-129). The standard “twice-cooked pork” appers on pp. 132-133. Blood is less common in Sichuan than in Fujian, but still a regular item (170-171). Tofu is not ignored; she provides a recipe for making it yourself (247-248). Pickled and preserved foods are staples in Sichuan, even more than elsewhere in China, and of course a full taxonomy is provided (416-417), with recipes following, including smoking your own bacon (424-426). You can even make your own sweet aromatic soy sauce, starting with regular soy sauce (459), and your own fermented rice jiu (460; also Dunlop 2016a:326).

Dunlop has also given us a memoir (Dunlop 2008, reissued with new foreword 2019), narrowly focused on food. Ms. Dunlop is possibly the most adventurous eater since Anthony Bourdain, having tried every Chinese food short of human flesh (a last resort in old-time famines). She admits to having been defeated by a breakfast of pig lungs with liver and chitterlings, plus sheep stomach (Dunlop 2019b:211). She has been in all parts of  China, being intrepid enough to brave arrest and detention by hitching her way into remote parts of Tibet. She went through a chef school in Sichuan, not only the first foreigner but almost the first woman to do that. This involved learning some very local terms (Dunlop 2019b:82). Her memo ends on sad notes, however, as she chronicles the appalling contamination, pollution, infection, and outright poisoning that hit the Chinese food economy in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries (Dunlop 2019b:273-290). Forunately, the situation has improved recently, though not enough. She also confesses grief about the number of endangered animals killed for food, and regrets consuming more than a few of them herself (Dunlop 2019b:255-272). Indeed, China is eating itself into biological collapse. The ecosystem cannot survive elimination of almost all biodiversity.

Jiangnan, classically the home of China’s most prestigious and refined cuisines, has received excellent studies by the indefatigable Fuchsia Dunlop in Land of Fish and Rice (2016) and by Jin Feng, Tasting Paradise on Earth (2019). The books are studies of the hallowed traditions, their great restaurants, and the recent commercialization of both in that affluent, tourist-oriented, accessible part of China. The food is not always what it used to be. Dunlop is ever British-polite, but Jin Feng is a remarkably forthright reporter on quality.

Related is the food of Shanghai, which includes a number of very local specialties. Jiangnan cooking in general, and Shanghai in particular, runs heavily to long, slow cooking, often of stews with sugar, star anise, and dark soy sauce. Anyone who identifies “Chinese food” with the lightning-fast, ballet-delicate cooking of Guangzhou learns with astonishment of a Chinese cuisine more deeply into slow simmering than any in Europe. Mark Swislocki (2009) has provided a fine study of Shanghai food and its local meanings—heavily nostalgic, of course.

Shanghai’s special variant of Jiangnan tradition has also found a superb chronicler

in Betty Liu, in My Shanghai (2021). This book is truly exemplary among recent Chinese cookbooks in beginning with a thorough, accurate account of major cooking methods and ingredients, giving the Chinese characters and pronunciation along with English-language description. I have never seen this better done, and for a cuisine surprisingly little known in the US it really matters. (Most “Shanghai” restaurants in the US, in my experience, are actually eclectic, serving Sichuan, Canton, and Beijing dishes with glorious indifference and aplomb). My first acquaintance with Shanghainese food was in the hotel where my wife and daughter and I first stayed in Hong Kong, in 1965. Downstairs was a stunningly good Shanghai restaurant, where we frequently ate after moving into our own quarters (which consisted of a small boat, since we were studying the boat-dwelling fisherfolk). Their signature dish was beggar’s chicken, unfortunately not found in Betty Liu’s book. This is a chicken cleaned and stuffed with herbs, then encased in mud and baked. The chicken can be wrapped in fragrant herbs inside the mud shell. Originally, it was stuck into the beggars’ campfire to hide it from the chicken’s rightful owner if he came searching for it. (Compare “bandits’ lamb,” pit-buried to cook over hot rocks, in the Mediterranean world.) Today, it is legally acquired and baked in an oven. The clay was broken off with an empty bottle, to our amusement.

Some other traditional Shanghainese items salted duck eggs (mild, with slightly runny yolks; very good); small river shrimp with Chenkong vinegar; finely slivered baby bok choy with mushrooms and meat threads. Extremely small baby bok choy is “chicken feather” bok choy. Chenkong vinegar comes from a local town; it is aged and has a distinctive flavor. It looks like balsamic vinegar and has a similar gourmet cachet, but does not taste similar to balsamic.

Wenzhou, an isolated port city in southern Zhejiang, has a distinctive dialect of Wu, or separate language in the Wu group, and an equally distinctive cuisine, with its own dumplings, salads, and sother usual types of dishes. Being on the sea and cut off from the rest of the world by mountains, it specializes in sea foods, ranging from edible fish skin with garlic to crab and pork dishes. The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman has chronicled this cuisine as well as many others (Newman 2012d).

Another food-famed city in Zhejiang is Shaoxing, whose fermented jiu is a standard of quality everywhere. More obscure are the lees that remain from making jiu, known as jiu zao, and used to produce zao lu (Dunlop 2016:22), a pickling or preserving medium known since ancient China. Preserving food in zao lu has been a major part of Chinese thrift for at least a couple of millennia.

Hangzhou is famous for many foods, including cat’s-ear pasta amazingly similar to Italian orecchiette (Dunlop 2016:266). It appears to be independent invention.

Also famed in Zhejiang is ham from Jinhua, which ranks close to Yunnan ham in popular esteem. More widespread in the lower Yangtze area is “squirrel fish,” scored and fried so that supposedly looks like a cooked squirrel (the resemblance escapes me). Filled dumplings in the area are sometimes still called mantou (Dunlop 2016:30), though that word has come to mean small solid-dough loaves elsewhere in China.

Acorns are still an important food in remote and mountainous parts of Zhejiang, as chronicled by M. Wang and colleagues (2025). They studied three widely-separated villages in Zhejiang. Four categories are recognized: Q. glauca and Lithocarpus glaber (trees); Castanopsis sclerophylla; Q. fabrei & Q. serrata (shrubby); Q. acutissima & Q. variabilis (trees, montane). They are usually made into acorn tofu, which involves rinding, leaching, soaking (3+ days till water is clear), boiling, and solidifying. This gets rid of bitterness. They used to depend a lot on them and even made jiu and soy sauce out of them. The “tofu” is not coagulated with gypsum or anything else; it naturally gels. Essentially the same thing is dotorimuk in Korea. Starch jelly is also made. A review of the archaeology is included in their article. Different tannin levels were separated out in some sites.

Finally (as far as Zhejiang is concerned), on a literary note, a humorous short performance by storyteller An Zhongwen of Hangzhou has been translated (Simmons 2011:476-477). It is a marketplace dialogue between a dried ribbon fish and a winter melon. They slang each other in dialect like a couple of peasants. The ribbon fish boasts not only of his taste but of “containin’ phosphorus, protein, and fat”—An Zhongwen was having some fun with modern nutritional advice. The winter melon answers that it is “thrifty and practical, moreover easy to cook.”  As well as available for candying and soup. Also, it could roll over and squash the fish with its sixty-eight catties—88 pounds, a most unusual weight indeed for a winter melon.

Jiangsu cuisine has been chronicled by Li and Ma (2022). Its high cuisine traces back to Tang and Song. Subtypes include Jinling, Suxi, Huaiyang, and Xuhai. The mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis is a favorite seasonal item. Crayfish is also a specialty, with “thirteen-spiced crayfish” being a particularly elaborate recipe. Better known is “squirrel fish,” not a squirrelfish but a fish that is fried and sauced so that it (vaguely) resembles a squirrel. Another unique localism is “fish hiding in mutton,… fish wrapped in deboned lamb ribs and stewed with spices.” Lionhead meatballs and salted and stewed duck are less unique but locally characteristic. The high level of seafood and vegetable consumption makes this a very healthy cuisine; one vegetable, watershield (Brasenia schreberi), has antibacterial action, though possibly not when cooked in soup. It is a classic local food with many literary allusions.

Henan, previously a rather blank spot on the culinary map, has had its food chronicled by Jacqueline Newman (2011d—with recipes). It is noted for fairly plain, straightforward cooking, running heavily to pork, onions, and noodle dishes. Another blank filled by the intrepid Jacqueline is the northeast (the former Manchuria; Newman 2019b). She notes its history of game, including deer tails, which have to be soaked to make fur removal easy, and then stewed “for at least two hours with several Korean pastes and lots of cinnamon” (Newman 2019b:15). Saqima (Manchu sweets) and sanzi (glutinous rice dumpling “wrapped in perilla or linden leaves” (Newman 2019b:14) are eaten.

In Shanxi, jujubes are made into a true wine—they are mashed and fermented. Buckwheat is important there, and is made into noodles, as in Korea and Japan. Shanxi possesses a huge salt lake, the Yuncheng Dead Sea, that has produced salt for 4000 years. It contains sulfates, which nourish colorful algae blooms. Today it is more a tourist attraction and health spa than salt supplier, but salt ponds still flourish (Wong and Thuras 2021:118).

In Shaanxi especially (but widely in north China), a sandwich, rou jia mo (“meat in bun”), is a common snack. It is more or less a flattened equivalent of a stuffed bao (see Wong and Thuras 2021:121-2). The cuisine of Shaanxi and Gansu preserves much of the Yinshan Zhengyao cusine, including noodles with lamb and large cardamoms, various breads and dumplings, and cabbage dishes. Noodles include biang biang noodles, a.k.a. you po mian (“oil slapped noodles), whose dough is slapped hard on a hard surface such as a metal or marble counter top, presumably for the same reason that beaten biscuit dough in beaten in the U.S. south—to develop gluten rather dramatically. With lamb tripe and similar ingredients, they are a Xi’an specialty.

Fujian food involves, besides the famous red ferment on rice, a flavoring mix often lacking ginger—odd in China (see below). Raw sea food in wine lees or red ferment is not to the outsiders’ taste, especially since the sound and feel of crunching the shell is part of the pleasure. Pitahaya, a Mexican cactus fruit, has come to Fujian and elsewhere in southeast China, under the name of “fire dragon fruit” (huo long guo)—a creative name for a scaly fruit of shocking pink and electric green. New world foods often came first to Fujian, and some odd ones occur, such as a purple field corn similar to rare Mexican varieties—and very good (I met with it in remote rural Fujian in 1999). Green tea powder is used there, as in Japan. Fukien “water liquor”—made with yeast, often including the red ferment so beloved there (Huang 2000), and water—is mixed with highly distilled raw alcohol to produce a drink significantly called “tiger piss” (lao hu miao). Hakka people of the area sometimes skin and smoke-dry field mice for food.

In Fujian, dumplings stuffed with meat and flattened are called bian shi, “flattened eats.”  A round bread baked in a tandur-like oven is kompyang or kompia (nasalized), said to have been invented in 1562 when Japanese pirates were spotting pursuers by their kitchen fires and a storable, precooked food was needed. Of course this could be one of those delightful Chinese dish origin myths. The bread is bagel-shaped and could be hung on a pole. It is native to northern Fujian and apparently other areas (Wikipedia, “Kompyang,” with additional information from Katy Biggs [Hung] on Facebook, June 3, 2015). Reported from Malaysia is a strange cake made with lye: ki-a-kueh, “lye cake” (ki is lye, a the Hokkien diminutive, kueh is “cake”); Victor Yue, Facebook posting, Dec. 24, 2021). This is evidently of Fujian origin, since the name is pure southern Fujianese (Southern Min).

In Quanzhou, tea was once common, became rare, and is now common again, thanks to the boom in the Chinese tea industry; this is a case of “re-invented tradition” (Tan and Ding 2010).

In Guangxi, barnyard millet (Echinochloa) is an important grain; its name has spread to maize. The foods of Guangxi have been described by David Holm (1999).

In Yunnan and elsewhere, a bitter tuber of a water plant, sa pi, comes from a Homocharis sedge. Pteridium and Osmunda fern shoots are also eaten. Mallows, chayotes from Mexico, and mushrooms abound. Yogurt is still widespread. Lima beans have become very common in Yunnan, and known locally elsewhere.

The minorities of Yunnan traditionally lived largely by swidden farming, though there are several in the south who terrace hillsides for paddy rice. Shaoting Yin (2001) carried out a long and detailed study of swiddening (translated by Magnus Fiskejö, an authority on Yunnan minorities who could add his own knowledge). Yin defends Yunnan swiddening as being extremely sensitive ecologically (see also Jianhua Yang 2013). For one thing, many minorities have planted alders in abandoned swidden fields. Alders rapidly and heavily fix nitrogen from the air, since they have root-knot microbiota symbionts, as legumes do. Thus the swiddeners refertilize their fields while growing valuable timber. They also know that deforestation dries up mountains. Some groups sow eleusine (Eleusine coracana), locally called “dragon claw” millet; this is a plant from Africa that came via India. The usual millets, vegetables, and rice are grown; the Jinuo have over 71 kinds of it (p. 242-244). Recent replacement of swidden by tea and rubber plantations has been ecologically disastrous (Fiskejö 2021; Wang 2013).

            Yunnan cooking still includes dairy products, including thin sheets of goat cheese (ru pi “milk skin”), said to be from the Bai people. Related is deep-fried soft goat cheese cubes. Yogurt survives among Tibetan and related minorities. The extension of milk products to southeast Asia, and their subsequent contraction from much of the region, was chronicled by Paul Wheatley (1965). He pointed out that they spread with Hinduism and Buddhism, which use milk products ritually, and contracted with the spread of Islam. An excellent water-buffalo yogurt survives among the Toba Batak of Sumatera, as a local but important food (personal observation; Richard Lando, personal communication).

            Highland minorities in western Yunnan grow three species of quinces: the familiar Chaenomeles speciosa and also C. cathayensis and C. tibetica. They provide much vitamin C, and are medicinally used (as elsewhere in China) for their tannins, soothing value, and ability to sweeten other medicines. They are pain medicines in Yunnan. They provide valuable ecosystem services, like other tree and bush crops (Yang et al. 2015).

            Notes on mushrooms are surprisingly rare in Chinese sources, but Anna Pechova (Facebook posting of July 20, 2023) reports an entry on chanterelles from the Diannan Bencao (Yunnan Herbal)of 1436, warning that they have very damp properties and must be cooked with ginger to correct this. It adds that local people believe poisonous mushrooms turn garlic black when cooked with it, but this is not necessarily true; ginger, however, will blacken. Modern science does not uphold either of these home tales. Fortunately, chanterelles are nonpoisonous and hard to mistake for anything that is.

            Wuhan food, judging from a very inadequate sample in a restaurant in San Gabriel, involves very chile-rich chopped meat dishes cooked in a pan over the stove; I have seen this in Hunanese restaurants elsewhere. In my experience, there is not much taste except the basic ingredient and the chile. The Tasty Dining Restaurant also offers sweet glutinous rice-squash cakes with sesame seeds on top; good, and supposedly loved by Mao Zedong. Noodles with sesame and soy sauces, dumplings with rice and mushrooms as well as pork, and other small items are major parts of the cuisine.

            Jacqueline Newman (2014a) has spent some time in Dongbei—Manchuria—and provided some notes on the cuisine. Bears’ paws were traditional, with the left front one preferred, but now the paws must be emulated in bean curd, for bears are rare and protected. Local game in general is so rare that Newman could never find out what a feilong—flying dragon—was; apparently some kind of pheasant-like bird. Moose nose was popular there, as in Siberia and aboriginal Canada. Forest mushrooms and herbs remain available. Various breads show Russian influence, up to and included sausage baked into a bun and known as pork khleb (Russian for “bread”).

            Guizhou’s cuisine, previously almost unknown to the outside world, has finally received a short monograph. The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman (2010b) reports both regular and glutinous rice, the usual vegetables, nuts including walnuts, wild sour fruit, and game. Pickled vegetables are popular, and Newman gives an elaborate recipe (2010b:10). Dog meat is eaten for strengthening (see also Newman 2011a). Recipes include a marvelous one for fish in sour soup. Many snacks and fish dishes occur. I remember once seeing in a Chinese cookbook a Guizhou recipe for pangolin—an animal eaten because its weird appearance makes it suspect of having powerful qi. The recipe involved stewing it with every strong-flavored thing in Chinese cuisine, obviously to kill the taste; the animal lives on ants. (I was reminded of the classic American folk recipe for cooking a coot:  Put the coot in water with a brick; boil till brick is tender; throw away the coot and eat the brick. I am told that Australians use the same recipe for the cockatoo.)

            In Hubei, the mountainous southern district of Enshi is an outlier of minority groups; people of Tujia, Miao and Dong ancestry live there, though they have now Sinicized and blended into the local Chinese population. A distinctive cuisine of uncertain origin is locally called “Tujia,” but is really a general local cuisine, eaten by all groups in Enshi. The local anthropologist Xu Wu (2011) has devoted an entire book to this cuisine—the first scholarly book in English on a Chinese local folk cuisine. Apparently it is a development of the whole mixed-origin population, since it is based on introduced New World crops and is thus clearly a relatively recent development. Early account mention millets (including eleusine—now forgotten in the area), barley, buckwheat and bracken fern rhizome starch instead of the New World foods. A watershed for the area was 1735, when the Qing Dynasty worked to open up the area for farming; settlers including minority peoples moved in, land was cultivated, game was hunted out, and the New World crops began to take over.

The distinctive Enshi cuisine is based on maize flour. Maize is now thought to have been there since ancient times, and the locals refer to themselves as maize-eaters in contrast with the people of the plains, who are rice-eaters; by humorous analogy, jeeps are “maize-eaters” and autos are “rice-eaters.” Rice is, however, important, and all the ritual grain dishes are made of it. As elsewhere in China, maize has remained very much an outsider in this regard.

Local vegetables are staples, including wild greens. The “fish flavor vegetable,” Houttuynia cordata, is popular; the root is eaten with the inevitable chiles. Wormwood (Artemisia sp.) is another. The people also eat what the Japanese call konnyaku:cakes of the root starch from Amorphophallus riveri. One dish is made of smoked pork, smoked sausage casing, sticky rice, regular rice, wild wormwood, and wild garlic.” It is eaten at the Spring Sacrifice in the second month. Another green is Camellia oleifera, traditionally used not only for soup but also for tea in place of C. sinensis. There are said to be 2000 kinds of medicinal plants. Famine in the Great Leap Forward led to reliance on sweet potato, fern starch, and even loquat tree bark, which is somewhat poisonous.

Pork and bean curd are as popular as elsewhere. The rivers have fish, once abundant but now depleted. Game was once important; old accounts even mention smoked tiger meat as well as hunting with hawks and hounds. Even today, meat (now pork) is often smoked, harking back to the days when preserving game was a regular activity.

This cuisine, at least the folk form of it, is called “hezha.” It was once considered low, but is now popular, with its own specialty restaurants. Hezha refers specifically to soybeans ground with water as for making tofu, but it is used as a drink or soup in Enshi instead of being processed into tofu. It is usually cooked with chopped vegetable leaves for soup. Sometimes red peppers, garlic, and other hot spices are added, or meat is ground with the soybeans to make a very rich hezha. Its name has come to be the term for the whole cuisine. Rice is sometimes cooked with white potato cubes as a starch staple. This is washed down with the local white lightning, made of maize. Potatoes—often a staple—are also sliced and stir-fried, then eaten with vinegar-chile sauce. Sweet potato too can be a staple, sometimes made into a ball of mash.

The people love sour flavors including pickled vegetables. They especially love sour-and-hot foods (“hot” with chile—la—not necessarily hot in temperature). They make chile sauces, both with chiles alone and with chopped chile mixed with maize flour. The latter can be stir-fried with smoked pork or cooked into mush. Chile is used in everything and is wildly popular, and is pieced out with spicebush (Lindera glauca), a spicy-flavored wild plant; it is said to regulate qi. Sweetening came from glutinous rice, sweet potatoes, maize stems, and other natural sources, including honey. The local variant of “five spice” involves brown pepper, star anise, cinnamon, clove, and fennel (five spice can also include ginger, cardamom, black pepper, and other items, and can range from four to six or seven ingredients, despite the name). The methods of cooking are the usual ones, but they add “dressing raw vegetables with sauce (liangban). A banquet is known as “eating wine” (chi jiu). Another unique trait (so far as I know) is their category of “rising” (fa) foods, those like konnyaku, egg, sticky rice, and kelp, that stimulate and can exacerbate skin outbreaks (allergy rashes)—more or less a blend of the wider Chinese concepts of supplementing (bu) and hot-wet (yitsap in Cantonese) foods.

New Year is celebrated as usual, but many families eat the banquet a day or two before the actual new year. This is said to be a Tujia custom, but is in fact rather widely distributed. Many different explanations are given, showing how many “origin myths” for a common custom can coexist in even a small community. Often the meal involves a pig head and tail, so the year will have “a good beginning and a good end.”

A large number of taboos and avoidances for pregnant women are known, and the usual high-nutrient postpartum foods are recommended (Wu 2011:193).

Xu Wu has also studied eating of Artemisia in Enshi. It is eaten in shefan, or haozi fan (hao means “artemisia”), a dish for the spring sacrifice festival. Wild wormwood is cooked with the local wild garlic (Allium macrostemon) and other wild greens. An artemisia meal will involve such other items as smoked pork, smoked pork intestines, dried tofu, shepherd’s purse (wild greens), and so on (Wu 2014a). Only tender young leaves of wild plants are used. This can be compared with the widespread use of wormwood in Korean cooking.

Wu has extended her concern to other villages, and their revival of local foods in nongjiale—“Farmers’ Joy”—restaurants. These provide more or less authentic local traditional foods, but to varying degrees modified for the tourists. “Stinky”—fermented—foods are generally ruled out, for instance. The Chinese Communist government’s bureaucratic attitude toward classifying ethnicity is revealed in the change of one village from Han to Tujia to Dong (Wu 2014b:170), all with no change in the people. They are, in fact, culturally Han and mostly Han by ancestry, but classifying them as minorities helped them get a tourism industry started, with—of course—food.

Wu has also done a fascinating article (2015) on food and pilgrimage on Wudang Mountain. Here, local gathered foods were ignored and considered uninteresting, but pilgrimage tourism has now made them a hugely popular local specialty. Farmers and cooks have opened restaurants along the pilgrimage route. Some have started to cultivate plants formerly gathered in the wild.

China’s traditional contempt for rural and minority cultures has changed to nostalgic love for them, with a newly discovered reverence for “original ecology,” i.e. a romanticised version of the traditional adjustment of local people to their landscapes. This is partly western-derived, partly derived from China’s own strong and ancient counter-tradition of loving rural landscapes and people. Communist “modernizers,” who mix modernizing with Han chauvinism, have variously judged negatively the eating of wild animals and plants, eating in a different pattern from standard urban Chinese, drinking much rice wine, drinking with straws, and of course those “stinky” foods (Wu 2014b:164)—though Han foods include some stunningly fragrant ferments, from fermented bean curd to Sichuan pickles and bean pastes. Wu provides a long, detailed, and well-referenced discussion of Chinese cultural attitudes toward traditional foodways.

From Hunan, we have “the strange tale of General Tso’s chicken” (Dunlop 2005). General Tso’s Chicken is a common Hunanese dish today, but does not fit the usual Hunanese cooking style, and is not known in Hunan itself outside the capital. Fuchsia In fact it was created by an innovative Hunanese chef who invented it in Taiwan (after the Nationalists took refuge there) and then moved to New York, where he Americanized the recipe. It now bears more resemblance to American Chinese restaurant fare than to anything native to Hunan. Dunlop points out that it fits a common pattern of naming a dish after a general or other famous individual who might have enjoyed it. In this case as in some others, it was invented long after the actual General Tso passed on. The dish has mutated now into many variants, often named after quite imaginary generals with similar-sounding names. Anglo-American foodies love to demonstrate their knowledge of Chinese food by saying it is not a “real Chinese dish,” but of course it is as real as any other, just not as hoary with antiquity.

More truly Hunanese are a cold dish of cucumbers with garlic and red pepper flakes, marinated in soy sauce; thin-sliced mutton stir-fried with cilantro, garlic, and cut-up fresh jalapenos; pork intestines; smoked duck; and, in general, incredible amounts of cut-up jalapenos or similar chiles in just about every dish.

Fujian cuisine includes a jelly made from the nuts of Castanopsis spp., very bitter chestnuts. The nuts have to be ground, leached with water, and the resulting mush pressed through a strainer; the result is made into jelly. The process is similar to Korean acorn-jelly production. The trees are saved in fengshui groves, which often become largely this genus, another proof that fengshui groves are working forests, not some result of bizarre and idle belief.

A sort of extension of Fujianese cuisine is the cuisine of Taiwan, now enriched by north Chinese, Shanghainese, Hakka, and other immigrants. An amazing paean to the humble noodle and dumpling houses of Tainan has been penned by S. J. Ren, a true gourmet in his awareness of perfection in cheap breakfast and snack cuisine, in a bilingual book descriptively titled The Rise and Fall of Some Small Noodle Shops in Northern Tainan: A Historical Survey (2014; thanks to my erstwhile student Toni Snyder for finding this wondrous item). It is a fine introduction to the really traditional food of the island.

Fishing by burning sulfur to attract fish to the light is a dying art in northern Taiwan (Wong and Thuras 2021:129).

More substantial is an amazingly thorough and expert work, A Culinary History of Taipei by Steven Crook and Katy Hui-Wen Hung (2018). It is in fact an introduction to the food of the whole island, including Aboriginal food, otherwise almost undescribed in western-language sources. Various fermentation techniques are used. Rodents are eaten, sometimes intestines and all. Snakes and mushrooms are foraged, and wild boar regularly hunted. Sweet potatoes were the poverty food and often the staple in the old days, and remain popular, partly from nostalgia (103-104). Dutch influence is seen not only in the name for peas (ho lan dao, “Holland peas,” as elsewhere in China) but also in a local name for cabbage, ko le cai, the first syllables being Dutch cool (“cabbage,” cf. German kohl, English cole).

Agriculture continues its sad decline, as cheap food imports become ever more available, but specialty farming flourishes (97-118). Rice is still grown, but Taiwan’s formerly great production of sugar and pork is long gone. The local ponlai rice was one of the genetic sources of the high-yield, short-straw Green Revolution rice.

Interesting plant foods adopted by the Chinese from the Austronesian aboriginals include pickled fruit of pobuzi, Cordia dichotoma, a plumlike tree (p. 17-18; the Maya of Yucatan pickle a very similar fruit from a closely related tree) and seeds of Litsea cubeba, a peppery spice from another tree (p. 21). Hung reports that it is magao (also shanhujiao, mujiangzi, or douchijiang) in Mandarin, mai chang in Taiwan, and mac khen in Vietnamese, and maqaw in Atayal, all from an early Chinese word (Facebook posting, Dec. 2, 2022).

Perhaps the most interesting is a native Taiwanese quinoa, Chenopodium formosanum, with reddish seeds; it is generally known by the Paiwan (Austronesian) name djulis (118) and is becoming popular with the wider population. It has medicinal value, under study currently. Another oddity is leaves of a Chinese brown pepper relative, Zanthoxylum ailanthoides, known as tana to some Aboriginal groups and cicong in Mandarin (21). The young leaves are high in vitamins. Another Aboriginal special plant is a mint, Chinese mesona, scientifically Platostoma palustre, used for a jelly called “grass jelly” (154). Wikipedia informs that it is xiancao in Mandarin, sian-chhau in Taiwanese Hokkien, leung fan chou in Cantonese.

Among other vegetables rather strange to most of China are “crested floating-heart of white water snowflake…Nymphoides hydrophylla; a daylily Hemerocallis disticha; a fern, Diplazium esculentum, guomao in Chinese; areca palm flowers; and chayote, whose young shoots are excellent eating and are known in Taiwan as “dragon’s whiskers” (longxu) (Crook and Hung 2018:102-103). Chayote shoots are also popular in their native Mexico. Most obscure is jabuticaba, a South American fruit (Plinia cauliflora, syn. Myrciaria cauliflora) superficially similar to grapes, but growing on the trunk of a large tropical tree. How it got to Taiwan remains obscure, but it is now popular there (107). The native fig Ficus pumila has a choice local variety, gathered wild; it is a traditional food of the Austronesian groups, with many local names (107).

Among the Chinese, salted mustard greens are a major staple. A sad Hokkien proverb describing the sad fate of women is cha-bo-gina-a, ku chhai mia; cha-bo-gin-a, lu chhai chi mia—”a girl child, a chive’s fate; a girl child, a mustard seed’s fate.”  Cut down or mashed without thought (p. 14). They note (p. 31-32) that Chinese satay sauce (Hokkien sa te, which became Mandarin and Cantonese shacha) is now fairly different from the Indonesian original; in Taiwan it now has soy oil and Chinese spicing instead of peanuts and Indoneesian spices. Hong Kong’s form is closer to the original, but sometimes includes spiced soybean pastes. Pork floss and geng stews are common—a bit of ancient Chinese food ways surviving today (35). Bean curd is popular, incliuding the infamous chou doufu, “stinky tofu”—fungal fermented until it greatly resembles the most extreme German soft cheeses. Vegetarianism is popular in Taiwan, with its Buddhist heritage and western influence. Many fruits have names that pun with desirable things, as youzi “pomelo” and “to have a child” (with a tone difference).

            A fad word as of their writing is “Q”—just the English letter. It is actually the Hokkien word k’iu, designating the texture for which the Mandarin word is cui—a succulent but somewhat resistant bite, slightly chewy but moist, like ripe fruit or tender young greens or glutinous rice preparations (Crook and Hong 2018:74; also from Victor Mair, email post). Ideal Q is the texture or mouthfeel of good rice cake—springy and elastic, then chewy (Qin 2018). There was a current fad for Q foods at about the time of their book.

Crook and Hung give the whole festival calendar with its appropriate foods (pp. 76-83).  These defy summary, but the account of mooncakes (p. 80) deserves special note. Mooncakes have been getting smaller and lower in calorie lately, as elsewhere. Warming foods for winter include lamb hot pot, ginger duck, and sesame chicken in wine; cooling foods for summer include mung bean porridge (with its cool green color), lotus-leaf porridge, and the lower-calorie, more sour vegetables (83). Celebratory roadside banquets, open to the neighborhood, are bando (84). Austronesian festivals are rarer, but feature millet, the ancient crop among these groups (82).  

The traditional Chinese custom of “sitting the month” after childbirth involves highly nutritious, protein-rich foods, as elsewhere, but also includes rice wine (94-95).

Cannibalism, so often alleged without evidence in China, was occasionally practiced in Taiwan, as actually observed by at least three outsiders. As in mainland China, parts of executed criminals were eaten as a strengthening or courage-giving medicine. Headhunters ate the brains of victims (Crook and Hung 2018:57).

Western food came rather early, via Japan or via Russian refugees (p. 67). Bakeries selling western-type goods now abound, as of course do the international chain eateries. Beer, wine, sake, and award-winning whiskey have been added to traditional white lightning (baijiu made from kaoliang, or, for cheaper forms, sweet potatoes and the like; 160). The Aboriginal groups prepare a cloudy millet wine (like that of the Wa and other southeast Asian minorities), sometimes fermented by chewing like Andean chicha, and sometimes mushy enough to be eaten with a spoon, like Southeast Asian tapai.

A particularly fine study of Aboriginal life, provided by Scott Simon (2015), discusses dog and pig keeping by the Atayal people of Taiwan. The dogs are used for hunting, and are also beloved pets. The Atayal have a comprehensive moral ecology reminiscent of similar systems in other small-scale traditional societies (Australian tjukurrpa, for example).

Yamamoto and Nawata have provided an extremely detailed and well-documented study of Taiwan aboriginal food, including Tabasco chile pepper use by these groups (Yamamoto and Nawata 2009). Names and genetics show varieties in the southern areas of Taiwan were introduced from the Philippines (and often to the Philippines from Indonesia). These small hot chiles are used not only for food, but for ornament, medicine, and ritual. Young leaves as well as fruits are eaten. This all indicates a long and interesting history. The plants must have been introduced soon after the Spanish occupied the Philippines in the 16^th century.

            To Katy Hung (Biggs) and Tammy Turner I am deeply indebted for information on Litsea cubeba, known as may chang, mu jiang, or shan hujiao (“mountain black pepper”), or in Atayal, a Taiwan Aboriginal language of the Austronesian phylum, as magao or maqaw. It is so important to the Atayal that a park is proposed, with that name, to save it.  It is also widespread on the mainland, in tropical areas. It is valued for its berries, which have a lemony flavor that Ms. Biggs finds exquisite. The scientific name shows its use as a substitute for cubeb pepper (Piper cubeba), formerly imported to China from Southeast Asia. Another flavoring food there is Rhus javanica, whose sour berries are used for salt. (Information by email exchange, Dec. 6, 2014.)

            The indefatigable Ms. Biggs, who is Taiwanese in spite of her Irish name (she now usually goes by Katy Hung), reports that in southern Taiwan noodles are made from catfish meat (Facebook posting, Dec. 14, 2014). Dumpling skins are made from fish meat mixed with sweet potato flour. This adds a whole new dimension to Chinese noodle cuisine. The snakehead catfish is referred to as “dog mother fish” (gou mu yu, or kiau mu yu in Taiwanese) from its resemblance to a lizard, “dog fish snake” in Taiwan Chinese, which is considered lowly. She also reminds us that mudskippers are good food, and I can add walking gobies from experience eating them with Chinese in Malaysia. Mudskippers (fei yu seems to be the name) are apparently fancy restaurant fare in southern Taiwan.

            Taiwan food received another major boost with Clarissa Wei’s book with Ivy Chen, Made in Taiwan (2023). This book covers Mandarin, Hokkien, Rukai Aboriginal, and Hakka recipes from the island, all very carefully documented. Stories and text provide a full ethnography of Chinese eating and foods. Clarissa Wei was born in California to parents from Taiwan, but returned to the island, first for study, then permanently—largely for the food, to judge from the book. She comes from a younger generation than Katy Hung, and thus documents a younger world, used to convenience foods, not well connected with old-time rural life, but often eager to learn. Particularly useful is her transcription in Chinese characters and romanization of names in the relevant languages: Hokkien, Rukai, and Hakka. The vast majority of local recipes are Hokkien, providing a delightful introduction into that beautiful, evocative, distinctive language. Its fondness for nasals (try nng for “egg”) comes out clearly. The book is a total delight for a painstaking and perfectionist cook. The present writer fears he will seek out restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley, or just go back to Taiwan, where he spent many happy days in the 1960s and 1970s, when life was simple and food was fresh and superb.

Hakka food, long obscure and poorly described, finally found a serious and worthy champion in Linda Lau Anusasananan (2012), a California Hakka (married to a Thai, hence the notably un-Hakka last name), in The Hakka Cookbook. She was raised in northern California, where her father had a Chinese restaurant. She became a food writer, and later traveled the world to explore her heritage and its transformations. Hakka speak a distinct language. They immigrated from the north to southern China in successive waves—she lists five—around one to two thousand years ago; they localized in a wild upland area where Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangzhou meet, which, as G. William Skinner pointed out, was something of a dead zone between the downstream-oriented and coast-oriented centers of those provinces. She cites Lo Hsiang-lin (Luo Xianglin) as holding the Hakka came from north China from the Han Dynasty on, and also challenges by others who maintain that they are semi-assimilated local minority groups. I interviewed Lo in Hong Kong in 1966 and have high respect for him as a scholar, and I agree with him; however, of course the Hakka have mingled over time with local minority people and assimilated them.

The Hakka were forced to work hard to survive, and to defend themselves against older-established groups that felt the Hakka were interlopers (“Hakka” means “guest households”—Mandarin kejia). They developed a simple but exquisitely flavored cuisine that runs heavily to pork (stewed or minced), mustard greens (often salted or pickled), and other vegetables. Stretching the pork by stuffing vegetables and tofu with it is a trademark. Spinal cord of a cow is a delicacy. I have always loved Hakka food, which manages to be surprisingly subtle and complex in spite of its mountain simplicity. Their poor homeland made them quick to adopt New World plants that would grow in rough hill country, from maize and peanuts to chiles and sweet potatoes, and these are now an important part of Hakka life.

Linda Lau Anusasananan provides all the classic recipes (though sometimes more “modernized” that I like). She also gives an amazing kaleidoscope of recipes from all the places the Hakka have gone. Their montane homelands are poor and barren, so the Hakka have dispersed over time, first to Hong Kong and other coastal areas near their home, then to the whole world. There are now said to be 75 million Hakka scattered over the world (p. 6). They have learned to do everything from pickling chiles and lemons (neither of which are native to Hakka-land) to making full-on Indian curries and Peruvian ceviche. Anusasananan provides recipes from Mauritius, Peru, Hawaii, Malaysia, Singapore, India, and elsewhere, often involving blends with local cuisine. India/Hakka food is particularly amazing, but all the adaptations are testimony to the incredible creativity of Chinese cooks in general and Hakka ones in particular.   

A major ethnography is Bitter and Sweet by Ellen Oxfeld (2017), a study of food and its social meanings in a Hakka village in rural Meixian, the Hakka center, in Guangdong. She has watched over two decades the changes from real want to considerable luxury. Older people remembered real starvation, first in pre-Communist days and then again in the Great Leap Forward. They revel not only in better food, but in the fact that proximity to the county seat lets them work at better jobs than agriculture. Many of the young have white-collar jobs, and are buying food rather than raising or even cooking it. A fascinating contrast of home cooking and city food appears in lists of two Midautumn Festival celebrations put on by host families. The first is home-cooked:  sea cucumber, chicken and duck feet, squid with chive flowers, pig stomach with celery, lotus rhizome soup, braised dog meat, chickens with ginseng in soup, pomfret (steamed), braised duck, steamed shrimp, red-cooked pork with mushrooms, frog with gren peppers, fragrant veined vegetable (xiangmai cai), and fish and meatball soup. Another family got the feast catered:  Sea cucumber, pigeon, sweet-sour pork, shrimp with snow peas, duck feet, greens (unidentified), custard-filled sweet dumplings, steamed chicken with ginger, red-cooked pork, chicken and ginseng in soup, fried rice flour balls, steamed fish (Oxfeld 2017:68-69). Note that many dishes are the same. This was a county-seat caterer who evidently knew what was appropriate. But the other dishes are more interesting: home cooking gives us pig stomach, dog, and frog; the restaurant provides sweet-sour pork (presumably a backwash from overseas communities) and other standard restaurant dishes like shrimp with snow peas. The catered meal reflects less flavor, less effort, more worldliness. Another feast that “consisted of a number of standard Hakka country dishes: braised pork…, fried noodles, soup with beef and daikon radish, dog meat, stir-fried peapods and pig liver, fish ball soup, fried lettuce…and steamed chiken with ginger and red chiles” (p. 160); another added shrimp and celery and one or two other items (162). The hotpot is well known and a special treat (168). People criticize the “liquor and meat” of the cadres in the same terms that Chinese have used for 2000 years.

Another Hakka tradition exists in Nanxiong county, at the north end of Guangdong, bordering Jiangxi (Lin and Waley 2022, 2025). River crabs, field rats, spiny frogs, spicy goose, duck, and the usual Hakka stuffed bean curd are important. A yellow dumpling is stuffed with pickles. Chiles abound, chopped up and stir-fried before other ingredients are added, or made into sauce. They go into meat dishes; not the stuffed bean curd or soups or vegetables. Wild meats remain important. All hunting and selling of wild animals was prohibited in China in 2020, pursuant to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has not slowed hunting and consumption in Nanxiong (Lin and Waley 2025). Local people note that meat is rarer now, but conservation is not mentioned. A belief exists that any part of a wild animal’s body will supplement (bu) that part of a human.

Cantonese food is more elaborate than ever, but the simplest of its dishes, “yat ka mien,” remains with us on American menus. The name simply means “one order of noodles” (Gray 2011). Another simple food that persists is pun choi, “basin dish,” a large stew-up of meats, traditionally prepared by men, in quantity, for ancestral feasts and commemorative rites and for weddings. James Watson (1987, 2011) provided a classic study of its important role in village life; it was a core of the festivals that brought village people together and created solidarity. It has more recently caught on as a restaurant dish (Cheung 2012) and tourist attraction (Watson 2011). It involves once-inexpensive village foods:  “dried pig skin, dried eel, dried squid, radish, tofu skin, mushroom and pork stewed in soybean paste” (Cheung 2012:4). Fancier ingredients are now added.

A Cantonese restaurant in Ohio advertised “too hard to translate soup”—the dish was a homemade dough drop soup (dough in small balls dropped into water), but the Chinese for these dough drops literally means “pimples” (from Victor Mair’s Language Log blog, Sept. 1, 2018). I have also seen a menu item, for a dish with very unusual characters in its name, “No Google translation but the dish is delicious.”

Another Cantonese touch is referring to carrots as “the ginseng of the poor” (Z. Liang 2013).

Another food of interest is waai san (Mandarin huai shan) a true yam, Dioscorea polystachya (information from Q. Yao on a fascinating exchange about this plant on Facebook’s Cantonese Food Recipes page, July 13, 2023; the exchange provided enormous information about this and similar medicinal roots). It appears in medicinal soup, and is apparently much loved. The superficially similar burdock root is niubang in Mandarin, gobo in Japanese.

Simpler yet is rice, but its role in Cantonese life is important enough to inspire a major book, Gourmets in the Land of Famine by Seung-joon Lee (2011).

A fascinating email exchange in August of 2011 between Andrew Coe, Fuchsia Dunlop, myself and several students and Chinese cooks revealed half a dozen unrelated and mutually incompatible origin myths for the name gu lou yuk, the Cantonese for sweet-sour pork (see Dunlop n.d.). It literally means “murmuring and muttering meat,” probably with reference to the sound of cooking the dish. Some say this could come from a homonymous phrase meaning “ancient-old meat,” but this is unlikely, since there is nothing ancient or old about the dish. There is a persistent myth that it is a euphemistic way to say guai lou yuk Cantonese for “foreign devils’ meat,” because the dish was devised for westerners. (It is based on traditional recipes used for pork ribs and for yellow croaker fish, but  was created in the 19^th or early 20^th century for foreigners, who love sweets and do not want to deal with bones.)  Non-Chinese who are would-be sophisticates take delight in bashing this dish, but a team of leading Chinese chefs who visited Los Angeles in 2013 evaluated one high-line restaurant by its sweet-sour pork, and said this is a standard dish to test a cook’s skill (Gold 2013). It is not at all easy to make well; it can range from superb to inedible.

Ha kaau (Mandarin xia jiao), the shrimp dumplings that may be the most beloved Cantonese snack, came originally from the village of Wufeng in the Haizhu district (Leo Lok, Facebook post of July 24, 2021). Their almost inevitable companion siu mai may be Mongolian; it is shumai or shaomai in Mandarin, mai meaning “wheat” (Katy Hung, Facebook post of Jan. 4, 2021), though Cantonese uses a different character that in Mandarin is mi.

            The famous taan t’a or “dan ta,” “egg tarts,” are derived from pastel de nata, famous exemplar of the pasteis de Belém, the latter word referring to a monastery in Portugal that made them famous. An anticlerical liberal administration took over Portugal in 1820, and a company was set up to save the Belém monastery and its foods. The pastry had probably spread to Macau long before that. In any case, from Macau it spread to the entire Cantonese world, and thus the entire globe today.

Shunde (Sun Tak) has a distinctive cuisine, very rich, with mild and subtle flavors; many fish dishes. It is very popular in Guangjou. Delicacies include sandworms, snake belly meat (various species of rat snake are on the menu), turtles, chestnut cake (stuffed pancake), all sorts of fish. Pork hocks are cooked in a sweet sauce much like an American ham sauce. Cheese is made, astonishingly, in Shunde. It is made from water buffalo milk, and is fully traditional there. Miranda Brown has documented and filmed three women making it (Brown, Facebook posting, Dec. 11, 2017). Excellent, thorough research by Sau-wa Mak (2014) found that water buffalo fresh cheese used to be eaten with rice congee for illness, but that stir-fried milk, deep-fried milk, milk in ginger juice, and other modern Sun Tak delicacies are relatively or quite modern inventions, created as sophistication and refinement came to Sun Tak and led to elaborating traditional dishes for fun and profit (a very Cantonese thing to do). At least in my experience, deep-frying milk involves freezing milk in ice cube form, battering the cubes, and deep-frying them before they can melt. They remain somewhat liquid inside.

Fish are still raised in rural Hong Kong—protected heritage fish ponds present an unchanged landscape contrasting strangely with the high-rises of Yun Long. The fish bring 12-15 HK dollars per catty but cost 12 per catty to raise, so it is not very profiatable. The young of the area are not picking it up as a profession.

Chen Village fen is rice paper with pork bits and soy and other saucing; it is simple but great. A really good sweet is glutinous rice cake with jujube mashed with some brown sugar.

Graham and Elizabeth Johnson spent a lifetime chronicling the town of Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong. During this time, it changed from a cluster of old-fashioned brick houses to a skyscraping city of highrises. The last old-timers persist in the last brick homes. Among foodways recorded are the ceremonial cakes for Chinese New Yeark, a local specialty. These are chahgwo and goubaahn, sweet rice cakes with or without peanuts. There are also “year cakes,” nonsweet sticky rice cakes with radish, green onion, preserved meat, mushrooms, and the like. Small cylindrical chahgwo for Qing Ming Day (3^rd day of 3^rd lunar month) were called jeuijaibaahn, “little boy’s penis cakes.”  Types of chahgwo occurred at some other festivals, incl black herbal ones for Dragon Boat (Johnson and Johnson 2019:36-37). The book is a beautifully written and highly nostalgic account of the changes in a wonderful, close-knit, friendly little community that is on the verge of being finally absorbed into the vast urban mass of Hong Kong.

Western food came into Hong Kong not only with the British and Portuguese, but with Chinese and White Russians moving down from Harbin and Shanghai. Chinese cooks opened western-style restaurants as early as the 1860s. The flight of Russians from eastern Russia to China after the 1917 revolution and 1917-21 civil war cretaed a huge Russian population, often food-conscious and able to cook. Russian restaurants became a Christmas tradition in Shanghai and then in Hong Kong. (The last of the Russian colony largely moved to San Francisco in the later 20^th century, merging with the Russian settlers in the west-central city.) A western cuisine known as “soy sauce western” arose from a fusion of Russian, British, and Cantonese, the Cantonese toning down strange spices, adding soy sauce to soften flavors such as gamy meat, using more vegetables, and otherwise nativizing the cuisine (E. Cheung 2021). I well remember the old Russian restaurants of Hong Kong in the 1960s, already drifting away in a Cantonese direction. They are gone now. “Soy sauce western” restaurants, such as the well-known Tai Ping Koon, lasted into the 2010s, but they too have largely vanished, in spite of nostalgic visits by old-timers.

Hong Kong’s famous floating restaurants are largely gone, but a huge one, the Jumbo Kingdom, survives at this writing. These began as Boat People eating places, but caught on with tourists and were turned into floating palaces by land-dwelling entrepreneurs. The food in the old days was overpriced and cooked for volume feeding; I hope the Jumbo is better (see Wong and Thuras 2021:125).

The boat people themselves are almost all on shore now, not only in Hong Kong but even in Guangzhou (Dixon 2018). Boat-dwellers are said to exist still on remote rivers and coasts.

In a market in Guangjou I noted several new items to me in January of 2013. One was “cow milk jujubes,” huge jujubes as big as apples and green in color. Another was gobo root, huai shan. Passion fruit was sold as hundred-fragrance fruit, and enoki as golden-needle mushroom. Snow lotus was a crisp root, somewhere between a yam and a radish. A real yam was called fen ge. Tiger head chile is California chile. A new fruit is jitan guo (chicken egg fruit), apparently yellow sapote.

Rosemary is now available in Guangjou herb shops. So are all too many dyed gouji berries and Cordyceps; phony or low-quality cordyceps, dyed orange, is a staple. The real thing is worth more than gold, and rather hard to find. Live scorpions, however, abound. Crocodile meat may be found, and soup of it is taken for asthma (xiao chuan bing). A new herb is snow chrysanthemum, a bright orange dried daisy flower. It makes the best herbal tea I have ever had. It is in Hong Kong too, as are huge thick slabs of Vietnamese cinnamon bark, used to treat allergy to meat, among other things.

In Hong Kong tea rooms, new tim sam include a baxing jiaozi stuffed with peanuts, and very small bits of carrot, cabbage and meat, and a fen kok with very succulent and well-spiced thin-sliced roast or steamed beef wrapped up in the noodle skin, then decked with cilantro. We learn from Dunlop (2019:192) that the famous and venerable Luk Yu Teahouse was named for the author of the “Tea Classic,” Lu Yu. I remember early morning tim sam at that teahouse when it was in its original and long-standing home in the old Garment District of Hong Kong Island. Urban renewal took out that street, and the Luk Yu moved uptown, but never recovered the unbelievable levels of gourmet cooking of the old place.

            Cantonese use of food for insulting people never ends. Haam jyu sau, “salty pig’s hand,” is Cantonese for a groper. Mandarin zhu shou “pig’s foot” means the same, and led to some embarrassment when a Chinese market posted a sign “German Style Sex Offenders” over a display of smoked pork hocks (photo widely circulated on Internet).

            Cantonese shrimp sauce, made of shrimps in salt such that they autodigest, has expanded in Beihai, Guangxi, to include ghost crabs caught on the beach. Pollution is controlled to keep them flourishing. The sauce is extremely popular there (Wong and Thuras 2021:121).

Cantonese hot non-vegetarian dishes are yitfan “hot staple-food” (see So 1992:136ff). Cantonese soups and related foods are chroniced by Teresa Chen (2009).

Yak meat may now be had in Guangjou as well as Tibet and west China; it tastes like good beef.

Macau has its own cuisine (see Sales Lopes 2010). This went unchronicled, partly because Macanese tend to be quite secretive about it, holding tight to their special family recipes. Finally, it found a devoted historian in Annabel Jackson (2003, 2020). She records wonderful stories and family records, discusses the place of cuisine as critically important heritage and ethnic marker, and provides histories of the incredibly complicated origins of the cuisine. Basically the effect of Portuguese setttling in a Cantonese area, the cuisine was enriched from the start by foods from all the other places the Portuguese colonized, even Brazil, which contributed everything from chiles to specific dishes. Africa provided a surprising amount of ideas, including “African chicken,” a famous Macanese specialty that was invented in Macau by a Chinese chef but with true African antecedents. Another major influence came from Goa, the Indian colony that was a major focus of Portuguese activity in Asia. Melaka also contributed, providing Malaysian foods. Of course, Portugal’s own contributions, from Belem egg tarts—now Cantonese taan ta—to sausages. I remember old-time Portuguese markets in Macau, and goods reaching Hong Kong. One could buy vinho verde, the wonderful “green wine,” as well as Portuguese cheeses, sausages, and canned fish. Bacalhao, the dried salt cod that is Portugal’s signature food, was in evidence. Macanese food has now gone worldwide, with the dispersal of Macanese following Communist Chinese takeover in 1999.

Teochiu (Cantonese Chiu Jau or “Chiu Chow”; Mandarin Chaozhou) cuisine remains little known in the English-speaking world, but apparently is covered by Chinese cookbooks. There is said to be a cookbook: Jia! The Food of Swatow and the Teochew Diaspora, by Diana Zheng, but I can’t locate it so far. Newman (2015) reminisces about feasts of duck soup, braised goose, soupy sweets, oyster omelettes sometimes wrapped in bean curd skin, and other items. She knows this food mainly from Singapore, where they have adoped shacha sauce. The word is pronounced sa te in Hokkien, revealing its origin from Indonesian satay. I have encountered all these dishes in Teochiu places in Hong Kong or California. Newer to me is “hot pot made with many leafy vegetables, yams, and tapioca flour. The yams are sliced very thin” (p. 10). Another new dish to me is “a fish salad made with fried or fresh fish and fried shrimp. It has five-spice powder, plum [mei] sauce, preserved vegetables, radishes and carrots, and fish balls they call dumplings” (ibid.). This sounds wonderful. Yet another is spring rolls in bean curd skins, and a congee made with sour mei, among other things (p. 11). (Wikipedia has directions on how to salt, pickle, and make sauce from mei.) 

A recent study of food shops in Shantou (Swatow) by Guang Tian et al. (2018) describes five famous and long-established shops, selling, respectively: taro cakes and soup; various foods and meat products; bamboo shoot cake with dried shrimp and other cakes; dry noodles with pork and onions and soup with pig parts and fish balls; and stuffed pig intestines, horseshoe crab cake, and zongzi. The last three are now state-owned, the first two remain private. Shantou and Teochiu are adjacent. They are culturally and linguistically similar.

Chapter 14. Foods of Non-Han Peoples Living in or near China

            Foodways of the Muslim ethnic groups of Xinjiang, largely Turkic-speaking, have been beautifully documented in an encyclopedia, Zhongguo Qingzhi Yinshi Wenhua (Chinese Islamic Drink and Food Culture), issued in Beijing in 2009. Many illustrations and recipes are provided. Interesting is the strong European cast of many of the groups, especially the Tatars (p. 202ff), who are quite East European-looking and sometimes brown-haired and blue-eyed.

            Turkic food includes the dried milk solid qrut (qurt, qurut), usually dried yogurt but often dried skimmed milk. It is aaruul in Mongolian, kūru in Manchu, and one of the milk solids covered by rubing in Chinese (Bello 2016:140).

            Jen Lin-Liu, a food writer and cooking school teacher, traveled the Silk Road from Xi’an to Rome and wrote a delightful travel book about it, On the Noodle Road (2013). She was obsessed with noodles, and learned to cook every noodle dish she encountered along the way. She notes that noodles were called tang bing, “soup cakes,” in early medieval China. In China, la mian dominated, under various names, becoming laghman in Turkic languages. Other noodles and breadstuffs were found. She reports that the large breads of northwest China are mo, but were earlier tuturma, from Turkick tuturmashi (Lin-Liu 2013:49-52).

Chinese chives are popular, as in Afghanistan. Dumplings are manta, but small soup dumplings are chuchurma, both Turkic words (see Lin-Liu 2013:86). Humoral “hot” (Chinese re) is yel (Lin-Liu 2013:89). Gushgerde are buns baked in a tonur, the local pronunciation of “tandur” (Lin-Liu 2013:95). From Uyghurland, Jen Lin-Liu proceeded westward, describing noodles and other foods as she went through Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, and Italy. She continues to produce food blogs, with an emphasis on China. To this it is worth adding that the tandur is called nangkeng “nang pit” in Chinese (Phillips 2016:362), and polo (pilaf) is zhuafan, “grabbed rice,” because it is eaten by hand (Phillips 2016:369).

Uyghur food includes yang’aq halwasi, “walnut halva” (-si is the possessed Turkic ending, denoting the noun covered by the adjective). The Chinese name is ma tang, short for hu ma tang, “sesame sugar” (i.e. “sesame sweet”). It is actually, at least as sold in Beijing, a large cake, up to a meter or so in diameter, made of sesame, peanuts, and dried fruit as well as walnuts and probably other items to bind it. It is sold by the half kilo by Uyghur vendors from villages near Kashgar; they are often illegal migrants and selling illegally, so they have a complex relationship with police and informal market areas (Sullivan 2016). Halva made of lamb oil and sugar exists. They admit that laghman was originally la mian (Lin-Liu 2013:72).

Persian nan is the standard bread, pronounced nang. Holuq nang is paper-thin and used for roll-ups. Qatlama nang is layered, like Indian parathas.It is leavened with yeast, and often has cheese filling.  Toqash is a small version.It is traditionally baked in a tanur (tandur) jar. Güsh nang is meat-filled. It is cooked in a regular oven, not a tanur. Lots of vegetables are eaten, including cucumber, squash, carrots, onions, and the other usual Central Asian items, including cilantro, ashköki. Chile is laza, from Chinese la jiao. Läng men is Chinese la mian. Persian samosa appear as samsa. They are baked in the tanur, and resemble similar dumplings in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Kababs are popular. Fish are not eaten and were at least sometimes taboo in old times.

Sweets and the traditional Iranian nibbles of nuts and dried fruit are popular (Dunlop 2019b:248). And she finally found good-tasting lungs (Dunlop 2019b:251). Drinks can include dried peaches steeped in water, and yogurt (qıtaq) with salt; this drink is dohap. Dried milk solids are qurut, the universal Central Asian Turkic word (more usually qurt). 

            The indefatigable Jacqueline Newman has added a compact description of Kashkar (Kashgar) food (Newman 2017c). It is typical central Asian fare. She says the city name means “place to find jade.” She too describes ma tang, describing it as “nut nougat covered in creamy yogurt curds drizzled with brown shugar syrup.”  A spice mix called tetitku is noted. Bread is naan (Farsi, and general) or nang (Uyghur); she gives a recipe, which is more or less the typical Persian one. Lagmen and similar noodles are as popular as elsewhere in the center. Whole lambs are served with caraway in their mouths. “Chicken was cooked with carrots and onion, mutton called polu came fried with onion, rice steamed with carrots and onions, too. Kebabs were called kawaplar [Uyghur pronunciation of “kabab” with –lar, the Turkic plural], and made with beef or lamb, seasoned with salt, pepper, sesame seeds, and sometimes chile and cumin, then grilled after soaking them in milk, butter, salt, and sugar” (Newman 2017c:13). A “big plate chicken” was served (Phillips 2016 has a recipe). Fish was available and was eaten with rice. Sangza, “crispy twisted fried bread, or baked buns called kao baozi” (Newman 2014:14) were eatenat breakfast. The former is thoroughly Chinese as well as central Asian. The latter—the word means “roasted little bao”—is Chinese but adapted to ovens; Chinese traditionally did not bake bao (though they now do in western countries and westernized bakeries in China). Lamb soup was shorpa, as elsewhere (ultimately the familiar Arabic root sh-r-b, “drink”). Kumys was a preferred drink. Black tea, Russian-style kvas, and “a non-alcoholic beverage made with honey…called gewasi” were also drunk.

            All this sounds properly Turkic-Central Asian, with expected Chinese additions. The words are a mix of Turkic, Chinese, and generic Arab-origin Middle East (shorba, kabab/kawap). Sometimes, one cannot quite figure out where a word started; lagmen is probably Chinese, from la mian, but Iranic speakers claim it as an Iranian word.

            Mongol food is covered elsewhere in my writings (Buell et al. 2020), so I note here only a recent thorough account of dairy food preparation by Mongols in Xinjiang (Chan 2017). The intrepid Jacqueline Newman has chronicled Inner Mongolian food too, with recipes for buuz dumplings (rather like jiaozi), rather Chinese-style meat, and the Mongol version of hot pot. She mentions “maichan, a boiled lamb and onion dish with bulmuk, a flour-based gravy” (Newman 2017d:11).

            Mongolian food also includes boodog, animal cooked in its own skin. One skins the animal, cuts the meat off the bones, seasons it to taste, puts it back in the skin along with hot stones. The hot stones cook the food, while the hair is singed off over fire (Wong and Thuras 2021:144-145). This is a classic technique among hunters all around the Northern Hemisphere, known as skin-boiling. For large animals, the stomach is used instead of the skin.

            China’s neighbors and ethnic minorities have very complex foodways of their own. Paul Buell and I, with collaborators Montserrat de Pablo and Moldir Oskenbay, have written up Central Asian food (Buell et al. 2020), including a thorough run-up on Korean food, owing much to Michael Pettid’s superb account of it (2008), and much to research in Los Angeles Koreatown as well as in Korea itself.

            Central Asia shows itself in mandu, large dumplings similar to meat pies, stuffed with minced meat or vegetables. They came in from the Turkic world far back in the early Medieval period.

Korea’s national dish, kimchi, continues to propagate worldwide. In Korea, it is still homemade; only 7% of that consumed is comercial (Wong and Thuras 2021:154). Koreana magazine has glorified it as a perfect health food (Young 2008). Indeed, it has plenty of antiseptic garlic and chile, vitamin-rich cabbage, antioxidants in all the vegetables, and so on, but its high salt content is associated with Korea’s high stroke rate. Pickling destroys its vitamin C content. I was amazed to find in France, in the heights of the Auverne, a mixed winter pickle virtually identical to kimchi but apparently a purely local invention.

An extremely refreshing soup consists simply of kimchi in water, nabak kimchi or mul kimchi (mul means “water”). The word “kimchi” escapes my philological dragnet, but I may point out that kiam chai is Hokkien for “pickled green vegetables.”

The usual vast range of noodle dishes is found. Nangmyeon is buckwheat noodles, usually served cold. Often there is a light topping and otherwise just the noodles in water, mul nangmyeon, but sometimes a strikingly varied and usually chile-rich topping is added, pibim (“mixed”) nangmyeon. Pibim also extends to rice, pibimbap being just cooked rice (pap) with various mixed toppings. A common breakfast form includees an egg. As elsewhere in eastern Asia, pap by itself can stand for food in general.

An interesting Korean dish is ssam-bap. This consists of rice with chopped meat in sauce, eaten by being wrapped in leaves, like some Vietnamese rolls. The leaves include tender young collards, mustard greens, perilla, Beijing cabbage, mizuna (for garnish—it won’t do for wrap), and others. The best thing about the dish is the variety and contrast of raw leaf flavors. Ssam is in fact a general term for wrapped food.

A large range of healthful congees, bonjuk, treats every condition. The king and court could get abalone congees and other valuables. Ordinary people could still manage with congees enriched by jujubes, medicinal herbs, fermented beans, and other products. Another widespread soupy food is sundubu, tofu boiled in a spectacularly spicy sauce, rich with chiles, fermented foods of various kinds, and typically some meat or seafood. Koreans still eat a great deal of wild or semiwild herbs, from ferns to burdock root.

One important Korean food not known in China (as far as I can find) is acorn mush. Chinese do eat acorns, however—usually roasted—as well as a pecan-like nut called a “mountain walnut.”  Hu Shiu-Ying (2005) identifies this as referring to both the Chinese hickory, Carya cathayensis, and the Manchurian walnut, Juglans mandschurica. For the Korean dish, acorns are ground, the tannic acid is soaked out of them, and the meal is then boiled while stirring until it forms a jellylike mush known as dotori muk (the meal is dotori muk karu). It is tasteless, but is sliced and eaten with seasonings or other foods. It is similar to the acorn mush of California’s Native American peoples, but more thoroughly leached. It was independent invented in California and Korea—there are no intermediate steps to connect the two.

Since Korea is a peninsula with an irregular coastline and countless islands, fish, shellfish, and seaweeds are extremely important in the diet. Mackerel, needlefish, and other strong oily fish are greatly relished, though Chinese do not like them much. Pollack is popular not only for the flesh but for the guts, which are made into stew with much chile and some vegetables, and are definitely an acquired taste. Seaweeds, squid, cuttlefish, and shellfish abound in the diet. An unusual food is hagfish, a primitive lamprey relative; it is cooked in extremely pungent and complex chile sauce, and is crisp and a bit chewy, like cuttlefish but more so; the texture is a major attraction. (No references for this or most of the last several paragraphs—I had to do all the field work myself on this, in Korea and in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, though see Pettid 2008 for general description.)

Beware of ordering a sundae in Korea; it is Korean for blood sausage. A gourmetship for this product exists, with specialty restaurants, famed manufacturers, and other appropriate accoutrements.

A duck lunch eaten at a Los Angeles duck specialty restaurant—so Korean it had signage only in hangul—consisted of thin slices of duck grilled on the usual tabletop grill, but in a grill pan that saved the fat. The duck slices were eaten on lettuce, with various pickles, plus salt, to make up a bite. Then rice was fried in the remaining duck fat, and eaten by those of us who still had space.

Korean drinks include makgeolli, unstrained rice beer—a wonderful, sparkling, yeasty-flavored, milk-white drink that can incorporate chestnut powder and other fascinating additions. Strained, it becomes more ordinary (and less popular) jiu. Distilling Korean jiu of any sort results in soju, a vodka, as tasteless as others of that breed, but usually much less strong; it can be potent, but usually runs around 16-20% alcohol. It has been lovingly monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021), who finds it was probably introduced by Tang times, but made much more available and popular by the Mongols. It is now generally made of grain, but was often made of sweet potatoes in the past, especially when it was of the bootleg order.

Korean ceremonies still use ancient Confucian sacrifice rites, involving offerings of foods adapted to the Korean context (Kim 1999). These include jujubes, pine nuts, walnuts, and ginkgo nuts, as well as the usual meats and fish, but also kimchi, including things like Chinese bellflower and wild dropwort (these are medicinal herbs). Rice cakes and various wines are used, as well as meat minced with soy and other ingredients. Meat items include something rather mysteriously defined as “swine’s armpit” (Kim 1999:8; the Chinese characters supplied makes things even more mysterious—the character translated “armpit” means “to pat” in Chinese). Korea now proves to have a very long, complex prehistory (Nelson 1993, 1999). Millet cultivation began (probably introduced from northeast China) around the 6^th millennium BC (Nelson 1999:150). Recall that the Korean people very likely stem from the Xilongwa culture of the Liao River drainage. Rice was introduced, already domesticated, from China, by 2000 BC or earlier (Nelson 1999:150). Pigs and other animals came early, before rice, and pigs became major domesticates.

A complex agriculture evolved in Korea, spreading eventually to Japan with the Yayoi culture (intrusive from Korea to Japan around 200 BC). Japan had some agriculture earlier, but it stayed very simple and minor; only with Yayoi did Japan become truly agricultural. A quick note suffices for Japan: recent comprehensive, detailed, and excellent work by Eric Rath (2010, 2016; Rath and Assman 2010) and Charlotte von Verschuer (2016) makes further description unnecessary.

Manchu food is more or less Chinese, in recent centuries, but traditions of venison and distinctive noodle dishes survive. Newman (2006) provides recipes. Large dumplings are bobo, presumably linguistically related to Tibetan momo.

A detailed account of foodways in Vietnam (Ngo 1994) notes that the heating/cooling system and the five-elements system flourish there. Cooling foods, including many vegetables and fruits, were favored, because of the hot climate. About 1500 medicinal plants make up the traditional herbal canon; some 150 are food plants (p. 77). An 18^th-century physician, Hai Thuong Lan Ong, wrote a book, Culinary Art, with 152 recipes for healing foods, with recommendations of foodstuffs. “For instance:  glutinous rice related to sweet and tepid, strengthened spleen, lung and kidney and cured urobilinury whereas ordinary rice related to sweet and healthy, kept up the body and regulated the temperament. Regarding beans, soya related to sweet and tepid, strengthend the bone, boosted the temperament and detoxicated whereas green beans related to sweet and cold, dissipated the heat, detoxicated and cured diabetes” (Ngo 1994:77). Lemon balm, ginger, and other plants were noted. “[W]omen in delivery should use glutinous rice wine, with hen-egg…” (Ngo 1994:77). Papaya promoted milk, as did soup of pork leg.  The giant waterbug Lethocerus indicus is important in Vietnamese cuisine (Packard 2003; Smith 2003), as in northern Thailand, whence it has been imported into the United States (Pemberton 1988; also my own observations). The pheromonal gland produces a scent that is greatly relished. Insecticides have made the insect rare. It is traditionally made into sauce with chiles, lime, and sometimes dried fish or fish sauce.

Chan Yuk Wah (2011), in a brief but brilliant article, tells of investigating whether the Vietnamese rice roll known as banh cuon was derived from the Cantonese cheung fan roll. He realized that both are variants of a local food that seems to be one of the many regional things—foods, words, ideas—linking Cantonese and Vietnamese culture as opposed to north Chinese or (other) southeast Asian. He reasonably refers to this as Yueh culture—Yueh being the ancient Chinese state occupying what is now southeast China. “Vietnam,” which is “Yueh nan” in Mandarin, simply means “south of Yueh.”  (Nam Viet, “southern Yueh,” was attested historically too.)  It is definitely time to realize that Cantonese and Vietnamese cultures do comprise, in some ways, a unity over and against their neighbors; one can fold the Thai and Muong cultures of north Vietnam into it, too. Chan, again correctly, notes that “southeast Asia” is an awfully vague term—it links together a large group of countries that share nothing except their agricultural system (wet rice and tree crops) and some degree of Indian and Chinese influence. Southeast Asia is much less a cultural unity than, say, Europe, Latin America, or East Africa. One can easily deconstruct it and make the cultural links go in quite other directions. Chan’s article is a really wonderful example of starting with something deceptively minor, writing a deceptively short and simple article about it, and using this to establish conclusions that shake the received wisdom on a whole region!

Nir Avieli has described in detail the food of Hui An, a town in central Vietnam that formed around a core of Chinese merchant settlements and thus has a strongly Chinese-influenced cuisine with several distinctive local innovations (Avieli 2005, 2012). Among these are adding raw herbs—beloved of Vietnamese eaters—to Chinese dishes. These raw herbs can, however, carry diseases that Chinese cooking would prevent—as I was reminded, to my cost, in Hui and Hui An!

One of the common herbs there and elsewhere in southeast Asia is Tabasco parsley, not a parsley but a lettuce relative, Eryngium foetidum. It comes from Mexico (especially, of course, the Tabasco area) and how it got to southeast Asia is a real mystery. Around Hoi An it is known as ngo gai.

            In Yunnan, dozens of local ethnic groups continue interesting foodways. A marvelous cookbook of local Yunnan food comes to us from Georgia Freedman:  Cooking South of the Clouds (2018). The recipes are excellent and the photographs are exceptional even for this modern age of photo-cookbooks. From limited experience in Yunnan I can vouch for at least several of the recipes. Freedman usefully recommends substitutes for ingredients hard to get outside Yunnan, while still listing the proper ingredients for those who can find them (though failing to explain that “sawtooth herb” is that Eryngium foetidum). She traces the best of the famous Yunnan hams to Xuanwei county, near the Guizhou border (and recommends—properly—that you can use Spanish Serrano ham if you can’t find good Yunnan).

            Wild fruits are still very important (Chen et al. 1999). Slightly over the international border, Yunnan Chinese in northern Thailand have set up highly successful, stable, intensive farming systems, based on subsistence food cropping plus orchards of lychees, tangerines (with a juice processing factory), and other trees (Huang 2005). They also use an amazing and wondrous variety of wild plants for medicine, including for childbirth (Wang et al. 2003).

            Yunnan food, and some other Chinese foodways, have migrated to Burma, where Chinese food in Mandalay has become inextricably mixed with Burmese food. A Burmese tamarind soup, typical of the sour soups of India, Burma and Thailand, is Yunnanized with chile and pronounced a “Yunnanese” food (Duan Ying 2011).

            Tibetan food and medicine are still poorly known in the west (though see Dorje 1985). The Shuhi people, a Tibetan-related group in Yunnan, rely heavily on walnuts, for food and oil, and not surprisingly give them a major place in religion and ritual (Weckerle 2005). This links them with scattered long-resident ethnic groups around the Himalayan region; perhaps there are ancient relationships, though we cannot know. In any case, deteriorating rural and forest conditions in China bode ill for this adaptation.

            The Tibetans of Yunnan now produce a rapidly increasing quantity and variety of medicinal herbs (D. Anderson et al. 2005; Glover 2005; Salick et al. 2005), which is greatly improving the local economy, and, one hopes, world health. However, it is clearly unsustainable; plants are getting smaller and rarer. The future can only be one of crashes of major species. Cultivation is occurring, but a belief that wild plants are more effective than domestic ones makes this a shaky proposition.

            Especially interesting is the caterpillar-parasiting fungus Ophiocordyceps sinensis, known as yartsa gunbu in Tibetan and xiacao dongchong (“summer herb, winter worm”) or simply chongcao (“worm herb”) in Chinese. It grows in the bodies of ghost moth caterpillars (Thitarodes spp., 37 known host species).The first known mention is in a fifteenth-century Tibetan medical text. It appears in Chinese medical writing in 1757, but did not catch on as a mass fad until 1993 (Zahler 2016).Believed to have magical cure-all effects, it is collected in vast quantities in Tibetan grasslands and sold throughout China and among overseas Chinese. The supply is rapidly depleting. Zelda Liang (2012, 2013) records that it is now hyped as “viagra”-like (it does not work), and has become a super-rich status consumption good, now that the traditional luxuries such as abalone, shark fin, sea cucumber, and fish maw are affordable to the upper middle class. Illegal bu pin (strengthening foods) such as pangolin are also super-status.

            The effects of this new affordability on the luxuries in question is, of course, devastating. Many shark species are now endangered because of shark fin exploitation; often the fins are cut off and the shark thrown back into the water, there to die (it requires fins to swim and survive). Even the Gulf of Maine is losing its sea cucumbers. Fish maw (swim bladder) is overexploited to the extent of endangering several fish species, notably the totuava of the Gulf of California, and as bycatch the vaquita dolphin that lives with it; the scaly croaker of Papua-New Guinea is also getting rare, with desperate local people in the Kikori delta forced to exploit it as other fish disappear (Chandler 2024).

            A Tibetan community renamed “Shangri-La” by venal Han Chinese publicists has not only become a tourist designation, it has become a major wine terroir, with the publicists doing everything possible to hype its special virtues. It is said to be reasonably good. Unfortunately, mass tourism and French-style wine culture do not mix well with local reverence for mountains, forests, wildlife, and nature (Galipeau 2016).

            The Naxi of northern Yunnan are the subjects of a brief note by Jacqueline Newman (2018), providing only one recipe, but it is complex and stunning.

            The Yi peoples (Harrell 2001) may have ruled Yunnan in its independent days as the state of Nanchao. They now occupy a vast swath of highland territory from Sichuan to Thailand. Among the northerly groups are the Nuosu of the Liangshan (Cool Mountains), famous for having remained de facto independent of the Chinese state right up to the 1950s. Their staple food is buckwheat; they grow both bitter (Fagopyrum tataricum) and non-bitter (F. esculentum, the species familiar in the west—to which it spread from west China). They prefer the bitter, in spite of its taste, because it has more nutritional value (at least they say it does; Bender et al. 2019:144). They also grow wheat, barley, and potatoes, the last entering the picture since 1700 but very well established. They have a turnip-like vegetable called voma that is said to be watery and unsubstantial but very popular (Bender et al. 2019:144). They raise pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, chickens, and horses, and sacrifice and eat the first five of those species. They formerly ate a good deal of game, subject to a number of taboos that guaranteed sustainability, but now the game is shot out as taboos go by the wayside in a populous, mixed-ethnic world. With other Yi peoples, they have a cosmology of forests and wilds (the domain of spirits) and cultivated, thoroughly managed lands (the domain of people), and maintain sacred groves that conserve biodiversity (on conservation, see Urgenson et al. 2010, and countless writings by Stevan Harrell). Their origin myth (Bender et al. 2019) teaches respect for all beings; it does not explicitly order conservation, but it provides the context of beliefs that allow taboos, sacred demarcation, and ritual management systems to conserve a sustainable system. They maintain a wide and deep knowledge of edible plants and fungi (Li, Stepp, and Tilt 2022).

            Other Yi peoples include the Hani and Akha. The Hani of Yunnan grow “rice and corn; the rice is often but not always purple rice. They grow lots of…peanuts, tea, and sugar cane…..they love foods tasting acidic and/or spicy” (Newman 2015:29). They eat a rice dumpling cooked in banana leaves. Special dishes include baiwang, coagulated “blood of one or more animals: pig, goat and dog are favorites; and mix it with salt, radishes, leaves of the garlic plant, and chili peppers. Then they season it and grill it” (Newman 2015:30). They often top it with peanuts. Another favorite is “fish mud,” “minced fish with deer, goat, any wild bird, some eel, hot peppers, and chili oil…grilled over charcoal” (ibid.). An infertile woman “is given a leg of pork to hold”; it is called “dragon meat” and eaten with bean curd, fish, celery, sticky rice cakes, peanuts, etc., and the leftovers buried with rice seedlings (ibid.).

            The Sani of central Yunnan are a detachment of the Hani; the name is a variant. The Sani have an ancient tradition of rice agriculture, both upland (slash-and-burn) and wet, but they have more recently adopted New World crops with enthusiasm. Their villages consist of adobe houses, on and around which are hanging maize, chile peppers in strings, green beans drying, and Mexican squashes. Even epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides) has made it there as a pot-herb, called ki chr kimi. It slotted into the C. album niche as a pot herb. A Sani village looks like a central Mexican one, even to the clusters of maize ears hanging in trees. This amazed and delighted the Mexican representatives at the International Congress of Ethnobotany held in Yunnan in 1990.  

Sani dispenses with vowels in many words. Ng pan mo is “chile.”  The odd small eggplant—a local species, Solanum khasianum—is a dz, a water buffalo an ng (cf. Chinese niu, Cantonese ngau). Dog is chrzh (the last three letters being used here to write something like the buzzed r in Czech). Simplest of all was “horse”:  m. (The Chinese is ma.) 

The Akha, related linguistically (but much more fond of vowels, of which they have many), practice slash-and-burn cultivation and some wet-rice agriculture in southern Yunnan (Sturgeon 2005, 2021). They eat a typical southeast Asian diet of rice with greens, fish, fruit, peppers, and forest products. My student Ayoe Wang, an Akha from Yunnan, carried out detailed ethnobotanical researches on the Akha (Wang 2008, 2013). He found the same general cosmological beliefs as those reported for the Nuosu, with more explicit conservation and more self-conscious differentiation from the surrounding groups. The Yi world is part of the Southeast Asian world of intensely conservationist and highly sustainable agriculture, a model for the world. Tragically, the Akha have suffered the usual fate of minorities under de facto colonialism. They were dispossessed of most of their land on the patently false claim that they ruined the forest by their shifting-cultivation practices, which are actually extremely careful and conservationist. They were then “given the opportunity,” without choice in the matter, of growing tea to survive. They wound up cutting down even their sacred groves (Sturgeon 2021). This will lead to ruin, according to both Akha religious belief and modern ecological wisdom. Whether the cause is ancestral punishment or lack of resilience in the face of global climate change, the ruin of Akha lands in the near future is assured.

Another related group, the Lisu, are little known to the food world. A few dishes are described by a Lisu writer, Bai Chingshun (2015). Bai reports that a thick unleavened wheat bread is one staple; it is cooked on a flat pan and then in the ashes of the fire. Sweet twisted wheat pastry is a simple delicacy. Another food is tamales: maize kernels taken off the ear, ground, mixed with chiles and salt and steamed in corn husks or Erythrina variegata leaves. I suppose they are an independent invention based on something like Chinese zong, not direct borrowing of tamales. Streaky pork with bean paste (mashed beans) and garlic leaves are a delicacy. Another is wild fennel boiled, tied in a circle, filled with beaten egg, and cooked in soup. In no case are full directions given, and apparently the author has been long away from home. We need more ethnography of groups like this.

Wang Si, an ethnologist in Yunnan, has described the Bai (Wang 2012), who are also fond of raw pork. She supplies details on pig butchering and raw meat preparation and use. Newman has also contributed a brief account of the Bai of Yunnan, whose cuisine is not strikingly different from other Yunnan Plateau food (Newman 2012).

Dai food of southern Yunnan has been chronicled by Newman, and is described as often being sour, with pickled vegetables important. They share a fondness for minced, highly spiced raw meat with other Thai-speaking groups (Newman 2012b). Water bugs continue popular. They are a main flavoring in Thailand, especially in the north, and are occasionally shipped to California, and eaten there (Pemberton 1988). Lethocerus indicus is the species recorded in California. In Thailand, they are prepared .with fermented shrimp paste, galric, Tabasco chile, lime juice, a bit of cilantro, and a small eggplant of the Solanum khasianum type, or more simply with chiles, shile paste, dried minno, and a bit of cilantro (Richard Lando, pers. comm.).

Also related are the Lahu, evocatively described by Shanshan Du (2002), a Chinese ethnographer. They live a similar lifestyle in the same general area. Du emphasizes the importance of women, who maintain that “chopsticks work only in pairs,” and men and women equally need each other.

Nearby are the Wa, an Austroasiatic-speaking group (like their neighbors the Palaung). They have a well-deserved reputation as ferocious headhunters, protecting their wild and remote but lush and rich land by living in large villages hedged by thorns, guarded by gates, and defended by implacable warriors. They were conquered by the Chinese Communist government in the middle 1950s, but in Burma they remain semi-autonomous. Their staple is rice. They grow foxtail millet for beer, an exceedingly popular item, used ritually like other millet beers of southeast Asia. As in much of the world, meat is highly favored. Cattle, buffaloes, pigs, and chickens abound, and some other domesticates and game animals are consumed. Sacrifices and feasts were once common, especially to celebrate heads taken. The skulls were ritually placed in pillars lining the main road to the village, a fairly good warning of what invaders could expect. The Wa, previously known largely from scary rumors, have been the subject of sustained and excellent ethnographic attention by Magnus Fiskejö (2021 and references therein).

The Mian of southern China and neighboring southeast Asia traditionally ate bland, simple food, but use southeast Asian basil varieties, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass, at least in their southeast Asian villages. Minced beef with basil, eaten in a lettuce leaf, is a favorite dish, and resembles Thai and Vietnamese dishes. Sticky rice has also spread from the north Thai world (Jeff McDonald, pers. comm.).

The Mian are also called Yao, and some groups are described under that name. They have varied foodways, many of which are being lost. The Ao Yao of Guangxi used to salt down small birds with rice powder to dry them off; this is no longer done. They pickled many foods. Otherwise, their diet was, or at least now is, more or less the standard diet of impoverished mountain dwellers: sweet potatoes, maize, and such, with rice and pork the luxuries (Huang 2009). Huang gives a recipe for blood sausage—blood and rice in a pig’s intestine, with salt and flavorings.

The Tujia (Newman 2014b) are a large but strikingly little-known group, living in central China. They now speak a Chinese language, but many live near Miao and speak Miao dialects, so one wonders if they have some Miao ancestry. Over a million are scattered widely from north-central to south China. Little is recorded of their food, except that it seems hot, spicy, and sour—they love pickles—and related to Sichuanese cooking; they maintain they originated in Sichuan. This is not the same as the Hezha cuisine above. The group appears to be broadly the same, but it has no corporate identity, and no consistent cuisine is reported.

China’s largest minority is the Thai-speaking (now often Han Chinese-speaking) Zhuang, who live in Guangxi Province and neighboring areas; there are perhaps 30,000,000 of them. Their food remained mysterious until recently, but now an article (Newman 2005), among other sources, opens them to the world. They eat both sticky and nonsticky rice; nonsticky seems to be usually (not always) the staple. They are fond of cassia and fennel, and flavor their tea with orange flowers. Black rice soup flavored with cassia and fennel is a typical dish. Eggplant is cooked with rice vinegar, white pepper, cinnamon, sugar, fermented sticky rice, and oil.

A restaurant in San Gabriel (near Los Angeles) served Guangxi Zhuang food. A  specialty is luosifen, snail noodle soup. The snails are boiled in the water but then taken out. They give a strange earthy or pond-like flavor. The soup is based on spaghetti-like rice noodles with tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, bamboo shoots, meat or fish of any kind, and flavorings. Other soups with sour vegetables exist. (The same restaurant—run by a couple from China’s northernmost and southernmost extremes—served Harbin specialties from north Manchuria. These are largely dumplings stuffed with pork and fennel leaves or other meat-and-vegetable stuffings. Cumin is a common spicing, indicating Near Eastern antecedents. Lamb stir-fried with sour cabbage is also a delicacy there as elsewhere in the far north.)

Dr. Newman, who is systematically chronicling the minority foodways of China, has gone on to describe the foods of the Dong (Tung), another Thai minority very close to the Zhuang (Newman 2007, 2012b, 2012c). (In fact, “Dong” and “Zhuang” are routinely confused. The languages are very similar, and are close to Thai. Speakers are called “Dong” or “Zhuang” indifferently, depending on local history. Newman reports that some people of apparent Tibeto-Burman origin are also called Dong locally.)   A characteristic Dong flavor is tea oil, from fruits of Camellia species including C. oleifera, C. sasanqua and C. kissi (but not from true tea, C. sinensis). This is often made into a sauce with mustard, vinegar, salt, and sugar. A raw-shrimp paste with chile, rice, ginger, cinnamon and salt is also made and stored; it would salt-cure (autodigest) in the jars. Sticky rice is common as a staple. It is also the staple food in northeast Thailand and neighboring areas. Vegetables are marinated in a mix of sugar, salt, Chinese hard liquor (technically a vodka or unaged whiskey), and rice wine.

Newman’s latest foray has been to the world of the Gelao (Kelao), a group so obscure that they appear never to have been well described in print in English. They live in the far south, in Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi. Their language is distantly related to Thai, but in a separate branch (Kadai) of the Thai-Kadai phylum. It is poorly known. Their food was even less well known till now. Newman (2016) reports:  “Their staple diet is corn supplemented with ricewheat, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, and sweet potatoes.”  They like sweet-sour tastes. “They make a condiment called ‘chili bone.’ It is actually ground pork bones mixed with chicken meat, lots of chili powder, sugar, wine and/.or vinegar, and Sichuan pepper and salt. This they seal in jars for two weeks or more…it is a sweet and sour sauce-like item used as a dipping condimentor spread on dumplings or rice cakes.”  They worship on Ox God with sacrificed chicikens, wine, and rice cakes (Newman 2016b:13). Newman provides recipes for maize and shrimp congee with vinegar, and ginger, glutionous rice cakes with brown sugar, black vinegar, sesame oil, preserved vegetables, and fried dough sticks, and presed tofu and rice cakes with ginger, black vinegar, sugar, and chile (Newman 2016b:14). These resemble Cantonese breakfast items.

            Yang Zhuliang has chronicled mushrooms in Yunnan (Yang n.d.). Mushrooms also figure large in Tibet, where they are collected by Tibetans and minorities as food. Sale of them has made many people quite well off (Arora 2008). The caterpillar-parasitizing fungus Cordyceps sinensis complex is an extremely important medicine, sale of which actually is the biggest single moneymaker in rural Tibet (Winkler 2008, 2009). It is used for almost anything by Chinese and Tibetans, but is not known to have any empirically demonstrable benefits. Many other mss. on mushrooms, as well as taro, herbal medicine, edible insects, wild game animals, pine nuts, dogs, and other edibles have crossed my desk, but in preliminary or partial forms that cannot be cited here.

            Southeast Asian food and its history has been reviewed in an excellent historical study by the Japanese scholar Akira Matsuyama (2003). This book is particularly good on fermented foods, and provides an opportunity for someone to do a really major study by comparing them with those documented in Huang (2000). Ties with China are very clear.

Chapter 15. Globalization and Diaspora:  Chinese Food Outside China

Much research on Chinese food in recent years has focused on the process of globalization. This has led to questioning just what Chinese food is (King 2020). In most arenas, globalization has meant the spread of American pop culture at the expense of everything else. It is currently a bit politically uncorrect to say this, but look at any photograph of any street in any city in the world, and think where the clothing styles, sign styles, building styles, car styles, and other styles originated. The only serious exception to Americanization, outside of local scripts on the signs, is the religiously-entailed women’s clothing in the more conservative Muslim cities. In foodways, however, the Chinese have more than held their own. Chinese food has been going global for centuries, since it spread along the Silk Road and along land and sea routes to Southeast Asia.

China’s most far-flung restaurants have been chronicled by the intrepid researchers of Gastro Obscura. They now occur in northern Alaska, Easter Island, the south tip of South America (in Ushuaia), over 14,000 feet up in Cerro de Pasco, Peru, and in Greenland (Wong and Thuras 2021:126-127). Old railroad and mining towns all over western North America have very old Chinatowns, dating from the use of Chinese labor building the railroads, mining, or servicing other workers. Many very old buildings survive, as well as treasure troves like the medical records of a frontier Chinese doctor in Idaho. The food was classic chop suey house fare, and often still is, though now often cooked by recent immigrants who can also produce more upscale dishes.

One result of the food diaspora has been the rise of white experts on Chinese cooking and the neglect of Chinese experts. Mea culpa, of course, but I have tried to acknowledge, cooperate with, and coauthor with Chinese experts. Clarissa Wei (2017) has written an insightful article on the problem. (She is willing to forgive competent experts, but not the newspapers and the white chefs. I am more forgiving—but I am not a disinterested observer here.)

            The long process of blending Chinese and Southeast Asian food thus commands attention, and has received it in several excellent studies (Tan 2011). Notable is one on Chinese food in Singapore. Chinese settled in southern Malaya by the 1500s, and a fusion cuisine, “Nonya” food, arose as they married into local communities.  It influenced both parents:  returning migrants brought Sinicized versions of Malay foods back to China, and Malay food has adopted countless Chinese ingredients and techniques. It differs from both parents in a strong emphasis on turmeric and lesser galangal; it uses more hot spices than Chinese food, but less than Malay. A very similar evolution has taken place in Indonesia, where the peranakan (Indonesian-Chinese) communities developed fusion cuisines and influenced Indonesian food profoundly. (Ultimately, they influenced the whole world, through such inventions as ketchup.)  “Nonya” cuisine (“nonya” is a local word for a Chinese woman of status) has been self-consciously revived and modernized in Singapore (and to a lesser extent in Malaysia). Thus, it has progressively changed. However, Chinese identity is still marked. Holvor Helland (2008), studying Penang, found about what I found in 1970: Chinese food reinforced Chinese identity, with pork a particularly strong ethnic marker because it is banned to the Muslims who form most of the rest of the population there. Chinese have adopted local ingredients but cook in Chinese ways. At least in 1970, that meant Hokkien ways, but I suspect the same thing has happened in Penang that has happened in Singapore: a blurring of Chinese ethnic lines and a spread of Cantonese cuisine across Chinese ethnicities. (One may argue that there is a good reason for that, given the contrasts in cooking between flavorful Cantonese and the often bland and lardy Malaysian Hokkien foodways of the old days.)

            Meanwhile, invasion from a very different direction has occurred: California cuisine has come to Singapore, an arrival making the front page of the Los Angeles Times (Pierson 2022). This cuisine is basically French plus standard western American, using fresh farm-sourced produce and meats (often from high-quality specialist producers). Typical are inventive and surprising combinations of ingredients, but not the multiple combinations of spices and flavorings found in Asia; California cuisine will add truffles to ice cream or berries to shrimp but not half a dozen spices to a dish. The freshness and relative simplicity seem to have caught on in Singapore.

            The initial diaspora of Chinese food was almost entirely from the south coastal provinces, Fujian and Guangdong (Anderson 1988; Tan 2011). Southeast Asian Chinese food is primarily from Fujian, with varying degrees of Guangdong and other influences. The names for foods show this. In Southeast Asia, they are almost entirely in Hokkien (Southern Min), the language of southern Fujian and neighboring northern Guangdong (Anderson 1988; Tan 2011). The Philippines seems slightly more complicated, with some highly Tagalog-influenced Chinese words that do not always show clear Hokkien roots. Carolyn Ang See (2011) provides an excellent account with full food vocabulary; words can be Tagalog, Hokkien, Cantonese (e.g. siomai for siumai) or even possible Mandarin with much Tagalog influence. Sometimes the etymology is astonishing:  the standard Philippine noodle dish pansit is from Hokkien pian sit (Mandarin bian shi), “fast or convenient food.”  On top of this, Philippine languages have borrowed many Spanish words for dish types and ingredients. Sometimes these Spanish words were in turn borrowed from native American languages; for instance, various pronunciations of the Nahuatl (“Aztec”) word camote have become the usual namesfor the sweet potato.

            Fishing went with Chinese settlers to every coastal area they settled. In North America, Chinese got into fishing quite early, dominating some fisheries. This did not totally satisfy demand, so much was imported from China, especially since certain gourmet items like salt croakers and dried squid were hard or impossible to produce in the new land.

            J. Ryan Kennedy (2017) has studied the mix of Chinese-caught, Anglo-caught, and imported fish available to early Chinese Californians. San Francisco Chinese firms (jinshanzhuang, “Golden Mountain firms”) imported dried fish, including the southeast Asian snakehead catfish Channa micropeltes (Kennedy et al. 2021). This catfish was possibly imported as a health aid, since ability to breathe air and squirm through wet grass between ponds gives the various snakehead catfish the reputation of being sheng yu, “living fish,” whose flesh makes one resist cancer and other such diseases. However, I was gravely assured in Hong Kong that some are “bone-transforming dragons” (fa kuat lung in Cantonese), that if eaten will make the eater disappear completely, even his bones. The catfish are thus cooked with a piece of pork, to see if it disappears. I was told of people who had seen this happen, but never met any or heard believable accounts.

            Chinese moved quickly into the abalone fishery, since that snail is among the most valued gourmet health foods in eastern Asia. Todd Braje (2016) studied abalone fishing camps on the Channel Islands, where particularly well-preserved ones on San Clemente give insight into Chinese and western fishers. Kennedy and Braje summarize a long literature on these subjects.

In the Western Hemisphere, Chinese food meant Cantonese food—from central Guangdong—until recently. The standard food names are Cantonese, sometimes in the Taishan (Toisan) dialect; most of the early Cantonese migrant were from Taishan or the nearby “four districts” (the sei yap of California Chinese history) that speak a closely related dialect. (The sam yap, “three districts,” spoke a more Guangzhou-like form of Cantonese, and often warred with sei yap and Toisanese in the 19^th century.)

Only in the last 40 years have Sichuanese, Shanghainese, north Chinese, and other regional cuisines spread much beyond China’s borders. Another aspect of the mix has been the recent emigration of vast numbers of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam and other southeast Asian countries. They have started restaurants that not only reflect the fusion cuisines of their homelands, but also reflect fusion in their new homes with local traditions. It is thus common in the United States to find “Vietnamese” restaurants that serve sinicized Vietnamese staples, standard south Chinese dishes, and American Chinese dishes like beef broccoli and ginger beef.

An eclectic cuisine has developed and become almost universal. “Chinese” restaurants in North America and Europe, for instance, typically serve the more famous dishes of several regions. This regional fusion was looked upon with some disquiet by traditional gourmets, but it is now quite standard in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as in diaspora communities (Wu 2011 gives excellent descriptions and provides his full share of the disquiet). Sidney Cheung has written on the assimilation of Shanghai foodways into Hong Kong life (2020) and on Hong Kong food in general (2022).

            Americans first learned of Chinese food in China itself, and developed a stereotype of it (based on Canton experience) as a lot of unsavory dishes of cut-up cats, dogs, and such (Coe 2009; see pp. 32 ff for colonial racist quotes; also Dunlop 2023). Chinese emigrants came to America in the Gold Rush and in much larger numbers in the late 19th century, bringing rural Cantonese food, especially from the Taishan (Toisan) district of Guangdong. This food was not necessarily China’s finest, and only slowly won acceptance. Coming of more variety and quality led to an explosive growth of acceptance, making Chinese food universal and beloved (Coe 2009; Newman and Halporn 2004).

            Tofu was brought to America by a rather striking individual, Dr. Yamei Kim. She was born in Ningbo in 1864, orphaned, adopted by American missionaries with medical background, raised in Japan and the United States, and became a doctor. She worked with new foods in WWI for the United States, introducing a variety of soybean products including tofu (Roth 2018). She was obviously not the first to bring it, but she seems to have made it more visible to the American elite world. She lived a colorful life, being very much a showperson and champion of both modernity and Chinese tradition.

            More recently, Chinese restaurants from Korea and Japan to America and Europe have developed local versions of Chinese food. (On this, there are several excellent recent studies, notably Arnold et al. 2018; Banh and Liu 2019; Newman and Halporn 2004; Roberts 2002; Wu and Cheung 2002; Wu and Tan 2001. For Korea, a superb article by Kim Bok-rae, 2009, chronicles in detail the changes involved. Here the main influence was from Shandong, not south China. For France, see Sabban 2009.)   They accommodate to local tastes by changing spices, substituting local ingredients, etc. Many stories of particular restaurants, and memoirs of restaurant families, have been collected recently (see Banh and Li 2019 and references therein).

They also, alas, often use much cheaper and worse ingredients than they would dare to use at home, though this is rapidly changing. American Chinese food has gone through several stages in my lifetime. When I was young, most American Chinese came from impoverished backgrounds, and cooked (by necessity) rather cheap, simple food. Accommodation to American ways led to making this cuisine even cheaper and simpler, resulting in the food of the “chop suey joints” of old (Coe 2009). These were small local restaurants that served very humble food.

The oldest one surviving is probably the Chicago Café in Woodland, a small farm town near Sacramento. The region was settled by lare numbers of Chinese workers from the Gold Rush on, and a large Chinese farm worker population existed in the Sacramento Valley and Delta, including Woodland. The café was founded by Young family in 1903, and continues in the ownership of their descendant Paul Fong and his wife. They are growing old, and the future of this historic café is uncertain (Garrison 2024).

“Chop suey” is from Cantonese tsap sui, “miscellaneous leftovers.” In California, it is widely believed to be a California invention. According to folk legend, it was created when a restaurant was invaded by clients who would not be turned away. The desperate chef just stir-fried the day’s leftover, and the clients were happy. In fact, chop suey is a widespread Chinese dish that occurs in many forms. The direct ancestor of California’s form is a dish from the Toisan and Sei Yap area of Guangdong province, originally made by vegetable growers. At the end of the day, they would cook up the “miscellaneous leftovers” that were too small or odd to sell (information from former vegetable growers in Hong Kong, 1975). In America, it first appeaed in New York, then appeared in San Francisco around 1900, becoming famous there (Coe 2009; Peters 2013).

The Mandarin pronunciation is za sui. “Leftovers” is more often used to refer to the odd bits of animals, and the dish has another past as a way of using up chicken gizzards, intestines, lungs, and the like, as pointed out by Hai-Ming Liu (2009) and Miranda Brown (2021). This makes the dish comparable to Mexico’s menudo (“little parts”) and birria (“leftovers”), made from tripe and from the leftovers of sheep and goat butchering respectively.

The dish is venerable. The first mention is in China’s great fantasy novel, Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. The trickster-hero Monkey threatens to make chop suey from the organs of a demon if it swallows him. The demon gives up the project (vol. 1, p. 75, reference from Facebook posting by Jim McClanahan, Jan. 2022).

Recently, this once-humble dish has occasioned a publishing explosion. Major authorities have devoted books and articles to it. These include Miranda Brown (2021), Andrew Coe (2009), Haiming Liu (2009, 2015), Anne Mendelson (2016) and Yong Chen (2014) have chronicled the progress of chop suey and other Chinese-American foods; Yong Chen gives some recipes.

Other memorable foods of the old chop suey houses were chow mien (chao min, fried noodles, with sauce), egg foo young (fuyong, omelet-like stirred eggs), tofu dishes, won ton soup, and stir-fried meat with vegetables. Often this consisted largely of undercooked vegetables with tiny shreds of meat. At best, it would have oyster sauce added. “Beef with broccoli” was one standard, substituting American broccoli for kai laan choy, often called “Chinese broccoli” though actually a form of Chinese cabbage.

Another standard was yatka mien, from Cantonese yat ko mien (or min or men), “one bowl of noodles.”  This normally meant just regular noodles, with some green onions, barbecued pork, and the like, but the irrepressible culinary genius of New Orleans has made it into a whole new dish, yakamein. This is a hangover cure, sometimes known as “Old Sober,” and made of “spaghetti, chopped beef, green onions, and chopped hard-boiled eggs, drowned in a tangy beef broth, spiced up with hot sauce and soy sauce, and sprinkled with liberal amounts of Creole seasoning” (Gastro Obscura, online newsletter, 2019).

Ever-present was the fortune cookie, based on the Japanese tea wafer, but converted in the United States to something like a sugar cookie; it was and still is folded (when still pliable) around a slip of paper bearing a “fortune” or a wise saying. They were invented in San Francisco (though San Franciscans like to blame them on Los Angeles). The fortunes were apparently added during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, by the Benkiyodo bakery, possibly in relation to the Sperry Flour Company’s huge display at that fair (Peters 2013:179-180). They were quickly picked up by Chinese restaurants.

San Franciscans tend to blame it on Los Angeles and vice versa (McDermott 2000). One Anglo-American man in San Francisco made a career of writing the fortunes for the restaurants there. The fortune cookie found chroniclers in Jennifer 8 Lee (2009; yes, 8 is her middle name), and in Terry McDermott (2000), who researched it thoroughly for an article (a very humorous one) in the Los Angeles Times. Many of the fortunes are recycled bits of Western wisdom literature, and many of the fortune-writers are not Chinese.

            It turns out the fortune cookie does indeed come from Japan (Peters 2013). It is a cut-down, Americanized version of a Kyoto temple cookie. Makoto Hagiwara started the trend around 1900, at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. Apparently it converged there (or near there) on the American sugar cookie. The fortune in the cookie goes back to the Golden Gate Park tea garden, and is found in Kyoto at least in recent years. Fortune cookies were a new and strange item in Hong Kong when I was first there in 1965; restauranteurs could not imagine why American tourists were insisting on them as inevitable Chinese restaurant trappings.

Fuchsia Dunlop has discovered in Shanghai a wafer of batter “pressed between two round irons” and then folded ovr a stuffing of “crushed nuts and sugar” (Dunlop 2016:293). This resembles the fortune cookie and is probably related to the Japanese tea wafer, but more interesting is its obvious relationship to central Asian sweets, including baklava. We are almost certainly dealing here with another central Asian sweetmeat survival. The “glutinous rice buns stuffed with candied rose petals” that Dunlop records for Suzhou (Dunlop 2016:292) are also of likely central Asian or Turkic relationship.

New waves of ever-more-affluent, ever-more-educated immigrants brought higher standards, and now the best restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco are as good as any (except perhaps the very best) in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The Los Angeles area now has highly specialized restaurants; one excellent one specializes in hui tou, a shallow-fried dumpling like a pot-sticker but larger and juicier, with a rather thick wheat-flour skin surrounding finely minced, highly flavored pork or beef. Vegetarian and Buddhist restaurants exist, as do ones specializing in Zhuang minority food, Manchurian food, medical food, and countless other items. Dumplings are so popular that non-Han experts are emerging. Christopher St. Cavish, from Florida but now resident in China, has made a study of the xiao long bao (“little dragon dumpling,” a big meat dumpling boiled in soup, a Shanghainese specialty). He found that the ideal skin was thinner than 1.36 mm (which is very thin), 20% soup within, and folded with many pleats at the top (18-20 seems ideal but perhaps excessive; see Makinen 2015).

The southeast Asian immigration to America has brought thousands of ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thai, and others, many of whom start complex fusion restaurants. For one example, the Mien Nghia Noodle Express in the San Gabriel Valley is Teochiu-Vietnamese. It serves almost exclusively noodle dishes, with all sorts of noodles: fine rice to wide rice, small egg-wheat noodles to large ones, and so on. The food is a Vietnamese-influenced fusion of Cantonese and Teochiu. The menu is in Chinese characters, English, and Vietnamese (in that order). Similarly complex blends, involving many Chinese and Southeast Asian traditions, abound in the San Gabriel Valley.

Far from all restaurants come up to this standard. Even the old-fashioned “chop suey joint” survives in rural communities; it has become all but extinct in urban America.

An odd side note on China in America is the development of the Bing cherry by Ah Bing, a six-foot-tall northern Chinese man working for the Quaker farm family of Lewelling in the late 19^th century in Oregon. Seth Lewelling generously named the cherry after Bing (Newman 2019a).

Similar progress is documented for Australia, Japan, England, and elsewhere, with perhaps less eclipse of the low-end (Cheung and Tan 2007; Wu 2011; Wu and Cheung 2002). David Wu, anthropologist and self-described Chinese gourmet, has traveled widely in the world, and eaten at every sort of Chinese restaurant from the humblest New Guinea émigré shack to the finest and most expensive restaurants in China and Taiwan. He provides us a memoir (Wu 2011) with his reminiscences and frank opinions of Chinese food around the world—finding it very lacking indeed in many of the émigré communities.

In western South America, Chinese restaurants are known as chifa. The Chinese immigration to Peru came in the late 19^th century, with Chinese labor imported for the worst and most unpleasant jobs, such as mining guano on bird islands. Chinese restaurants soon appeared in Lima, Peru, especially near the Santa Rosa cathedral and market at city center; a few blocks there became a Chinatown.  The word chifa is apparently a Spanish corruption of Cantonese jyu faan, “cook rice” (Siu 2022), but may be from Cantonese sik faan “eat rice.” The food is typical of the old “chop suey joint” style. It provides cheap, filling food. Peruvian items such as guinea pig slowly began to appear on the menus, and now a real fusion cuisine exists. New “wine palaces” in the central cities have not displaced the old chifas.

            In Hawaii, the old “chop suey joints”—fondly remembered by working-class sand student-class Hawaiians—have given way to “all you can eat buffets” that provide modernized but bland fare (Wu 2008; similar restaurants exist on the mainland, but are not so common). There are many Native Hawaiian and mainland Anglo-American influences in the cuisine. Emphasis has been on providing cheap, filling food to a varied but typically nonaffluent clientele. David Wu, veteran of countless meals in the Chinese diaspora and long resident in Hawaii, concludes that, in Hawaii, “[i]t is very difficult at this time to identify any Chinese restaurants that provide a fine dining and exquisite culinary experience” (Wu 2008:23). Fortunately, this is not true of the Pacific Coast mainland, nor any longer of Hawaii.

            Saimin noodles—from Cantonese for “small noodles”—have become rather Japanified, leaving the Hawaiians in doubt as to whether they were originally a Chinese or Japanese dish, but very clear that they are now a Hawaiian dish (Hino 2017).

            Chinese overseas continue to celebrate with traditional foods—long-life noodles for birthdays, cakes and sweets for life-passsage rites and at New Year, buns, dumplings, roast meat (Newman et al. 1988). In general, as Chinese immigrants acculturate to receiver societies, drinks and snacks change first; traditional festive dishes change last.

Noodles have received their own excellent and thorough history, Slippery Noodles by Hsiang Ju Lin (2015). This book actually tells the whole story of Chinese food, but focuses on the rise and development of this favorite item. An odd recent fad was knife-shaved noodles, cut off a block of dough (Wank 2015). These briefly went worldwide in Chinese restaurants. Chinese food is as prone to fads and fashions as any other, and always has been, as have fashions; “changeless China” did have some slow-to-change aspects, like the reliance on millets and rice, but some things change fast. (Serventi and Sabban, Pasta, 2002, remains the basic work on the history of noodles and pasta in the west; it has much on China also.)

And, last but not least, we learn that in New Zealand the Cantonese have invented “beetroot kau yuk,” meat in alternate slices with beets, with cooked-down juices poured over—basically the classic meat-and-taro dish with beets instead of taro (video from “Sik Fan Lah!” Cantonese cooking program, with Nathan Joe, shared by my niece-in-law Cassandra Naleileihua, 2023).

I have developed an interest in cultural ways that “swim upstream,” i.e. that not only survive in the face of Americanization but actually invade America itself. Chinese food and Italian food are the clear winners in this sweepstakes, though Andean and Celtic music, Australian Aboriginal art, French and Australian wines, and various other cultural entities are noteworthy as well.

In general, things that “swim upstream” have to be really good, and they have to be actively merchandised. It helps if they are purveyed by prestigious urban communities, but this is obviously not necessary, given the success of Australian Aboriginal art and Andean indigenous music. Some things fail simply because they come from cultures that do not like high-pressure salesmanship. A comparison I did between Finnish food and Chinese food in America revealed that Finnish restaurants failed not because the food was bad but because traditional Finnish hospitality requires that guests be fed without charge! 

Other immigrant communities (the Ethiopian, for instance) were less charitable and did well, but kept restaurants going just long enough to put their children through college, whereupon the children became engineers, lawyers and other white-collar workers. A brief burst of Ethiopian restaurants in major American cities has narrowed to a small number of dedicated survivors in areas where some immigration still goes on.

By contrast, the Chinese, even when college educated, love to start restaurants. The distinguished Sinologist and anthropologist Vivienne Lo, for instance, continues to carry on the family tradition; her father was the famous chef and restauranteur Kenneth Lo. Now, she helps her sister Jenny Lo with professional cooking and cookbook writing (Lo and Lo 2003). Chinese food is taking over the world more surely than American fast food. One reason is the dedication of Chinese in all walks of life to good eating. Another is the popularity of Chinese food with virtually everybody.

            Meanwhile, American food, inevitably often at its worst, has invaded East Asia. A superb collection of studies edited by James Watson (1997) records the progress of McDonald’s Hamburgers in Asia. Yan Yunxiang (1997), writing in Watson’s book, records how McDonald’s in China became the “in” place for sophisticated, worldly young people to be seen—a far cry from its identification in its homeland with more humble social realms. I have seen the same thing in Hong Kong. It always amazed me to see Hong Kong citizens, arguably the most food-conscious gourmets that have ever existed on this planet, flocking to a restaurant of this nature. (Incidentally, McDonald’s started in the next city to where I live: the hardscrabble city of San Bernardino, California. The McDonald brothers first opened a roadhouse a few miles to the west of the town, then settled in San Bernardino and began to branch out. The real spread of the chain, however, took place after they retired and sold out to Roy Kroc, who internationalized the chain. See Schlosser 2002. Roy Kroc and his wife became leading philanthropists, investing the huge profits of the chain in many good causes.) 

            There was in 2012 a vast potato chip boom in China. Lay’s had the largest market share, but there were local imitations. Growers displaced grassland and herders in Inner Mongolia to grow the potatoes. Quality control was a problem—only 1 out of 3 big potatoes usually makes the cut (!). The sustainable grassland-herding economy gave way to an unsustainable potato boom (K. D. Anderson and Isenhour 2012). The boom wilted, and one hopes the grass could return.

With globalization, international influences have also influenced Chinese food in its homeland. First, the worldwide mid-20^th-century fondness for meat, oil and sugar influenced Chinese food, which became far less healthy than it had formerly been. This process ran from about the middle 1960’s to the 1990’s. By the 1980s, a reaction was beginning, again tracking trends elsewhere. The emphasis returned to healthier fare, with smaller portions, more vegetables, more delicate cooking, more attention to fresh high-quality ingredients, and above all less fat and sugar.

This may have been “nouvelle” cuisine in France and America, but it was, for China, a return to the status quo ante. It has certainly led to what almost anyone would describe as a marked improvement, if one compares a good Chinese restaurant today with one 20 years ago. But the great restaurants of 40 and more years ago remain, in my opinion, unequalled today. The biggest difference is in the ingredients. Few if any restauranteurs today raise their own chickens and feed them entirely on sesame seeds, for instance. And, more tragically, the superb sea foods of the old days simply do not exist any more. They have been fished to extinction.

            On the other hand, nouvelle cuisine is alive and well in China’s newly opulent cities with their nouveaux riches desperate for status consumption (see e.g. Farquhar 2002). Cantonese cuisine has benefited, or suffered, depending on one’s taste, and the resulting challenge to Cantonese tradition has been the subject of a stunningly good and thorough review by Jakob Klein (2007). Klein documents the rise of expensive nouvelle Cantonese restaurants in Hong Kong and Guangzhou; meanwhile the traditional food suffers some eclipse, partly because of the difficulty of getting good ingredients in these environmentally-sad times. Klein’s investigation of the sociological and personal experiences that result defies summary and needs serious reading. Klein has also given wonderful accounts of the revival of traditional Cantonese food in Guangzhou; some old-timers are not satisfied, but at least they have something of the good old days back (Klein 2006, 2007). Klein tells of Old Uncle Lu, who complains of sloppy cooking but still eats at the venerable teashop in the center of town.

            “Fusion cuisine” has become a fad in California and some other multicultural environs. Chinese food is often blended with French, Japanese, Italian, and other “great” cuisines (D. Wu 2012). The results are always striking and sometimes (!) successful…. One remembers that this is no new phenomenon; fusion cuisine at its most fused (so to speak) is documented in the Yinshan Zhengyao and many similar medieval works.

            All this raises the question of “authenticity.”  Obviously, by now, “authentic” Chinese food is a very slippery concept. Hamburgers are not authentic Chinese food, but what do you say about the split bao buns stuffed with flattened Chinese meatballs that were popular a few years ago in teashops?  They were thoroughly traditional in taste, but made to look like the prestigious hamburger. And what of the thousands of species of fish and shellfish now used in Chinese restaurants round the world?  Most were unknown in old China, but they are now cooked in thoroughly Chinese ways, and they taste just fine. And it always makes me feel a bit weird to eat hot-and-sour soup (suanlatang) that doesn’t have dried daylily buds or coagulated blood in it. But, in much of the world, you can’t get daylily buds, and people won’t eat blood. So, hot-and-sour soup adapts. Some westernization is a total disaster, such as using sherry instead of Chinese jiu in cooking, or thickening sauces with flour. Other westernization works fine, such as adopting asparagus and other newly-Asianized western vegetables. One has to look case by case. (Lo and Lo’s 2003 cookbook talks thoughtfully about such matters; see also David Wu 2008) 

            So I prefer to talk about what is traditional—what has been around for generations—and what is new. Then I care about whether the result tastes good. I let someone else worry about “authenticity.” 

Chapter 16. Food as Medicine

            As usual, Joseph Needham’s magisterial Science and Civilisation in China series is the place to start. Needham’s own contributions to the medical sections (Needham and Lu 1974; Needham, Ho and Lu 1976) are basic, not only at grounding the medical tradition, but at comparing it with European medicine. Needham lacked only a knowledge of the Near Eastern and Central Asian contributions, a gap that Paul Buell and I have tried to fill (Buell, Anderson and Perry 2010; Buell and Anderson 2021). Needham and his team provided a full introduction to incenses and elixirs, including the eating of poisons in the hopes of achieving immortality, an area of research vastly expanded and updated by Yan Liu in Healing with Poisons (2021).

Needham’s comparisons of China and Europe stress intellectual parallels and similarities. He saw China, Europe, and other civilizations working toward a common goal of understanding the world through science—broadly defined. Anyone who looked at the world and engaged in serious, ongoing attempts to understand it and predict reality would count. Nathan Sivin famously countered by stressing the basic, essential differences of these civiliations, and the lack of a common project.

Needham answered Nathan Sivin’s various claims that Chinese medicine is a totally separate, intellectually closed world, thus making comparisons with the west irrelevant. Time has not been kind to Sivin; Buell and I closed the circle by documenting the enormous influences from the west to China over millennia (Buell et al. 2020; Buell and Anderson 2021). Needham suspected, but did not realize, the extent of connection. The problem goes deeper than Sivin’s lack of knowledge. Sivin had a wrong-headed notion of “culture” as a closed system, a steel-walled sphere, structured so as to be impregnable. For him, Chinese medicine was a neat, consistent intellectual creation. In fact, “culture” in this sense is a scholars’ creation. Ordinary people have knowledge systems, but these are messy, constantly changing, and not necessarily internally consistent. They are dynamic. They are means of coping with the world, not philosophic creations intended to be timeless. They are thus made up of science in Needham’s sense, since ordinary people must understand reality enough to make a living, and genuinely different beliefs and principles that are distinctive, though never independent from neighboring cultures

Bernard Read’s classic studies have been drawn on for The Food of China (Anderson 1988, but I may now add “The Dragon in Chinese Medicine” (Read 1939). We need all the dragons we can get. The main medicinal use, of course, was in the form of “dragon bones,” i.e. fossils; they were a good source of calcium, and used for that was often identifiably calcium shortage.

Judith Farquhar’s classic studies of Chinese medicine included a fine essay, “Eating Chinese Medicine” (1994), which even deals with gourmet aspects of Chinese medicinal foods.

A huge study of Chinese medicinal foods was done by Ute Engelhardt and Carl-Hermann Hampen (1997), but I have not seen it. The same goes for a shorter work by Heine (1988).

            Since Pillsbury’s classic article (1978) there have been several studies of “doing the month”—recovering from childbirth. Pregnant women are at first cold for three months, then neutral, then hot,  and have to eat accordingly. Women after childbirth still stay warm and quiet and eat high-protein, high-iron foods; the custom, so valuable if restricting, has not changed as much as most traditions in this modern world. Pork liver is a favorite for this and for building blood. It works, being the richest in iron and vitamin B12 of any common food. Pigs’ feet cooked with vinegar and Chinese wine provide calcium and other minerals. Also valued are eggs—often in incredible quantities—and greens. Red foods such as red jujubes, peanuts (Chinese peanuts have red skins), and red wine are used for buillding blood, but with less excuse—they have some value, but their color is the main draw. By similar magical thinking, black foods—black jujubes, black chickens, black dog meat, Guinness Stout (called “black dog” in colloquial Chinese)—are used to build body. Their saturated color is thought to indicate their strength. Variants of “doing the month” occur widely in Eurasia, from Bangladesh to Spain and thence to the New World, so it may be a part of the Greek humoral medical tradition that shares that distribution. Some scholars have seen it as part of the repression of women common in those cultures, but the fact is that “doing the month” involved rest, warming, and diet that was necessary to the survival of mothers and infants in the old days. It now receives some support from modern medical writers—at least the milder forms involving rest and good protein-rich food, not the mother-roasting and restriction to the house. Those made sense in the old days of rampant infection, but no longer do.

            Infant feeding methods in old times were studied by B. S. Platt and S. Y. Gin (undated separate from Archives of Disease in Childhood, ca. 1938). In the 1930s, Chinese (largely Yangzi Delta people) breastfeeding was almost universal. Thirty-six families had used a wet nurse; otherwise, mothers nursed their infants, though six mothers used powdered milk (having been apparently unable to nurse) and one claimed, unbelievably, to have used only rice powder. Rice powder was used as supplement from very early. From five or six months, soft rice supplemented the milk, and from about eight months, soup, eggs, and the like. Chinese jujubes often came in at this point to promote blood and body; the jujubes do have iron and vitamin C. Mothers ate pork, dry beans, cuttlefish, chicken, shrimp, sea cucumber, Chinese wine, wheat cakes, and millet to produce more milk. They were aware of the nutritional value of silkworms, which are indeed very rich in vitamins and minerals. The pupae are a standard food after the silk is reeled from them. Interestingly, soymilk was not used for feeding babies.

            Burton Pasternak and Wang Ching did another look at this much later (Pasternak and Ching 1985). They found that mothers in urban China still breastfed their babies up to 20 months or more. China was thankfully free from ads for formula. Boys and girls got equal nursing time and amount, in spite of continuing attitudes favoring boys n most ways.

The myths die hard. I heard in Taiwan in the 1970s that certain rich and powerful individuals abstained from rice noodles, humorally dry foods (such as peanuts), etc., eating instead a good deal of easily digested, nutritious food like chicken and vegetables and fruits. They drink honey and use little oil. This enables them to enjoy many lovers, which in turn built more vigor, since they could absorb yin energy from them. They even eat ground pearls to supplement yang force.

            Of course, some plants really are nutritionally superior. In addition to the pine seeds noted above (and now threatened by overharvesting; Allen 1989), the berries and leaves of Chinese wolfthorn (Lycium chinense; go qi zi and go qi zai respectively) are so rich in vitamins and minerals that they have served as de facto vitamin pills for millennia.

            The dietary combinations (shiwu xiangfan or shiwu xiangke—“food things that mutually dominate”) so feared in Chinese tradition have received some further attention since my coverage in The Food of China; see Lo (2005). Incompatibilities between medicine and food have a different name, fuyao shiji.

            Tea is proving itself; green tea, in particular, turns out to be preventive of heart disease, and other degenerative conditions. It may help with cancer (or may not; Eisenstein 2023). This confirms the long-maligned enthusiasm of the famous Dutch “tea doctor,” Bontekoe, who was long ridiculed for insightfully making these claims in the 17^th century. This is apparently because of the catechin tannins and other bioflavinoids and polyphenols that tea contains. “White tea”—tea leaves steamed at picking and then dried, so that they retain more of their chemical compounds—is better still. It slows bacterial growth and kills fungi (Conis 2005).

            Soy sauce is, on the one hand, a superb source of vitamins and amino acids, but on the other it is high in salt. This was once necessary—there were few other sources—but today it adds to a highly salted modern diet, with bad effects for sensitive people. Tofu, on the other hand, reduces risk of heart disease (Eisenstein 2023).

Then there are other medicinal matters…. Cockroaches, boiled to treat colds and pimples, found a more subtle yet direct use in the Castle Peak Bay community where I lived for two years. When a child was “shamming sick” to get out of going to school, his or her mother would quickly brew up some cockroaches and say, “All right, here, take this.”  The usual response was, “No, no, I’m fine, I’m going to school!” 

More serious is the use of endangered species as bu pin (supplementing foods; supposedly strengthening and tonic) or other uses. Pangolins are now endangered worldwide because of the alleged, but wholly imaginary, medicinal value of their scales. The Yellow-breasted Bunting (Emberiza aureola; huangxiong wu) formerly occurred in tens of millions. It is now down to tens of thousands. Always a popular food but able to survive heavy hunting, it was first hit hard by Mao Zedong’s anti-sparrow campaign. That campaign quickly died when huge insect outbreaks followed the slaying of sparrows, buntings, and other small birds, but then the bunting came increasingly (at least since the 1990s) to be seen as a bu pin, and massacred accordingly, though it is now protected. The world population is down to a few tens of thousands, and the bird may soon be extinct (Yali Wang et al. 2019).

            Several hallucinogenic plants were known to Chinese traditional medicine, including henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), datura (Datura spp.), marijuana (Cannabis sativa), and toxic mushrooms including Amanita and a “laughing mushroom” that may have been a Panaeolus (Li 1977). These plants made people see ghosts or “devils.”  Some plants that are toxic but not really hallucinogenic were classed with them; Phytolacca and Ranunculus, for instance.

            Moving from historical research to China today (see e.g. Farquhar 1993, 1994; Kleinman et al. 1975):  A brilliant new group of experts on Chinese medicine has arisen, many forming a network based around the Needham Institute at Cambridge. Their research has focused largely on clinical treatment practice (Hsu 1999, 2001), but food cannot be neglected in any study of Chinese medicine, and they do not neglect it (see esp. Engelhardt 2001; Engelhardt and Hempen 1997).

Livia Kohn has reviewed much Daoist practice (Kohn 2005). The Newman and Halporn (2004) anthology noted above has several articles on food and medicine, including one by myself (Anderson 2004). Chinese traditionally focused on trying to maximize longevity—not a surprising concern in a country whose traditional life expectancy was in the 25-30 range. Equally unsurprising, given China’s history of famine, was the fact that they were most concerned with nutrition. Poetry reflected health beliefs; Taoist poetry is full of medical views (Cheng and Collet 1998).

            Chinese food is indeed very healthy, or once was. Ironically, much of the health value comes not from the foods believed to be good for you, but from the humble, often-despised everyday grains and greens. Studies by T. Colin Campbell and associates at Cornell University in the 1980s and 1990s showed that Chinese under traditional rural conditions had incredibly low levels of cholesterol (average 127—vs. over 200 in the contemporary USA), were lean and in good shape, and had very low rates of heart disease, many cancers, and other circulatory and degenerative ailments (Campbell and Campbell 2005; Campbell and Chen 1994; Chen et al 1990; Lang 1989). Some areas, at least, had rather high rates of cancer. Cancer incidence can increase from having too low a cholesterol level (Barbara Anderson, personal communication). But, in general, traditional Chinese food was healthful. Some “long-life villages” in south China—often Thai-speaking villages—have especially long life expectancies (as do villages in parts of southern Japan, notably Okinawa, which has the highest life expectancy in the world). The secret seems to be mountain air and water, mountain exercise, and a diet of whole or nearly-whole grains, vegetables, some fish, and little meat.

            Chinese women traditionally breastfed for a long time, sometimes three years (but usually half of that). Frequent pregnancy and long lactation, and frequent spells of malnutrition, meant that women rather rarely menstruated, which may explain Chinese beliefs about menstruation as a rather strange and dangerous state (Harrell 1981). A large number of fascinating medical beliefs about breasts, breastfeeding, and breast health went—in general—to support breastfeeding in traditional China, but some were complex medical beliefs with obscure origins (see Wu 2011).

            On the other hand, liver flukes abounded of old, thanks largely to eating raw or undercooked carp and similar fish. Opisthorchis viverrini is particularly common today. “Many still believe that the O. viverrini parasite can be killed through fermentation, preparation of raw fish with chilies or lime, or consumption with alcohol” (Ziegler et al 2011). No, and even freezing, salting and drying do not kill it. There is no solution except thorough cooking.

Today, the situation is changing, and not always for the better. Eating more meat, fat, and sugar, and less vegetables, bean curd, and unprocessed grain, has led to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes. Longevity increases with modern medicine, but heart attacks are commoner. Moreover, the Chinese government has turned away from its spectacular early successes in medical care, which more than doubled life expectancy from the 1940s to the 1980s. Health spending as a part of total government spending declined “from 28% to 14% between 1981 and 1993, allocation to the rural ‘cooperative medical-insurance system’ decreased from 20% to 2%,” while rampant corruption and price-gouging have denied care to the poor (Dong, Hoven and Rosenfeld 2005:573-574). Given the epidemics of SARS, AIDS, and COVID-19, as well as the drastic decline in healthy eating, China is in deep trouble. Problems for the future include not only obesity and diabetes, but specific deficiencies, such as anemia (chronic in China for millennia) and folic acid deficiency (an emergent danger with the decline in eating vegetables and whole grains). Folic acid deficiency is probably the major cause of birth defects round the world, and is problematic though now rather uncommon increasing in China.

This is not without effect. Xu Lin, a Chinese nutritionist who had studied under Campbell, says: “Before the 1980s, the diabetes rate in China was lower than 1%. Now it’s over 12%.” (Quoted in Ye and Leeming 2023:S14.) The rate is up to 20% in the elderly. In 1980, the disposable income of urban residents was less than 500 yuan each year (US $294 at the time). Rurual residents, who then accounted for 80% of the country’s population, each had only 190 yuan” (Ye and Leeming 2023:S14). As of 2023, disposable income is over 100 times as high. Much of it goes for meat, often fatty, and sweets. The old grain-and-vegetables diet is rare now. Heart disease and obesity have increased accordingly.

On the other hand, life expectancy continues to increase (so far), and the Chinese live almost as long as Westerners. In Taiwan, and parts of south China, they live as long as do the inhabitants of many European nations or the United States. Food and medical care continue to be reasonably adequate, and the scale of differences from two generations ago are almost unparalleled in world history. However, public health care is declining seriously in rural areas (Arif Dirlik, talk of May 26, 2005, UCR), threatening the future.

            Meanwhile, Chinese medicinal food has spread to the western world, not only via books but also via such restaurants as the TT Chinese Imperial Cuisine of San Gabriel, CA—a restaurant serving medicinal foods to the local Chinese community. In China itself, restaurants serving yaoshan—“medical dining,” traditional medicinal dishes—have been growing in number and elaborateness since their beginning around 1980 in Sichuan. They use variously-updated recipes from the medical-nutrition classics.

            And the Chinese were right about one thing: there are five tastes, not four. To the west’s classic four tastes—salt, sweet, sour, and bitter—they added a fifth, shan, “meaty.” A Japanese researcher in the early 20^th century confirmed this, finding that the human tongue has receptors for glutamate, giving us the taste known in Japanese (and now in English) as umami. This gives the spark to MSG and many Asian ferments. And to end this ms with a correction: In 1988 I reported that MSG could cause flushing and discomfort, the “Chinese restaurant syndrome.”  This seems to be a rare allergy, not a normal event; the syndrome was usually psychosomatic. It was depessingly hyped by racist attitudes.

            Chinese medicinal cooking is a fine art in its own right. Medicinal food restaurants, usually specializing in bu pin, now abound. The Nature Pagoda in San Gabriel, a small café, has been enduring since 1997, serving herbal soups and nutraceutical sand pots (clay pots) and desserts, as well as more ordinary snacks. Soups generally pair a medicinal herb like ginseng with such bu pin staples as “old chicken” (advertised as such), dried scallops, duck, pig’s tail, black chicken, and even ox penis. The base is usually broth from those old chickens. (Older ones are more strong and vigorous, so more bu.) One adds chingbuliang—“cleansing, strengthening, and cooling,” chingpouleung in Cantonese—herbs to the chicken. The mix is a classic Cantonese cooling herbal soup. The clay pots have the same basic meats, plus salted fish of various kinds, ground pork, and a bed of white rice. The food is clear, simple, refined, and very mild in flavor, as is typical of such medicinal restaurants.

            Healing Herbal Soups, by Rose Cheung and Genevieve Wong, is a wonderful introduction to Cantonese folk medicine. The authors explain hot, cold, damp (wet), and dry, the values of bu pin (pou pan in Cantonese) and chingpouleung soup, the many virtues of “monk gourd” (their name for lohan guo), and all the virtues of the many excellent herbal soup recipes they provide. Many of these include pork and other good foods; one avoids the herbs but eats the regular foodstuffs. They are aware of the virtues of goji berries, the need for warming and restorative soups after childbirth, and the alleged wonders of ginseng. They recycle the classic Cantonese belief that male poultry are “poison,” i.e. bring out poisons in the system. They also advise not using the head and neck of poultry, and of seeking out black chickens (which are for sale in Chinese markets in southern California). They have a great deal of information on the seasons; each season has its special herbal soups. They also have a quite amazing guide to what activity and rest to do in each two-hour period of the day, starting, as Chinese days do, at 11:00 p.m. Each Chinese hour (two western hours) has its particular organ associated, and particular levels of rest or activity to keep it healthy. The advice is excellent, though of course the organs do not really change suddenly when the clock strikes the hour; it is a gradual shift with much overlapping and slow change. Their Cantonese folk medical advice and basic Chinese herbal and medical lore all seem perfectly traditional. They also provide what they can of international biomedical findings, but here they are a bit spacy—not always able to separate Chinese claims from proven facts. A very minor problem with a wonderful book.

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Appendix: Korean food, mainly what is not covered in Crossroads of Cuisine

            The definitive book on Korean food, so far, is Michael Pettid’s Korean Cuisine (2008). I draw on it heavily below.

            Korean is related to the Tungus languages, and almost certainly to Japanese, though the split from that language was very ancient. Resemblances are confused by countless loanwords going back and forth. Korean has also borrowed heavily from Chinese, but is not even remotely related to it.

It should be noted that there are two transcription systems of Korean script into English. The older McCune-Reischauer system more accurately represents the sounds of the language, but the new Korean national system has taken over, following Korean diaspora around the world. Many terms below will be given in both systems, the older one recognizable by using p, t, k for the stop consonants that become b, d, g in the new system (and ch becomes j). I try to give the commoner form and then the other one, but tend to prefer the older, since it represents the actual spoken sounds better.

The Korean script is the only phonemically and phonetically precise script in ordinary use anywhere in the world. It was based rather freely on the Phagspa script, invented by the Tibetan monk Phagspa for the Mongols. It was invented in the time of King Sejong (1397-1450), and refined since. According to tradition, it is based on the three layers of the Confucian cosmos, Heaven above, Humans in the middle, and Earth below. It is also said to be based on the shapes of the mouth as it enunciates (Lee and Ramsey 2011). One must use some imagination to see this in the neat, geometric forms of the script, but they are perfectly set up by modern phonemic standards. The Koreans had previously used Chinese characters, transliterating their own language, and Chinese continued to supply most of the substantive words until modern times.

            Agriculture has been traced back to 4800 BCE. It is surely older. Early Neolithic chŭlmun pottery dates back to 6000 BCE, and probably went with agriculture (Seth 2011:11). A cruder pottery is even earlier, but was used to cook sea food, and is not associated with agriculture (Shoda et al. 2017). Broomcorn and foxtail millets both appear from then on. The Eurasia-wide (and probably worldwide) cold and dry period around 4000-4200 years ago shows up clearly (Park et al. 2021). Barley and wheat appear about 2000 BCE, the same time they reached northern China. Adzuki beans go from wild to tame from that period onward. Barnyard millet is a late arrival. Perilla may be cultivated very early, and certainly is known by the Mumun period after 1000 BCE. Wet rice and soybeans are found in Mumun and may be earlier (Crawford and Lee 2003). Archaeologists turned up beaver bones in Pleistocene Korea, though beaver don’t occur in E Asia now.

Rice increased from 1500 to 600 BCE, the grains changing from small and narrow to big and plump. New rice varieties came in. The ancient semilunar havesting knife was replaced by iron sickles (M. Kim et al. 2013). This allowed rapid harvest but making it more difficult to select special head for seed and ritual. Settlements grew and nucleated, apparently producing conflict, but conflict waned after 200 BCE, as cooperation was needed to produce rice paddies and other irrigation works (M. Kim et al. 2019). Another dry period seems to have occurred around 800-300 BCE, possibly explaining this (Park et al. 2021). Early kingdoms in Korea show more genetic relationships with Japan than we find today (University of Vienna 2022).

In the Koryŏ (Goryeo) Dynasty (918-1392, Korean food became sophisticated. One Xu Jing traveled from China to Korea in the early 12^th century, and found the Koreans surprisingly civilized for “eastern barbarians,” eating food that was simple but decently served by Chinese standards (Vermeesch 2016). Tea culture flourished, and was related to the magnificent Koryŏ celadon ceramics, which have been called the most beautiful ceramics ever made in the world. Their pale green color sets off tea perfectly. They were made partly with this in mind.

Rice became less rare at this time. Rice cakes became important food, in many varieties. Vegetables at the time included: “Radish, turnips, lotus roots, taro, leeks, dropwort, lettuce, hooyhock [mallows, Malva parvifolia complex], green onions, water shields [Brasenia], garlic, shallots, cucumbers, and eggplants” (Yun1993:10). Kimchi and relatives already existed. So did sullongt’ang, bone and tripe soup, still popular.

In the following Chosŏn (Joseong) period, the New World crops came to Korea, providing a desperately needed relief from crowding on a mountainous and often infertile peninsula. Squash, white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and most important of all, the chile pepper, came over time, white potatoes possibly not until after 1800; sweet potatoes had been there since 1753, supposedly introduced from Japan by one Cho’ŏm (Yun 1993:11), though I am sure they were there long before (as they certainly were in China).

Korean food is as dependent on grain staples as other East Asian foods. Rice was traditionally the prestige starch, but was a luxury everywhere, the more so as one went north from subtropical Jeju Island to the subarctic cold of the northern mountains. Usually, people depended on barley, millets, and buckwheat, in various combinations. These often became noodles. Lacking gluten, they were variously prepared; I assume they were often forced through a sieve into boiling water, as in China.

A long passage from around 1500, quoted by Pettid (2008:27), describes an elite meal of the time, with fresh herbs, boiled vegetables, kimchi and the like, rice, soup, soy sauce, broiled fish or meat, and trimmings. Ordinary people made do with some sort of boiled grain and some soup or vegetables. A royal banquet could typically run around 30 courses, counting pickles and sauces, as well as several drinks (Pettid 2008:135-136 lists the whole array).

            Rice is pap (or bap). As elsewhere in eastern Asia, this term—focally denoting cooked rice—can mean a grain staple, or a meal, or food in general, by extension. Sticky rice—short-grain japonica—is preferred. Its stickiness is exploited in the countless rice cakes (ttŏk), made of rice flour either mixed with other flours (such as chestnut or mugwort) or made into wrappings around stuffings of the same and other ingredients. Rice cakes with mugwort are a traditional spring delight. Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) is bitter in a refreshing way, It is also slightly poisonous in heavy doses, and used to kill worms, repel insect pests, and clean up possibly septic situations, so its use as food has some medicinal value. The Chusŏk festival, East Asian New  Year’s Day (around early February), particularly features rice cakes, including the mugwort ones, as well as other rice dishes and special foods.

            Congee—rice gruel—is chuk (juk). It is not only a common everyday food, but it takes on special forms, often medicinal (bonjuk). A vast range of medicinal foods and herbs find their way into these. Abalone congee was an Imperial delicacy.

Food to accompany the grain staple has its own special word, as elsewhere. Side dishes with a meal are served in small separate plates and known as banchan (panch’an). Originally this meant anything eaten with rice (like sung in Cantonese), but now it applies solely to these side dishes. Traditionally, only the Emperor and his family could have an even number of these. Today, anyone qualifies.

A meal is bapsang (bap for rice of course), soup kuk (guk). Jang is the more traditional term for the salted side dishes that now are just banchan. Chopped spices and herbs as banchan are yangnyom. A main meal will have about seven of these—less for a minor occasion, more for a feast. One restaurant in Los Angeles, famous for its banchan, provides 18 small dishes for a single individual’s light lunch. The inevitable kimchi is supplemented with boiled vegetables, dressed greens, mushrooms, sea food, a+nd various pickles and spicy preparations.

A standard breakfast or lunch dish is pipim pap (bibimbap), cooked rice with various toppings including kimchi or the like and an egg. It is very well known to travelers on Korean Airways, as their standard breakfast option.

Meat was a luxury in the old days, but was consumed in large quantities when available, and today Korean food is meat-heavy. Do-it-yourself barbecue on metal cones over a live fire is overwhelmingly popular, and has gone worldwide. Pulkogi (bulgogi) is particularly famous, but short ribs, pork belly, and other delights certainly rival it in taste. The meat is marinated in highly spiced mixes. Hot pot, noodle dishes, and various dumplings are also extremely popular. The dumplings betray Central Asian origin by their Turkic name, mantu (mandu).

Korea being a peninsula with many islands, sea food is abundant and popular. Almost anything marine is eaten, up to and including stew of pollack guts, an acquired taste. Squid cookery is notably diverse and outstanding.

Blood sausage (sundae) is popular. Sohui Kim, in a beautiful photo-cookbook with fine recipes (S. Kim 2018:176), tells you how to make it, a long process that will probably remain confined to Korean experts. She also provides instruction on making your own Spam (pp. 188-189). Like Hawaiians, Koreans leaned to love Spam in the hard times during and after WWII, and again during the Korean War. The dwindling number of us who remember the US home front in WWII have distinctly less loving memories of that item, and are always amused to see how choice it is in Hawaii and Korea. Nostalgia extends to pudae chigae, “military-camp stew,” a stew including Spam and hot dogs—items available from US military installations during and after the Korean War.

            Korean food depends heavily on fermentation. Kinchi, pickled Chinese cabbage with chiles, is the most famous (the following information on it comes from Surya and Lee 2022; Surya and Nugroho 2023). It involves Lactobacillus fermentation, heavy salting being used to prevent spoilage. Kimjang is the process of making it, specifically the huge fall rush. It is most often made from baechu, white cabbage. Sea food in kimchi or chile sauce is jeotgal (chotkal). The sea food may be fermented as well as the sauces (Pettid 2008:93). There is a whole philosophy around kimchi and the making of it.

            At least 95% of South Koreans eat kimchi more than once a day, often at all meals. Two million tons are consumed annually, working out to ½ to 1 cup per person per day, 1/3 of their vegetable intake. It can have some vitamin C, though pickling usually destroys this. Meat/fish and fish sauce in it appear only since Choson, and nappa cabbage only got to Korea then too, around the 16^th century, like chiles. Soy sauce ferments came in Choson, were popular, have pretty much died out. A 1760 cookbook already has many recipes, plus 61 kinds of jiu (Cho 2020). In 2021 a Chinese pair of characters was invented for it, pron xinqi.

Kkakdugi is kinchi with white radish, chonggak includes the variety called ponytail radish, yeolmu (yŏlmu)is the product from fresh young summer radish. Tongbaechu uses whole cabbages (mak is the usual cut-up one), yangbaechu green cabbages. Pa is made with green onions, gat with mustard leaves, buchu with garlic chives, kkaenip with perilla leaves. Green pepper and cucumber stuffed with chopped carrot and chives make gochu sobagi and oi sobagi. Dongchimi and nabak use more mul—water, brine.

Sohui Kim has a thorough and well-photographed guide to making standard and variant kimchis (pp. 110-129). One is perilla-leaf kimchi, kketnip kimchi; perilla is indeed related to catnip, but the word resemblance seems accidental. (The perilla plant, Perilla frutescens, is deulkkae; the leaf is kketnip or khaennip. It is shiso in Japanese. It is often mistranslated as sesame in Korean and Japanese menus and other sources, apparently because of vague similarity of the seeds; the plants are not related.) The journal Koreana in 2008 had an entire issue on kimchi, including an article extolling it as a miraculous cure for ailments (Young 2008).

Kimchi is often used in stew, kimchi jjigae. Kimchi in pancakes gives us kimchi buchimgae. Kimchi soup is simply named kimchi guk, guk meaningsoup  Kimchi fried rice is kimchi bokkeumbap. Gochugaru, red chile powder, generally gets into kimchi. Over 16 bacteria species, plus yeasts etc., are involved, including Lactobacillus kimchii and Weisella kimchii. Even Leuconostoc and Candida get into it. There is even a philosophy of kimchi, which includes the usual East Asian ideas of yin and yang, the five elements, balance and harmony, beauty, filial piety, and patience. In short: Bogi joeun tteogi meokgido jota, “what looks good tastes good” (Surya and Lee 2022).

            Soy sauce is kanjang, red pepper sauce is koch’ujang, the familiar gochujang of Korean restaurants and markets. A fermented soy paste is toenjang (Pettid 2008:35).

More complex is jang (different from the word for a meal), the Korean form of the Chinese word jiang and the item it describes: fermented soybean paste. Not only Lactobacillus, but a large number of other bacteria, as well as yeasts and other fungi, go into the various forms of jang. The beans are steamed, dried, and then fermented in brine. Ground with chiles, they become gochujang, the famous Korean sauce for many purposes. It has a strong soy paste flavor as well as varying but often high levels of capsaicin “heat.”

            Pickles, generally Lactobacillus ferments, often with other agents, accompany, or used to accompany, every Korean meal. They still appear at every major occasion among the banchan.

            Dependence on pickles for vegetables during the harsh Korean winters was associated with high rates of stroke (cerebrovascular accident); Korea long led the world in this cause of death. Cold storage and good transportation reduced the need for pickles, and the stroke rate has rapidly and steadily dropped.

All the above pickles require incredible amounts of chile peppers. Korea must be far ahead of Mexico in chile consumption per capita. Chiles are first noted in 1614 (Pettid 2008:45), but were surely there before then. They probably came with the Portuguese, possibly via Japan, about the time of the Imjin wars, Japan’s attempted conquest of Korea around 1592. The Korean word for chile is gochu, but that term is found in older texts. so must have been used for some other plant.

            Maangchi (Emily Kwang-Sook Kim) provides another wonderfully illustrated and extremely useful photo-cookbook, Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking, with Martha Rose Shulman (2019). Among many other things, she gives directions for dosirak, the Korean version of the Japanese bentō. The bento is an elaborately planned and packed lunchbox. Japanese mothers try to outdo each other, or more often imitate an impossible standard of perfection, in packing these boxes for their children, to the point at which bento have become gourmet items in high-priced and thoroughly adult restaurants. The dosirak has yet to achieve such fame, but may soon. More nostalgia for the old days (besides Spam) is shown in the fish-soy-starch sausages of the poverty days, as “Good Memories Sausage” (Maangchi 2019:274).

            Chapch’ae (japchae) is a mixed stir-fry, of fairly obvious ancestry: chapchai is the name of the same dish in Hokkien. Many other Chinese foods have been borrowed over the years (Pettid 2008:172-173). One is chajang-myŏn, which will recall the superb jajiang mian of China, but I have experience it, alas, as a dismal cook-up of noodles and black beans.

            The national distilled drink is soju, monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021). It is a low-alcohol vodka, made from grains and distilled fairly gently, and often diluted, so its alcohol content is usually closer to 20% than true vodka’s 40%. It has gone worldwide, its popularity spreading outward from Korean restaurants. The best forms have the advantage of a pleasant grain taste along with lower alcohol than hard liquor. Samsu (from Chinese sanshu, “triple-distilled”) is stronger, more directly comparable to vodka, and is often made from sweet potatoes instead of grain. A drink whose popularity is still largely confined to Koreans is makkolli (makgeolli), a mild rice beer, carbonated and wonderfully flavorful. It is the perfect soothing and cooling accompaniment to Korean food fiery with chiles. I expect a boom in its popularity soon.

I actually much prefer makkŏli (makgeolli)—Korean rice beer. It is like southeast Asian tapai, and is somewhat carbonated. It is sometimes made with chestnut flour in addition to rice; this is sambam makgeolli; it has a sweet nutlike yeasty flavor. Kook Soon Dong is a good brand for the regular cloudy sort. Makgeolli was the ordinary drink of the old days, easily brewed at home in a few days or even hours. Sikhye was similar (Pettid 2008:126-127); lightly fermented, it was enjoyed cold in summer as a cooling drink.

Filtered, it becomes yakju, which is distilled to produce soju. The ferment starter is nuruk. Makkŏli is often served with jeon, mungbean or similar pancakes. Makkŏli is often made from wheat these days, because of a ban on rice in a hungry period some decades ago, but rice is coming back now (Swanson 2019).

Grape and flavored wines existed in Koryŏ times (Koreana 1993:10).

Korean for Chinese jiu is suk. Sake is also used, sometimes pronounced hake. A whole panoply of flavored, scented, fruit-infused, and otherwise modified ales (ch’ongju, or yakchu “medicinal wine”) is described by Pettid (2008:116-117). He calls them “wines.” They are clear and fairly strong, and are elite drinks, thus corresponding socially to wines in Europe. Pettid quotes or cites several poems to these various drinks.

Tea was a luxury. Ordinary people drank, and almost everyone still seems to love, barley tea (pori ch’a; note the Chinese loanword for tea). It is indeed refreshing, especially cold in summer, with a delightful grain taste. This delicate, otherwise hard to describe taste is typical of koso hada, subtle flavor (Pettid 2008:127).

            Some discoveries in the Korean markets of Los Angeles, plus a few from the literature:

Changatchi, pickles in soy preparations

Dotori-muk (tot’ori muk): acorn jelly. Muk means jelly and usually implies this (Wikipedia). It is a solid cake, with a texture like rice cakes. It lacks the bitterness of Indigenous California acorn mush, and is not grainy and soft like that commodity. It is made from acorns soaked to remove tannin, ground, then heated with water to make jelly, which is sliced and served with seasonings (Pettid 2008:106 and my observations).

Durup: an herb, crisp but chewy, very good with garlic.

Hoe, seasoned raw fish or meat

Kuksu or myŏn, noodles; the latter term is from Chinese mian.

Mandu are like little meat pies, a lot fatter and thicker-shelled than jiaozi. They can be filled with chopped meat, kimchi, etc.

Nabak kimchi: very watery and chile-rich. Sohui Kim provides instructions.

Namul, cooked vegetables, usually dressed with sharp or hot dressing of some sort

Omija are goji berries, “five flavor,” because they have sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and spicy notes (Maangchi 2019:384).

Pat, beans; used in kimchi.

Pŏndegi are silkworm pupae (Pettid 2008:173).

P’o, jerky or dried fish

Saengch’ae, salad; Chinese xing cai, fresh vegetables

Ssam pap (bap): rice and chopped meat in sauce wrapped in leaves. Lettuce, and various forms of Chinese cabbage, including the ferny mizuna of Japan, are standard. Herbs can be added.

Tchigae (jjigae): stew

Tul kirum is perilla oil, from perilla seeds (Pettid 2008:45).

Yukpap, sweet rice.

Korean royal food was saved from oblivion by finding one old woman who had in youth worked for the royal court (abolished in 1910 or so). It is super refined but not weird stuff. E.g. red beans each one hand-peeled.

Jeju Island is Korea’s deep south, roughly parallel with South Carolina. It thus could produce abundant rice even in the old days, before cold-tolerant varieties were developed, making the rest of South Korea more productive of that grain. A large number of other crops were grown. Sweet potatoes were very important. Native plants were heavily used. It is now a major tourist destination. There is still considerable agriculture, a huge expansion at the expense of woodland and grass, but it is mostly commercial, often to grow foods for the tourists. Local small farming and homegardens are rapidly disappearing, as local people turn to urban economies. Old people keep the gardens up, very often transplanting wild food and medicinal plants into them from the wild (Hong and Zimmerman 2022).

As elsewhere, traditional foods accompany life cycle rituals. Taesun Park (1993) provides a detailed account. Birth, and many milestone days after it up to the first birthday, are celebrated with several foods. Rice cakes are featured. Coming of age, in late teens, was recognized with “wine,” meat, noodles, and the like. Marriage was far more elaborate, with a long series of ceremonies involving food and alcohol. Funerals and memorial services offered food to ancestors.

            As in China, dietetics—the whole traditional science of using food as the first line of medicine—is well established. A great deal of it does indeed come from China, but Korea has plenty of its own herbs, and may have taught the Chinese the virtues of ginseng. Sikchi is the term of art (Ko 2023). The infamous dog meat, now finally banned in South Korea (though possibly not with total enforcement), was used in China to provide warmth in winter. It is a rich, gamey, fatty meat well adapted for the purpose. However, in Korea, it is eaten in summer, heat controlling heat; similarly, cold or cooling foods are eaten in winter (Pettid 2008:85-86).

Cho, Hae Jung. 2020. Talk on kimchi to Culinary Historians of Southern California.

Crawford, Gary W., and Gyoung-Ah Lee. 2003. “Agricultural Origins in the Korean Peninsula.”  Antiquity. Pp. 87-95.

Hong, Yooinn, and Karl S. Zimmerer. 2022. “Useful Plants from the Wild to Home Gardens: An Analysis of Home Garden Ethnobotany in Contexts of Habitat Conversion and Land Usse Change in Jeju, South Korea.” Jouirnal of Ethnobiology 42:261-281.

Kim, Minkoo; Sung-Mo Ahn; Youjin Jeong. 2013. “Rice (Oryza sativa L.): Seed-Size Comparison and Cultivation in Ancient Korea.”  Economic Botany 67:378-386.

1500-600 BCE, grains from small and narrow to big and plump. New rices came in. Semilunar knife (thus gradual harvest) replaced by iron sickle (thus all at once).

Kim, Minkoo, et al. 2019. “The Tethering Landscape: Dispersion and Nucleation in Early Agricultural Communities in Southwestern Korea.”  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 53:174-185.

Kim, Sohui, with Rachel Wharton; photography by Zach and Buz. 2018. Korean Home Cooking. New York: Abrams.

Ko, Byoung-Seob. 2023. “The Sikchi and the Recorded Cases of Seongjeongwonilgi.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 10, article 8.

Lee Ki-Moon and S. Robert Ramsey. 2011. A History of the Korean Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maangchi with Martha Rose Shulman. 2019. Maangchi’s Big Book of Korean Cooking: From Everyday Meals to Celebration Cuisine. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Park, Hyunhee. 2021. Soju: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Park, Jinheum, et al. 2021. “Holocene Hydroclimate Reconstruction Based on Pollen, XRF, and Grain-Size Analysis and Its Implications for Past Societies of the Korean Peninsula.”  The Holocene 31:1489-1500.

Park Tae-soon. 1993. “Life’s Milestones: Ceremonies and Food.” Koreana, autumn, pp. 28-35.

Pettid, Michael J. 2008. Korean Cuisine, an Illustrated History. London: Reaktion Books.

Pratt, Keith, and Richard Rutt. 1999. Korea: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary. Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon.

Seth, Michael J. 2011. A History of Korea, from Antiquity to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Shoda, Shinya, et al. 2017. “Pottery Use by Early Hunter-Gatherers of the Korean Peninsula Closely Linked with the Exploitation of Marine Resources.”  Quarternary Science Reviews 170:164-173.

Surya, Reggie, and Ann Ga-Yeon Lee. 2022. “Exploring the Philosophical Values of Kimchi and Kimjang Culture.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 9, 20.

Surya, Reggie, and David Nugroho. 2023. “Kimchi throughout Millennia: A Narrative Review on the Early and Modern History of Kimchi.” Journal of Ethnic Foods 10, article 5.

Swanson, Susan. 2019. “The Secret History of Makgeolli.”  Los Angeles Times, May 1, https://www.latimes.com/food/la-fo-homemade-makgeolli-korean-alcohol-20190501-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1A9DYj0ZK7GYrpFh0cyH7YqgtBc_ZhwME9HypXPq_2yDicRx4Gl9e6fiM

University of Vienna. 2022. “1,700-year-old Korean Genomes Show Genetic Heterogeneity in Three Kingdoms Period Gaya.” Press release online, June 21, 1,700-year-old Korean genomes show genetic heterogeneity in Three Kingdoms period Gaya (phys.org).

Vermeersch, Sem. 2016. A Chinese Treaveler in Medieval Korea: Xu Jing’s Illustrated Account of the Xuanhe Embassy to Koryŏ. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press and Korean Classical Library.

Young, Park Kun. 2008. “Kimchi, Ideal Health Food for a Well-being Lifestyle,” Koreana, winter, pp. 12-15.

Yun Seo-Seok. 1993. “History of Korean Dietary Culture.” Koreana, autumn, pp. 6-11.

MANY AND VARIED WORLDS OF FOOD

E. N. Anderson

www.krazykioti.com

gene@ucr.edu

This post consists of material left out of my various books on food because I haven’t had time or energy to pursue the topics enough. It consists of various reading notes and odd observations. They could be useful to food experts and researchers, so here they are. Many of them concern the early history and prehistory of foods in various regions of the world.

Note that China is covered separately in the post “China Food Updates” on my website.

Contents

PART I. SPECIAL TOPICS

Early Human Food

Good Farmers

Gut Microbiota

Fermentation

Fad Diets

PART II. FOOD AND FOOD REGIONS

Near East

Europe

Africa

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia

Oceania

Central America and Mexico

South America

North America

PART I. SPECIAL TOPICS

Early Human Food

Modern human hunter-gatherers eat least meat in vegetation-rich, game-sparse areas like many brushlands. They eat the most meat and fish in the Arctic and near-Arctic, where the scanty vegetation is mostly indigestible to humans. Our insulin metabolism, stomach acid balance, and other metabolic signs show long adaptation to meat (Ben-Dor, Sirtoli and Barkai 2021).

We may be able to recapture some of the prehistoric experience. Vow, a company in Australia, has now made meatballs by using frozen woolly mammoth DNA to grow lab meat, and another company has made gummy bears with gelatin similarly derived from a mastodon (Chandler-Wilde 2023).

Early prehumans in East Africa ate a great deal of grass, as well as other vegetation (Uno et al. 2016). Australopithecus suffered from seasonal food shortages (Johannes-Boyau et al. 2019). Tooth wear shows that that genus and the closely related Paranthropus ate a varied diet, with both C4 (largely grasses) and C3 (other plants).

Hunter-gatherers are also rather casual in defense of territory. Their groups have fluid boundaries. Rich resources (often those exploited by women) and, above all, stored resources are staunchly defended (Codding et al., and following articles, 2019), but the typical hunting-gathering group wanders over a vast area, most of it little used, and this area is generally open.

They also share game, often according to complex patterns, which keeps men hunting even when they do not appear to need it (Gurven and Hill 2009). Many modern hunter people are devoted to the chase in spite of being wage-earners in modern enterprises (Ready and Power 2018). Even in rural white America, much hunting is for such social reasons. Game gives prestige, can be traded, and above all can be shared widely, maintaining personal networks.

The Hadza of Tanzania still hunt and gather, though they are rapidly losing their land to encroaching farmers and herders. Big game was once brought down once a month by an average group, but now people are lucky to get one in a year. When they were hunting, the men would devour the best meat in the field, and bring back what was left (if any); they also foraged honey and ate most of that when found. Women and children provisioned themselves, eating berries and root foods, small animals, some honey, and anything else available. Men used meat to consolidate reputations, and to make sure they could thus maintain a household, but they shared meat with each other or the whole group, not with their families. Grandmothers were critical to child and group life, helping mothers to get enough to raise the children (O’Connell, Hawkes and Blurton Jones 2025). Survival long beyond menopause was probably necessary for humans—the famous “grandmother hypothesis” of Kristen Hawkes. It has stood the test of time and a good deal of challenge.

Related to this is the idea of cultural keystone species. Oaks were critical in the life of Californian peoples (K. Anderson 2005), salmon in the Northwest Coast, wild roots in the interior Northwest. These were ritually and ceremonially marked as well as providing staple foods. They were not always dominant in nature, and often were not even the most important food; they were simply species that mattered a great deal (Coe and Gaoue 2020).

Like hunting, gardening and simple agriculture are socially embedded. Crops are shared in neighborhoods and even in much wider linkups. Most of us in the modern world live, or at least have relatives living, on a bit of land that can produce food, and we network constantly with it. This leads, thoughtfully, to considerations of what gives “value.” For Marx, it was labor invested (though he was aware that labor invested in fertile soil produces more than labor invested in rocks). For David Graeber, however, value “appers when individual acts become socially meaningful”; gardens are dynamic loci of value creation, resistance, identity, and action (Peña et al.2017:43ff).

Eventually, intensive agriculture can lead to states, when extremely fertile soil, productive agriculture, and large open areas without defensible space force people to band together under a war leader and eventually under a king. Hobbes (1657) was right that conflict leads to kings, but was wrong about “savages” (he meant hunter-gatherers) feeling the need; it happened in the most productive but open agricultural areas.

Good Farmers

            Traditional small-scale agricultural people and societies have a mixed, but generally good, record as efficient, resourceful, clever, successful farmers. They tend to practice mixed farming, and to leave wild breaks that harbor predators. They favor intercropping, which is generally a good idea (X. Li et al. 2021), though there are, of course, exceptions.

Consider shifting cultivation: cutting down and burning a small section of forest, farming the resulting ash-enriched opening, then abandoning it after a few years and letting it grow back to forest. This can be done with extreme care and expertise: leaving valuable trees, cutting firebreaks to prevent fire escape, reforesting with nitrogen-fixing or fruit-bearing trees, planting mixed and productive crops, and otherwise managing the enterprise with care. Or it can be simply burn-plant-leave. I have seen both. The Maya of Yucatan represent the highest ideal (Anderson 2005), but the minimalist form is also known in the world. The same goes for every type of cultivation.

            The near-universal tendency of European and American scholars and scientists before the 1950s was to write off traditional small-scale agriculture as backward, unproductive, and even “primitive.” This attitude began to change in the early 20^th century, but awaited major works to disprove it.

The first to succeed at this were two studies: Harold Conklin’s Hanunoo Agriculture (1957) and J. E. Spencer’s Shifting Cultivation in Southeast Asia (1966). Shortly after this, Gary Klee edited World Systems of Traditional Resource Management (1980), which finally put traditional cultivation on a serious footing in international scholarship. This was followed by many works on local systems, such as Gene Wilken’s Good Farmers (1987) on Mexican and Central American best practices, and by Robert Netting’s superb Balancing on an Alp (1981)and Smallholders, Householders (1993) which demonstrated in great detail the virtues of small mixed farming, whether in the Philippine outback or in the center of Europe. By this time, thoughtful agronomists realized that the traditional farmers knew a thing or two. Excellent books drawing on traditional practices applied to modern farming began to appear, such as David Cleveland’s Balancing on a Planet (2014; note that his title refers back to Netting’s book; Cleveland and the present author were friends with Bob Netting, who died sadly young).

A major breakthrough was the development of permaculture (Holmgren 2002, 2012; Mollison 1988, 1997). This system was developed largely from the best practices of southeast Chinese and Southeast Asian cultivators. It used a very wide range of plants and animals, an extremely efficient use of water and nutrients, and a nearly closed system such that these inputs are re-used and recycled constantly. It is modernized by use of machinery and chemicals, but these are kept to a minimum.

            Meanwhile, theories arose on farming and subsistence. Thomas Malthus (1960 [1798]) famously argued that food production increased linearly, while population increased exponentially, until lack of food led to starvation, war, and epidemics. This is true enough of some natural populations, limited by such “density-dependent factors.” It did not have much to do with humans, who can always invent a new dodge or domesticate a new crop, and can also figure out how to limit populations without violence. Malthus began to acknowledge this is the later editions of his work, but the crude and merciless theory had gone ahead of him. An irony was that he was writing just as the “agricultural revolution” took off in his native England, eventually leading to the present world of plentiful food. A billion people are going hungry right now, but the world food system wastes 30-40% of the food produced, so minimal civil responsibility would eliminate hunger and waste in one swoop. Food-short Nigeria wastes by far the most, over 3500 tons. India, also seriously troubled with hunger, comes next with 2500, then the United States with 2000. Brazil follows with 1000, Russia ca 800. Related are greenhouse gas emissions: Meat and animal products are by far the worst source—130 kg of CO2 emissions per kg of food. Roots and oil crops produce about 38, cereals and pulses only 10-15, fruits and veg about 3 or 4 (Padmanaban 2023).

            An extreme counter was Ester Boserup’s claim that “population pressure” would force people to work ever harder, raising food production at the price of exploitation, often self-exploitation. This theory is at least as dismal as Malthus’. Fortunately it is equally wrong. People are as good at inventing labor-saving devices as they are at developing new crops and farming techniques.

The gluten in bread wheat is particularly abundant and sticky, allowing us to make good leavened bread that rises with appropriate fluffiness; the sticky gluten traps the bubbles of CO₂ gas released by the metabolism of the yeast or sourdough ferments used for leavening. The wild wheats emmer and einkorn do not have much gluten; it was bred into wheat when some village women in what is now Azerbaijan observed that some odd wheats from the edges of their fields produced an extremely superior bread. The wheats had been hybridiziing with a local grass, a subspecies of Aegilops squarrosus, that has ideal gluten for baking. The result, hexaploid bread wheat, has revolutionized the world. It is now the commonest and most widespread domestic plant, the staple food of billions, and the basis of a fantastically elaborate and complex baking culture worldwide. We owe a very great deal to those Azerbaijani women, and we have no idea of their names or ethnicities. Never was Ecclesiastes’ passage about unknown but great people more appropriate.

Orchids and Ericaceae have their own very specific species and genera. Ectomycorrhizae dwell on pines, oaks, myrtles (including Eucalyptuses, which are in the myrtle family), Caesalpiniae (paloverdes and pride-of-Mexico). Endomycorrhizae are also widespread. Only a few plant groups, including the mustard family, amaranths, chenopods, sedges, pinks, and docks (Rumex, Polygonum) lack them. These plants must therefore find highly fertile soils. But if they do, they can flourish exceedingly, since they do not have to transfer resources to the mycorrhizae. They have thus become common weeds in gardens and in uplands fertilized by nitrogen in car exhaust and other air pollution.

Gut Microbiota

            Gut microbiota turn out to have major effects on eating and metabolism. They profoundly affect digestion. Ours evolved along with us, so are as close to those of chimpanzees and gorillas as we ourselves are to those apes (Moeller et al. 2016).

Those in the lower gut even digest some cellulose and other long-chain molecules unavailable to us otherwise (Gentile and Weir 2018). Some encourage their host humans to eat more. Some signal pleasure in consumption of fat, others delight in sugars, amino acids, and food in general; thus the gut biota greatly influence consumption (Li et al. 2022). Many, many, are known to be there and to interact with us and with each other, but we do not know how or why; probes demonstrate an incredible wealth of little-known interactions (Sonnenburg and Bäckhed 2016; Sonert et al. 2024).

We once had many more cellulose-digesting micros, but domestication and then industrialization have led to a steadily declining number of species and individuals; at least we have gotten some new ones from domestic livestock (Morais et al. 2024).

Some affect the circadian rhythm cycle. Some may even make us exercise more. Mice with certain microbiota (species unclear) exercise five times as much as ordinary mice, and inoculating germ-free mice with exercise-prone mouse microbiota make the (previously) germ-free ones exercise vigorously (Pennisi 2022).

Related to this is the fact that the gut’s nerves connect directly to the brain, telling it the state of nutrition and digestion, and what the gut microbiota are up to (Kaelberer et al. 2018). We literally think with our intestines. They order the brain around. They have the same neurochemical signallers we do—GABA, serotonin, dopamine, etc.—and that hits the vagus nerve. Mice with cut vagus gut nerves do not get the effects (Sanders 2016). Thus, the gut microbiota have a significant share in our thoughts, a fact that should be of interest to philosophers.

            Gut microbiota are profoundly influenced by lifestyle and food. Aashish Jha and colleagues (2018) found that in groups that shifted from hunting-gathering to agriculture in recent centuries, the gut flora tracks the shift. Those that are still basically hunter-gatherers have a distinctive flora, totally lost by those settled for a couple of hundred years, with those more recently settled being intermediate. Water matters as much as food; drinking from wells versus drinking from streams has much to do with it. Seasonal changes in diet also cause variety; the Hadza of Tanzania, who have an extremely rich and diverse microbiota, change it with the seasons as their diet seasonally shifts from berries and fruits to game and honey (Smits et al. 2017). The microbiome is shared widely, and people in nearby villages have similar biota, though this differs with the amount of contact (Beghini et al. 2025).

Malnutrition leads to weakened, imbalanced gut flora that makes the situation worse; transplanted into mice, gut flora from malnourished human children leads to malnutrition and poor growth in the mice (Blanton et al. 2016; Blanton, Barrett, et al. 2016). Mice raised germ-free and undernourished children both benefit from having healthy gut microbiota introduced, and then from eating food that nourish this healthy biota, including chickpea, banana, soy, and peanut flours (Gehrig et al. 2019).

Sugary drinks, among their other bad qualities, stimulate the wrong kind of gut biota. `They feed Erysipelotrichaceae bacteria, which kill the good bacteria that increase helper cells that reduce gut absorption of lipids (Nature 2022). Melissa Gutschall, among many others, warns us against “fruit juice” that is really mostly sugar. She notes that 37% of American children have cavities, rising to 58% by adolescence (Gutschall 2024:124, 133)..

Babies raised with the diverse microbiota of traditional upbringing (including vaginal birth and nursing) are healthier generally and have fewer allergies, with gut microbiota as a clear factor (Denworth 2024).

Gut microbiota can turn hostile in conditions of malnutrition. Poor nutrition also gives unpleasant microbes a foothold. Kwashiorkor (an aggravated form of protein deficiency) in particular seems associated with bad-acting microbiota (Ley 2013). The immune system actually recognizes the “good” microbiota and protects them from immune responses (Lyu et al. 2022).

It now appears that they can even damage the children of fathers with bad biota. At least in mice, major damage (experimentally induced by laxatives and antibiotics) led to “impaired leptin signalling, altered testicular metabolite profiles and remapped small RNA payloads in sperm. As a result, dysbiotic fathers trigger an elevated risk of in utero placental insufficiency, revealing a placental origin of mammalian intergenerational effects.” Young had increased risk of “low birth weight, severe growth restriction and premature mortality” (Argow-Demboba et al. 2024). In other words, the father’s contribution to the embryo leads to poor development of the placenta (the downstream half of which is produced by the embryo), and possibly even to the baby itself, which in turn leads to poor nutrition of the embryo and poor development thereafter.

Fermentation

            The Great Book of fermentation in food is Sandor Ellix Katz’ monumental work, The Art of Fermentation (2012). This bookcovers the entire world, and all the dozens of microorganisms that people use to turn inedible resources into edible ones, save edible ones by pickling, make more nourishment, or otherwise improve on natural gifts. Fermentation is indeed one of humanity’s most impressive arts.

            Apes have consumed fermented fruits for millions of years, explaining our high tolerance for alcohol. We probably came early to other fermented tastes. Preservation by pickling, leavening, souring, and other fermentive processes is universal in agricultural societies and far from unknown among hunter-gatherers. Keeping meat by putting it in a cold stream or spring preserves it but allows some pleasant fermentation.

Lactobacillus delbrueckii var. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus, the main bacteria in yogurt, are domesticated–genunely transformed by artificial selection. So are Aspergillus oryzae¸ a fungus critical to East Asian ferments; Saccharomyces cerevisiae, wine yeast; and other fungal fermenters. The extreme importance of these domesticated microorganisms in human nutrition has never been properly assessed, though Katz’ book goes a long way to filling the need.

Yogurt is made from milk that is heated and then cultured; the bacteria thrive on heat. Milk for buttermilk originally was churned to remove the butter, then sterilized but cooled, and fermented by more cool-tolerant bacteria. It was a common drink from Europe through the Middle East to India. It is now, in the western world, produced by sterilizing milk and then fermenting it with Lactococcus lactis as well as Lactobacillus delbrueckii var. bulgaricus and various other ferments (Mendelson 2022; Wikipedia). The ferments produce lactic acid, which both inhibits spoilage and provides a sour taste that most of us enjoy.

In India, it and related products are lassi in Hindi, and are beaten up with a bit of salt to produce a wonderfully cooling drink. Mango lassi was once mango slices beaten up in buttermilk, a heavenly drink if there ever was one, but now in American restaurants serving India’s food it tends to be commercial yogurt blended up with commercial mango juice—oversweet and low on taste.

Buttermilk and other sour milk products were the ferment of choice in western Europe and America until the mid-20^th century, when yogurt swept the field. It was popularized initially by Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916), the discoverer of the functioning of the immune system (for which he won a Nobel prize in 1908). One Stamen Grigorov, a Bulgarian, introduced him to yogurt and its health potential, and Metchnikoff became a convert. A pioneer of gerontology, he publicized it in his book The Prolongation of Life (1908), and further publicity came from his widow’s adoring biography of him, The Life of Elie Metchnikoff (1921). It slowly gained traction as a health food, and then exploded in the 1950s as health faddists and hucksters got wind of its potential for attracting many dollars from the gullible and the enthusiastic. It turned out to accord with world tastes, and soon developed many varieties, as well as the now-universal sweetened and flavored forms, most of which are essentially yogurt-flavored sugar.

Another widespread sour milk product is kefir. The word probably derives from one or more languages of the Caucasus (Wikipedia, “Kefir”). This is similar to yogurt, using the same basic L. delbrueckii, but contains various other ferments, depending on the region. Wikipedia mentions L. kefiranofaciens and other Lactobacilli, Kazachstania turichensis, and yeasts including Candida kefyr and the familiar Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It dominates the sour milk scene in much of the Middle East and central Asia. It is often dried, and then used as a starter for more kefir or as a food in its own right. It makes an excellent portabl food with high nutritional value and long storage capability. Under its Mongolian name of aarul, it fueled the Mongol hordes as they rode out to conquer the world, and is still a basic staple of Mongolia—one of the main protein sources. Concentrated kefir, with much of the moisture drained out, is lebni (laban, labni, etc., depending on dialect; the word is Arabic). Chopped garlic and herbs, and often chopped cucumber, is added to produce a side dish wildly popular from Greel tzatziki to Indian dehei raita, dehei being the word for curds in general. These resemble kefir but are complex beyond description in microbiota—are dehei in Hindi.

Kumis (koumiss, kumys, from Turkic qymyz or kımız) is a Central Asian drink, basically buttermilk made from mare milk, or in a pinch donkey milk. It is the classic drink of the Turkic and Mongol horse nomads. Since it depends on the mares’ giving birth and raising their foals, it is largely confined to summer; the mares foal in spring, and for a few months the milk must go entirely to the foals. Today, there is a dairying industry, and kumys is somewhat liberated from its tie to summer. The basic fermentation is by Lactobacillus spp., but yeasts are introduced in the starter, and thus the beverage is mildly alcoholic and also somewhat carbonated. It resembles buttermilk mixed with weak beer. Concentrating the alcohol by freezing, distilling, or otherwise produced “black” kumis, with higher alcoholic content. “Koumiss” was popular in the United States around 1900 (Mendelson 2022), but failed to catch on.

Penicillium roqueforti, the organism that grows in Roquefort cheese and gives it its flavor and color,goes back to the Bronze Age in Euro caves. Roquefort is produced at only one place: the village of Roquefort, halfway down a huge limestone cliff in south-central France. The drive down to it can be hair-raising. Here, natural caves in the limestone have been enlarged and shaped into cheese-making sites. Local sheep milk is cultured, and the cheese is aged, improving notably with aging.

Aspergillus oryzae is the national microorganism of Japan; it and closely-related Aspergillus spp. are the basis of koji. They hydrolyze raw starch, which Saccharomyces does not do. Saccharomyces cerevisiae may have started on oak trees. Saccharomyces and Lactobacillus show up in 2500-year-old millet breads in China. Grape wine is at least 7000 years old. The Chinese mummy cheese has the usual yogurt-type microbiota (Warriner 2022).

Lactobacillus is the wonderful workhorse of human fermentation technology. It is basic to everything from soy sauce to salami, from cheese to sourdough bread, from sauerkraut to kimchi. Life would be far less tasty without it, to say nothing of its value in preservation, due mostly to its production of lactic acid, a very effective preservative agent. Many species exist; new ones keep turning up. San Francisco’s famous sourdough bread uses its own species, described as Lactobacillus sanfrancisco. (Alas, this bread has fallen on evil days; it has lost popularity to whole-grain breads, and the real old-time sour loaf is very hard to find.)

            The long-standing problem of lactose tolerance remains with us. All mammal infants produce lactase, to break down lactose (milk sugar) into easily-digested glucose and galactose. After infancy, most animals—obviously not cats, or some others—lose their lactase production, and can no longer get benefit from lactose. In humans, the ability is lost around age 6, following which drinking more than about 250 cc of milk at a time is apt to produce bloating, gas, and diarrhea, though this depends on poorly-understood individual factors. In Europe, Arabia, and East Africa, over the last 5000 years or so, people evolved lifelong production of lactase, as a way to live to a great extent on fresh milk.

The mystery is that this ability never arose in most of the Near East or in India or Central Asia, in spite of dependence on dairying and a great deal of gene flow from the west, allowing a gradient of adult lactase production from almost 100% in west Europe to almost zero in China. China once had a major dairying tradition, though, and still has a considerable one, even using fresh milk; people space consumption to avoid getting more than 250 cc at once (my observation, plus consulting with Miranda Brown, the expert on Chinese traditional dairy products).

            The Near East, Central Asia, and India depend for dairying on processing techniques that break down lactose, usually into lactic acid. Lactobacillus bacteria do that, most famously L. delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus. So do a few other microorganisms, including Streptococcus thermophilus and the yeast Kluyveromyces lactis (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S257). The one that matters is L. delbrueckii ssp. bulgaricus, involved in producing yogurt, most cheese, sour cream, and many other products. A problem with it is that the form of lactic acid it produces (the levo form) is not available to digestion by human infants, though adults can manage it. This raises the question: Why didn’t all Europe buy into this technology and avoid the human costs of evolving lifelong lactase? Presumably, a lot of people died, or at least failed to reproduce, in the process of such rapid evolution.

            In 1975, Frances James proposed that north and west European dairy fermentation specialized in sour milk, as opposed to yogurt, because of temperature: the sour milks of that area are prepared at room temperature, often of cool rooms, while yogurt requires at least initial heating of the milk to 40 or 50 C, and often continued heat.

            Beginning with this insights, Eva Rosenstock, Julia Ebert, and Alisa Scheibner (2021) wrote a monumental paper on dairying in west Eurasia. The paper requires detailed summary here. First the milks of available animals are considered. “The characteristic caseins in sheep and goat milk produce firmer curds than cattle milk” (S257), but cattle milk has larger fat globules which cause the separation of cream at the top. Horse and donkey milk has more lactose and does not form curds. They omit reindeer milk, but it is high in sugars and fats.

            The hot, dry southeast European and Near Eastern climate causes milk to spoil unless thus treated. North and west Europe are cool enough (except, often, in summer) to allow souring cultures to develop without the milk spoiling if left unheated.

            Any raw milk, anywhere, can carry Brucella, cause of the deadly disease brucellosis—formerly common in Europe and still common in Ethiopia. Tuberculosis can also be spread in milk. Louis Pasteur discovered the bacteria, and solved the problem by getting people to heat the milk, not enough to cook it but enough to kill the bacteria; pasteurization remains universal today in industrial settings.

            The various lactic-acid microorganisms are selected and propagated. Domestication of Lactobacillus was as important as the domestication of many food crops. Our friend L. d. bulgaricus does best at 40-50 C, so a marriage made in heaven is using it to treat milk that could not be left in any case. Conveniently, Lactococcus lactis will not only thrive at lower temperatures, but will even provide a small amount of lactose breakdown, and since the resulting lactic acid is both levo- and dextrorotary, it is available to all (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S259).

            Lactose tolerance evolved independently in Arabia among bedouins, who herd camels and used to live largely on camel milk. It will not solidify with Lactobacillus treatment, so does not make good yogurt or cheese; people had to evolve the ability to drink it straight. Urban and farm people of those areas usually lack the ability. Still other genes evolved in East Africa among the cattle nomads there, such as the Maasai, who depend heavily on fresh milk (Reilly 2013).

            At some point in the history of stockraising, cheese was invented. It can be either acid-set or rennet-set. The former uses lactic acid, or introduced acids like vinegar and lemon juice, to coagulate the protein fraction in the milk. Rennet uses nature’s way: the enzyme rennet is used by animals to coagulate milk in their stomachs. It is thus extracted from calf stomachs or from the abomasum (forestomach) of a ruminant animal, usually a cow. (Rennet cheeses are banned in strict kosher diets, because the rennet comes from meat; S266.) Most of our familiar cheese are rennet cheeses. They must be salted in preparation. Cheese is usually made from whole milk, but sometimes from milk after the butter is churned out.

            The remaining liquid after cheesemaking is whey, usually fed to animals, but in the Near East and Central Asia generally dried and made into a hard substance known as qara qurut in Turkic languages. Qara means “black,” qurut or qrut refers to dried milk. Dried (but often full-fat) yogurt qrut, called aaruul in Mongolian, is a standard food in the Near East, Central Asia, and northwest China. It is often offered to guests in hospitality. Dried whey products include whey cheeses like low-fat ricotta and Swiss sig (Rosenstock et al. 2021:S61).

            Rosenstock and her group point out that milk, and infant animals feeding on it, are—like carnivores—at a higher trophic level than adult herbivores. They take the herbivores’ food and go further, producing new protein from it.

            They shift to archaeology, which has been revolutionized in recent decades by development of ways to analyze milk products in ancient pots, boxes, baskets, and other items. (They have a long list of the advantages and disadvantages of various methods, S262.) Milking probably goes back to early domestication of animals, around 10,000-12,000 years ago, and can thus be demonstrated back to 8400 years ago, in Mesopotamia (S 263). It was probably common by then. Agriculture and herding came early to southeast Europe, but “Europe witnessed a major standstill of the Neolithic expansion until around 4000 to 3500 BCE,” when it spread rapidly to previously marginal areas in the north, west, and mountainous center. About this time, wooly sheep were developed; wild sheep do not have wool—it was developed by selective breeding. Bees were domesticated. Figs and olives were grown as tree crops (S264). In the next millennium, lifelong lactase may have come to central and western Europe with massive immigrations from the east, but it has not shown up in genetic studies until the 1^st millennium CE.

            About this time, history kicks in, with written records of dairying providing names for milk, cheese, and the like in ancient Egypt, to say nothing of archaeological finds of the cheese itself (S264). After this, dairying, milk processing, and cheesemaking all developed rapidly. The origin of butter making is obscure, but one suspects it was early; churning is not really necessary—one can simply shake a bag of milk for a long time. Butter provided a soft fat otherwise hard to get in cold parts of Europe, where animal fat got hard fast and vegetable fats could not grow. This is why chicken schmaltz and goose grease are famously identified with East European Jewish cooking; they could not use butter in meals with meat involved. Jews in the Mediterranean had olive and sesame oils.

            So, to return to our initial problem, heating milk and making yogurt was hard to do and not really necessary in north and central Europe, so lactase persistence evolved. People without lactase persistence can drink milk without too much suffering, and get the benefits of the protein, vitamins, and water, but in a famine they are in trouble; their problems with digesting milk sugars might spell doom in a milk-dependent society. This goes double for sick people, and still more for sick children above weaning age. Drinking milk persisted for thousands of years before lactase persistence started to become common, 5000 years ago; it then very rapidly spread to near-universality in west, central and north Europe, as well as East Africa, and became common in Europe and parts of the Middle East. Famine, disease, and extreme milk dependence are strongly suspected (Handwerk 2022).

There was also the benefit to infants, who could not get full nutrition from yogurt. A few groups in northern central Asia use largely cool-weather souring, yet mostly lack lactase persistence; they cope anyway, by spacing consumption and probably by gut flora adaptation (S269). Lactase persistence is found in 15 to 54% of people in eastern Europe, 62-86% in central and western Europe, 89-96% in Scandinavia and the British Isles. In India, 63% in northern India show persistence, but it is down to 23% in the south and east, where hot weather makes milk almost impossible to keep except as yogurt, so no reason for lactase persistence ever surfaced. In northeastern Africa one pastoral group shows 64% persistence (and probably some run well above that), while a neighboring agricultural group has only 20% (Gerbault et al. 2011).

Lactose fermentation also gives us sausage, at least the sour-tasting ones like salami; Martin Adams notes that the spicing typical of sausages has empirically been developed to assist: “Extracts of clove, cardamom, ginger, celery seeds, cinnamon, and turmeric, all with relatively high manganese content, have been shown to stimulate lactic acid fermentation…it is thought that manganese helps protect LAB, lacking the enzyme superoxide dismutase, from the damaging effects of reactive oxygen species….” Sausages are preserved by creating an environment in which bacteria and fungi/yeasts develop, each of which has some level of spoilage prevention (Adams 2010:314-316).

Other fermentations involve a whole host of yeasts and other fungi, as well as various bacteria. Alcohol is largely the product of various strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, wine and beer yeast. The winemaking strain, like the wine grape, is native to the eastern Black Sea, allowing the Georgians to make a believable claim for inventing wine as we know it today. Wine from cactus and other fruit was independently invented in the New World by Native Americans. Many other species of Saccharomyces, as well as other yeasts and fungi, enter into brewing. Euro-American ferments are usually simple, but Asian ones, from Himalayan local beers to Chinese soy pastes, involve many species and genera, some poorly known.

Brewing involves mashing up the item in question with water. This holds for making wine, where the simple juice of the fruit is enough. For soybeans (to brew soy sauce and paste) or other hard seeds, boiling is necessary first. Barley for beer requires yet another step: sprouting, to get the barley shoot to convert starch to maltose. Then the barley is baked to stop further growth, boiled or steamed into a mash, and brewed with introduced beer yeasts. Beer is also made from any grain, starchy root, and even starchy fruit like bananas; banana beer is extremely widespread and popular in Africa.

A further step is distillation—heating the fermented alcoholic drink till the alcohol evaporates and can be condensed by a cooler. Ideally, this will be some form of long tube or coil, allowing the “heads and tails” to be discarded and only the middle distillate kept. The lightest fraction—poisonous methanol—evaporates first, and must be eliminated. Then the ethanol, which is what we want, comes off. Last come the “tails”—heavier alcohols such as isopropyl—again bad for humans. They must be thrown out.

Distilled grain makes vodka if not aged, whiskey if aged. (The story that vodka is made from potatoes is true only of some home brews.) The original whiskey, or whisky if Scotch (the Scots must insist on their own spelling), is made from barley and sometimes oats. American whiskey is often made from rye, but Bourbon and other central-United States whiskeys are made from corn. Some makers add wheat for softness or rye for flavor. Chinese grain alcohol, generally made from millets and sorghum, is technically a vodka, but is known as bai jiu, “white [ie. clear] alcoholic liquor.” The stronger forms are san xiu, “triple distilled,” pronounced samsu in several languages. Aged whiskey commands a market, and C14 dating is now used to expose frauds. A whiskey said to be made in 1863 turned out to have been made between 2007 and 2014 (Nature 2020a).

Sugar cane alcohol is technically rum, but gets sold as vodka or whiskey by dealers cutting corners. It is produced widely in sugar-growing areas. Dark rum is colored and flavored with molasses from the sugar refineries. Distilled fruit alcohol is brandy, usually made from wine but often from apples, such as the calvados of Normandy and the apple jack of America. It is also made from peaches, cherries, pears, and potentially any sweet fruit—even tropical fruits have often been used.

Fad Diets

            The modern diet is notoriously bad for you. As noted above, it includes far too much sugar, especially fructose. It includes more fat than we need, It is based on highly processed foods. Worst of all, it includes a vast range of chemicals quite alien to the supposed foods. Some are artificial flavorings, but at least these are usually based on real flavors. Some are preservatives, in quantities enough to get some foods described as “embalmed.” Some are colors, many of which turn out to be carcinogenic; they are sometimes banned when this is found, sometimes not, and new untested compounds often appear in spite of laws forbidding untested ingredients. The most highly processed foods, involving not only processing in the narrow sense but also adding lots of fat, sugar, and salt, are baked goods. Cookies top the list, followed by muffins and eventually bread. At the other end of the list of grain foods comes pasta, which is processed in that it is ground and shaped, but at least has no added evils (Youmshajekian 2025). Seafood and spices are not usually much processed, nor is meat except for butchering.

            The modern diet is all too well known as a cause of metabolic syndrome, leading to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and various deteriorative conditions. The most forthright critic, Marion Nestle, has devoted a lifetime to exposing the ugly underbelly of the American food industry, which tends to sell bad nutrition and bad foods with an unhealthy dose of dishonesty about their safety and the dangers of the alternatives. (From a whole library of Nestle books, we may note only the most recent, Nestle 2015 and 2018. Out of a vast further literature, one may note Outlive by Peter Attia, 2023, as a pretty good introduction to why the modern diet is especialy bad when combined with lack of exercise and other modern shortcomings.)

            One result has been powering up the ancient art of inventing fad diets. The first fad diet was probably invented in the Pleistocene by a shaman a couple of hundred thousand years ago. By the time of the ancient Greeks, we had Pythagoras forbidding beans (possibly because of favism), others advocating meat, others revering bread as sacred, and Porphyry concluding that we should be vegetarians because eating animals makes us act like predatory beasts. The ancient Chinese had already thought of the idea that everybody who depends on grains dies, so maybe we should simply not eat grains—especially since the alternatives, pine seeds and other nutrient-packed seeds, did sometimes provide better health. Unfortunately, the eaters of these died too eventually, in spite of countless legends of people achieving immortality or at least very long life. (As the saying goes, “everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually dies.”)

            Fad diets never stopped. In the United States they hit a high point in the 19^th century, when people got enough white flour and white sugar to realize such processed foods were not ideal. Whole grain, vegetarian, and abstemious diets came into play (Deutsch 1977). My wife worked for decades at a Seventh-Day Adventist instution, and though not an Adventist she had to live and eat by the code a good deal of the time: whole grains, minimal or no meat and certainly no pork, no alcohol, no tobacco, no indulgents of such sort. There is a great deal to be said for this diet, and we still shop at the market and eat a lot of whole grains, beans, and vegetables. In practice, Adventists tend to use a great deal of sugar, to skimp the vegetables, and to cheat on the meat, but that’s not the diet’s fault.

            Then in the 1950s came Frances Moore Lappé and many imitators, promoting essentially the same diet (vegetarian, whole grains…) but also making a gospel of organic food. Lappé had less than ideal knowledge of either ecology or nutrition, and her “diet for a small planet” (Lappé   ) produced many a vitamin deficiency, particularly in devotees’ children, and did only some good (but, indeed, real good) for the environment.

It did spread the already-known ideal of organic food. Organic food is raised without artificial fertilizer or pesticides, and is indeed an extremely good idea ecologically (see above). In the markets, though, it differs from conventional food mainly in being more expensive. Unless you know and trust your dealer, it may not even be organic. Or it may be saved from pests by pesticides blowing in from a conventional farmer’s land. Conventionally produced food is now usually grown without heavy pesticide use before marketing. Still, organic is safer, on balance, though dubiously worth the extra money, especially for crops like wheat that are raised with minimal chemicals in any case.

            What these critiques of fad diets fail to realize is that the modern diet worldwide really is pretty unhealthy, and getting worse over time. The fad diets take a good idea and run too far with it. They often become far more unhealthy than the ordinary American diet, largely by limiting foods to the point at which adequate nutrients can only be gained by heavy use of vitamin and mineral supplement pills. One can move along a continuum from apologists for the ordinary diet (Deutsch, Chrzan and Cargill) to critics who still follow science and recognize we need to eat a variety of foods (Appia, Nestle) to mild faddists who still allow us decent nutrition (the more sane Paleo advocates) to outright faddists who restrict diet so much that followers cannot maintain adequate nutrition.

PART II. FOOD AND FOOD REGIONS    

The great food regions of the world can be defined by staple foods: the dominant foods—not just one, but a complex—in each area. Famously, the Native American agricultural system was and is defined by the “Three Sisters,” maize, beans, and squash. Similar integrated complexes define other regions.

This is to some extent arbitrary, and of course the systems grade into each other, blending at the boundaries. Any sharp lines drawn around our systems are arbitrary if necessary mapmakers’ conventions.

For this book, I define the following agricultural regions:

1. The classic wheat-barley-livestock realm of the Near/Middle East, first in time and first in worldwide spread as a system. This system moved slowly into Central Asia, a hunting-gathering world, which persists in Siberia.
2. Inevitably, I need to separate out Europe as a separate section, since its food history has been treated so extensively, and all too often with very little reference to the Middle East. Agriculture spread first to the south, then to the center, finally to the north. Also, extensions of the Near Eastern system to European colonies in the Americas and Oceania are treated with those regions, since in the Americas they necessarily came to terms with local foods and adopted them; North America produces far more maize than wheat.
3. Next in line, the East Asian system, based on rice, millets, and soybeans. This system began as two separate systems in north and south China; these fused early and spread to Korea and Japan.
4. The Indian subcontinent, which adopted both the above systems, integrated them, and added their own touches. Many variations on spicy themes emerged in the different regions.
5. Southeast Asia, originally based on root and fruit crops, later adding rice. A very special extension of this is the root and tree system of Oceania, covering the most area of any agricultural system except the first, but supporting relatively few people on small islands scattered over the vast Pacific Ocean.
6. Sub-Saharan Africa, based on its own local grains and roots.
7.  Native Mexico and Central America, based on the aforementioned “three sisters.” Many variants arose, and hunter-gatherer cultures persisted at the margins in the north.
8. South America, which added the all-important root crops: manioc, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and others. Highland and lowland South America had quite different systems, each with variants.
9. North America north of Mexico, with its own domesticated grains and vegetables in some areas, hunting-gathering maintained and intensified elsewhere.

To these we may add the hunting-gathering cultures, which preserve even today the way of

life that supported all humans for millions of years. Hunter-gatherers eat almost anything edible in their environments, but usually live on plant foods, especially seeds and roots, and on small animals. Only those in the far north live mostly on mammal meat. Many coastal groups live mostly on fish. These cultures will be discussed in the relevant geographic sections.

I will focus largely on the areas I know best: China, Europe and the Middle East, and Mexico. Comparative notes on other regions will be included, but I make no attempt to be exhaustive or even close.

Near East

            This area comprises dry Asia and neighboring North Africa, from Iran and Afghanistan west. The present chapter includes special sections on central Asia and Siberia.

Over a million years or more, during periods when Arabia was moist and cooler, people radiated out and settled widely. This occurred aroud 400, 300, 200, 130-75, and 55 thousand years ago, as shown by stone tools datable by type. In moist times, central western Arabia and the Salalah area had woodland, as well as high Yemen, and most of the peninsula was grassland (Groucutt et al. 2021).

During this period, and even earlier, hominins immigrated from Africa in successive waves. First, so far as we know, were Homo erectus, who appear in Georgia about 2 million years ago, and then in China and Indonesia not long after, indicating successful colonization and rapid spread. They are associated with huge, heavy hand-axes in the west, choppers and chopping tools in the east. The latter are heavy cobbles chipped to a simple edge, useful for bashing game or for working wood and bamboo; it seems likely that much better and more complex tools were made from those materials after initial working by choppers.

Homo erectus was a large, tough human with heavy skull bones. Brain size developed slowly from not much more than half modern size to about ¾ of our brain size. The species seem to have died out without issue in Asia, unless they engendered the tiny island hominins with small brains in island Southeast Asia, Homo floresiensis on Flores and Homo  in the Philippines. These persisted until relatively recent times.

In Africa, Homo erectus evolved into later humans with larger brains and less heavy skulls, classified under several confusing names. These also radiated into the Near East and thence the rest of Eurasia. Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis are the names used, the latter one for extensively found relics with much more sophisticated tool types. Heidelbergensis even made very good spears from hard wood; some survived for over 300,000 years, to be discovered in a bog in Germany a few years ago.

The evolution of these mid-Pleistocene hominins into more modern types is still mysterious, but probably took place in Africa, like the other advances in human evolution. In any case, the later Pleistocene saw the Near East dominated by Neanderthal humans, Homo sapiens neanderthalis. (They could and did interbreed with modern humans, thus showing they are the same species, in spite of usual terminological differentiation.) This large, bony, muscular human successfully hunted huge elephants and other Pleistocene megafauna in Europe, the Near East, and Siberia. They also created diverse and beautifully crafted stone tools, and some early cave art.

In central Asia they met a related but quite different hominin. This latter is new to science. Neanderthal remains were being excavated from Denisova Cave in south Siberia. A young girl’s finger bone turned up, and was duly sent to Svante Paabo’s lab, the leading site at the time for analyzing fossil human genetics. They ran a test, expecting another Neanderthal. The result was truly weird. They assumed an error in the process (such readings were few and innovative at the time), so they ran it again. Same result. Something must be contaminating the lab…but another run and then another produced the same weird reading. By now “a wild surmkise” had entered the lab: We may have a totally new type of human here. And so it proved. Denisovans have now turned up as genetic remnants, and one or two fossils, all over eastern Asia.

Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed to modern human genetics, via  a good deal of mixing. They contributed possibly some disease resistance, and other traits. In Tibet, Denisovans adapted to high altitudes, and passed some of these adaptive genes on to modern East Asians.

Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, got into the Near East before 100,000 years ago, but little is known of their early presence. Perhaps they did not persist. More likely, the record was fragmented by such events as the spectacular eruption (or eruptions) 74,000 years ago, that dug the trench now filled by Lake Toba in Sumatra. In any case, by 70,000 years ago, people abounded in the warmer parts of Asia and were beginning to probe north toward Europe. They became a visible presence there somewhat after 50,000 years ago, and extended in the meantime throughout eastern Asia, into the Indonesian islands. By 20,000 years ago they were not only in Siberia but had reached the New World, moving rapidly south; of this more in the relevant chapter.

A long period of hunting and gathering followed. In the Near East, game was till abundant, partly because deserts were less extensive than now. Much of the land was green, varying considerably according to glacial and interglacial periods. Here we meet the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the vast ocean dynamic that creates much of Eurasia’s weather. Warm water flows north in the Gulf Stream, warming north Europe. Cold water flows south in the Labrador Current and other cold subsurface streams. Being heavier, it sinks under the warm water, to surface again far downstream (mostly in the South Atlantic or even farther afield). Meanwhile, cold water wells up off Morocco, from the deep sea. Warmth moves north over the ocean, from the tropics, with warm air and rain. The temperature of the ocean from France to Morocco can fluctuate. The important result for humans is that the extent of warmth southward determines rainfall over all western Eurasia and North Africa. A warm south means more rain in the southerly parts of west Eurasia, including the Near East. If the warmth shifts north, so does the rain, and Europe gets a very wet year. The prevailing strong west winds of the temperate latitudes drive the rain far inland; even far west China (the western mountains of Xinjiang) benefit from a southward extension of the rain.

Hunting cultures in Eurasia created, among other things, some of the world’s greatest art. The cave paintings of Europe are often anatomically accurate, and more often stunningly beautiful. It has been observed that in terms of sheer beauty and effect on the viewer, art was as “fine” in those days as at any time since.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) is usually capitalized, because it was such a dramatic event in human affairs. Temperatures sank to one of the lowest points seen since the “snowball earth” days hundreds of millions of years ago. The worst time was about 20,000-18,000 years past. Atmospheric CO₂ now worries us because it is rising above 400 parts per million. In the LGM it was less than half of that. Cycles of warming and cooling had persisted through the Pleistocene, with CO₂ peaking around 300 or a bit less during interglacials and sinking to or below 200 in glacial phases. It stood around 270 in historic times. During the LGM, ice sheets covered all northern Europe and the mountain regions of Asia. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower, with so much water tied up in land ice. Rain was greater in many temperate zones, but worldwide it was less, for the same reason: so much water was frozen. Much of dry Eurasia was wetter, but the Sahara was even larger and drier than now. Arabia, at least in the south, was wetter, and served as a human refugium, but much of the Near East was dry, cold, and barren.

Hunting in the nonglaciated parts of Europe was good, because moist steppe conditions created ideal habitats for mammoths, rhinoceroses, giant deer, and other megafauna, as well as smaller animals.

The Near East and Central Asia were generally less well off. Central Asia was drier than today. The Altai and Tibetan Plateau were frigid desert where not under ice; they cooled the lowlands. Hunting megafauna, a way of life in Europe, was inadequate; people chased gazelles and other smaller game, ate acorns and almonds, and foraged for seeds.

Warming after 18,000 years ago was fairly rapid. Even more rapid, in fact extremely sudden, was its reversal in the Younger Dryas event, from 12,900 to 11,700 years ago. (The name refers to the re-expansion of the arctic plant genus Dryas as cold conditions returned.) Temperatures in Greenland fell by 4-10 degrees C (Wikipedia, “Younger Dryas”). Outside of the North Atlantic world, the period was less dramatic; it may have been caused in part by cold fresh water from melting of the North American ice sheets, flooding into the North Atlantic and overriding the warm circulation of the Gulf Stream. In any event, Europe and the Near East were whipsawed: extreme cold, sudden warmth, then extreme cold again, then almost immediate rewarming to modern conditions, and then onward to even warmer years from 8000 to 6000 years ago.

This, combined with heavy hunting pressure by well-armed humans, destroyed the megafauna. People are usually reasonable about hunting, and come into a loose equilibrium with the game, but this wild fluctuation stressed the game and the hunters both, making it impossible to find an easy balance.

However, all was not lost. The Near East, unlike temperate Europe, had not been lush enough to have many megafauna at best. When it warmed and moistened after the Younger Dryas, the main effect was on plants, which poured in from refugia in the south. A combination of cooling and drying with human mismanagement has made almost all the Near East into desert, steppe, and brushland today, but much of it was downright lush in the early postglacial period, with extensive oak, cedar, and mixed forests on the uplands. Pathetically tiny relics of this forest in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the high mountains of south-central Anatolia show what once was.

At Tel Tsaf, Israel. 14,000-year-old beer was found; this is the oldest drinking party on record (Archaeology News Network 2021).

With plants more numerous, people became much more dependent on them. Coinciding perfectly with the end of the Younger Dryas was the most momentous event in human history: the invention of agriculture. Anthropologists used to think that the wipeout of the megafauna made people turn to farming, but we now know that the megafauna die-off in Europe (and America, for that matter) did no such thing. Agriculture was invented in areas where the megafauna had been in short supply. Farming coincided with the rise in plant abundance.

People became dependent on gathering seeds, including wheat, barley, rye, peas, lentils, and other familiar plants. These naturally became the first to be planted. They also ate plenty of fruit, including pears, jujubes, olives, and, in the desert, dates. In cooler mountains grew wild almonds and other nuts. All of these were domesticated too, but more slowly, in view of their much longer generation times.

            Domestication of grains is usually first seen in selection for nonshattering rachises. The rachis is the tiny stalk attaching a grain to its stalk. In nature, it usually breaks when the grain is mature, so that the grain will roll or be carried by animals away from the parent plant, and thus grow without too much competition. Humans carried the stalks and grain back to their homes, thus automatically selecting the few nonshattering rachis bonds. Eventually, all domestic grains had nonshattering heads. Lentils, peas, and beans—the leguminous crops—have an equivalent in naturally breaking pods. Humans select for pods that stay closed.

            These marks of domestication show up around 10,000-12,000 years ago in the Near East. They are first recorded in the dry interior slopes of the Levantine mountains. Often, they occur near springs and streams, where people would naturally settle for the good water supply, and much later come to stay for the good soil and irrigation opportunities.

            Farming is notoriously a lot of work. Hunting and gathering is so pleasant that it remains a favorite hobby all over the world. The first two chapters of Genesis show very clearly what early Near Easterners thought of the matter. They are a story, compressed into a tale of two people in finite time, of expulsion from the paradise of hunting and gathering into the dreadful suffering of farming, where old Adam must win his bread by “the sweat of his brow.”

            Many grave minds have wondered why people would leave paradise for such a hell. The Bible implies it was the development of culture. The “tree of knowledge of good and evil” is not a real fruit tree. The Bible does not use imaginary things as images of real things, but always does the reverse. Eating the fruit of this metaphoric tree means developing a self-conscious moral code, independent of the happily innate self-regulation of wild primates.

            Modern speculations have generally done even less well. Most 19^th-century speculations were based on the idea that hunting and gathering paid so badly that people would naturally turn to agriculture as soon as they realized plants could grow from seeds. The problems with this are that, first, all hunter-gatherers know plants grow from seeds (one cannot miss that in the wild), and, second, hunting-gathering pays so well that many groups still do it, and manage a good living. A 20^th-century version assumed people were living off megafauna, hunted them out, and then had to turn to farming; we have seen why this idea fails. In no place in the world is exterminating megafauna followed by turning to agriculture; agriculture was always invented in areas that either had little to start with (not only the Near East, but also South America, New Guinea, and elsewhere), or preserved much of what they did have (China, southeast Asia). Many other ideas were proposed. It was even suggested that it was all an accident, because of the possibly accidental selection for nonshattering rachises (Rindos 1984). This did not explain why people kept planting more and working harder.

            For one thing, early agriculture does not pay well. It took thousands of years for grain in the Near East, China, and Mexico to be domesticated thoroughly enough to yield better than wild grain, if the wild grain was growing in ideal conditions. Early cultivated wheats and barley yielded the same 300-400 kg/ha as wild ones.

Two agreements were generally accepted. First, agriculture arose in what archaeologist Robert Braidwood called the “hilly flanks” of the interior Near East. Early sites stretch in a band from south-central Anatolia to Palestine and Jordan. Second, people found it desirable to concentrate more and more on small annual seeds, and eventually cultivate and then domesticate them.

A critically important site was Göbekli Tepe in southern Anatolia. This was an enormous community, almost a city, of hunter-gatherers, living by gathering wild wheat, barley, chickpeas, and other crops that would soon be domesticated. (It was probably only seasonally inhabited.) The wild ancestors of two of these—chickpeas and einkorn, an ancestral wheat—have been traced to the immediate area. This brought back memories of the long-ignored idea of Jane Jacobs (1984) that cities invented agriculture to feed their people. This idea had been dismissed at the time, because no large early settlements were known; cities arose, to everyone’s knowledge, well after 5000 years ago, when agriculture was already highly advanced and productive. Göbekli Tepe, and other large sites that began to turn up, suddenly made Jacobs’ idea look much better. However, very early plant domestication occurred widely in the Fertile Crescent, often in areas with extremely small settlements and low population densities.

There are two clues in the above brief summary. First, that note about “ideal conditions.” If ideal conditions are not met, selecting the right strains of crops and planting them in managed situations allows having them at hand. Sure enough, many small early farming settlements are in dry areas where they could take advantage of soils around springs and streams.

Second, if ideal conditions are approximated but settlements are really dense, it pays to plant grain as close to them as possible. You can have them ready to hand, and, probably more important, you can protect them from raiders and wild animals. Many habitats are folded together closely in the Middle East: woodland, conifer forest, riverine wetlands, lakes, marshes, deserts, steppes, shrublands, and intergrades between all these.

 This allowed a great deal of exchange and interdependence, as people shared products across ecological gradients, moved to protect what they had, learned about other zones, and above all found it very easy and tempting to plant items from one zone in another. Certainly, a part of domestication involved growing wheat, barley, and the other crops around oases in areas hotter and drier than the grasslands where those species were native.

This provides a neat explanation that fits the evidence. We await further research.

The classic “founder crops” of the earliest agriculture in the Near East were einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chickpea, and flax (Zohary and Hopf 1988; Zohary 2012).

It now appears that this was too specific. Slow progress toward agriculture involved long experimenting with these and other plants. Crops important later, such as fava beans, rye, and oats, were already being used and apparently subjected to some experimentation. The oats were wild; domestic oats came later, when two wild species, diploid A. longiglumis and tetraploid A. insularis, hybridized to produce our familiar A. sativa, a protein-rich grain with much potential. It is, for instance, a major source of soluble fibre, useful in fighting metabolic syndrome(Kamal et al. 2022; Paudel et al. 2021).

Tree crops were already used and managed; they have always been critical to Near Eastern farming. Domestication was a leisurely process (Arranz-Otaegui and Roe 2023).

Some early bread was found dating to 14,000 BCE, a time well before the origins of agriculture. Bread was made of the seeds of club-rush (Bolboschoenus glaucus), with small legumes, barley, oat, andeinkorn wheat. The flour was apparently carefully sifted, since no chaff appears in the bread, which has gas holes as if kneaded—certainly carefully made (Arranz-Otaegui et al. 2018).

A monumental neolithic village developed at Çatalhöyük, Türkiye, in a marshy area where a mountain stream flows out into the lowlands and spreads out in a delta. The area is now dry, but was wet in Neolithic times. The population was sizable over times, but probably only about 600-800 in any given year, not thousands (Kuijt and Marciniak 2024). It and other Neolithic early villages probably had many unoccupied houses at any one time, as modern villages do. The town lived on wheat and barley, with a few of the usual attendant crops.

Most of the languages in Europe, the Iranian world, and northern India are related, in the vast Indo-European language phylum. It first appeared in Anatolia, but recently there is a move to use Indo-Anatolian for the earliest ancestral form, which gave rise to Hittite and related languages. (To give some idea how close these languages all are, the Hittite for “water” is wadar. An unusual case, but you get the idea.) This early phylum may have started in Turkey south of the Caucasus, and broken up into the Anatolian languages around 4400-4000 BCE. There was already some mixing with Caucasus Mountains groups; a long genetic cline stretched from there to the Ukrainian steppes and then to the Volga River. Its genetic signature shows up in Anatolia by that period. Possibly the mix of Caucasus-Volga people, intruding into Anatolia, sparked the birth of the phylum. Farmers evidently moved up to steppes, already settled by rather mysterious farming cultures of the Trypillia and other cultures (Haggerty, Paul, et al. 2023; see also Ghalici et al. 2024).

By 4000 BCE, a mix of Caucasus-Volga people with local people of northern affinities created the Seredny Stih and then the Yamnaya (or Yamna) cultures. From 3700, climaxing around 3300, the Yamnaya exploded from their Ukraine source area, rapidly reaching Hungary on the west and Kazakhstan in the east. This appears to be the real Indo-European expansion. Indo-Anatolian had presumably been evolving rapidly into Indo-European forms. TheYamnaya mixed with locals—many derived from earlier Anatolian farmers—along the way. The Corded Ware and Bell-Beaker cultural groups emerged, almost certainly speaking the ancestors of our modern Indo-European languages: Germanic, Greek, Albanian, Slavic, Romance, and so forth. An earlier stream moved all the way across the steppes to establish the Tocharian languages of what is now western China. (The foregoing is a drastically simplified version of the involved story told in Lazaridis et al. 2025 and Nikitin et al. 2025. The senior figure behind both is the leading human geneticist David Reich.)

            Alcohol continued to be produced. Wine developed in the east Black Sea area, where the wine grape and the wine-making strain of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae are native. The Georgian word for wine, ghvino, is clearly related to Hebrew wainos, Latin vinum, and all the modern cognates. The earliest wine so far known from Georgia dates to 6000-5800 BCE, identifried from residue in a jar (McGovern et al. 2017). Many similar jars like it occur from then onward, showing widespread winemaking. Presumably they are the ancestors of the large ceramic qvavri now used for quality winemaking. Grapes and winemaking spread very fast, being well known in the ancient Near East. The Hebrew Bible records its extreme importance by the Bronze Age.

Another word that has lasted is buza, of very ancient origin, surviving in “booze.” A noteworthy history of alcohol in the Near East, Joseph El-Asmar’s The Milk of Lions (2020), concerns itself more with distillation, a much later event, but recognizes the early roots.

            The ancient Mesopotamians developed date wine, called shekaru in Akkadian, whence modern Hebrew sheker for ale and Yiddish shikker for “drunk”; the same Akkadian root may give us the word “cider” (Jurafsky 2014:75).

In ancient Mesopotamia, barley was the staple; einkorn, emmer and hexaploid wheat were used; pea, grasspea, chickpea, broadbean (rare), lentil, onion, garlic and other vegetables existed (Potts 1997). Sizable settlements developed by 4000 BCE, cities by 3000.

Early documents actually provide a number of recipes for ancient Mesopotamian food, as recorded by Jean Bottéro in The Oldest Cuisine in the World:  Cooking in Mesopotamia (2004).

            New data on this appeared in Food & Drink (online, Nov. 4, 2019), including recipes. One simple example is:

“Meat is used. You prepare water. You add fine-grained salt, dried barley cakes, onion, Persian shallot, and milk. You crush and add leek and garlic.”

Newly-found tablets add four dishes to those known to Bottero. “The four dishes culled from the list-style tablet also each have unique uses. Pashrutum, for example, is a soup one might serve someone suffering from a cold, Lassen said, though the meaning of this bland broth accented by leek, coriander and onion flavours translates as “unwinding”. Elamite broth (“mu elamutum”), on the other hand, is among two foreign (or “Zukanda”) dishes listed in the tablets….”

A full recipe is worth reproducing here:

“Tuh’u recipe

Ingredients:
1 lb leg of mutton, diced
½ c rendered sheep fat
1 small onion, chopped
½ tsp salt
1 lb beetroot, peeled and diced
1 c rocket, chopped
½ c fresh coriander, chopped
1 c Persian shallot, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 c beer (a mix of sour beer & German Weißbier)
½ c water
½ c leek, chopped
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed

For the garnish:
½ c fresh coriander, finely chopped
½ c kurrat (or spring leek), finely chopped
2 tsp coriander seeds, coarsely crushed

Instructions: Heat sheep fat in a pot wide enough for the diced lamb to spread in one layer. Add lamb and sear on high heat until all moisture evaporates. Fold in the onion and keep cooking until it is almost transparent. Fold in salt, beetroot, rocket, fresh coriander, Persian shallot and cumin. Keep on folding until the moisture evaporates. Pour in beer, and then add water. Give the mixture a light stir and then bring to a boil. Reduce heat and add leek and garlic. Allow to simmer for about an hour until the sauce thickens.

Pound kurrat and remaining fresh coriander into a paste using a mortar and pestle. Ladle the stew into bowls and sprinkle with coriander seeds and kurrat and fresh coriander paste. The dish can be served with steamed bulgur, boiled chickpeas and bread.”

            The characteristic beehive oven was already known long before civilization. It is made from clay or brick. The fire is built in the oven and then raked out; the breads, stews, pizzas, and other foods cook in the residual heat. They start extremely hot, hundreds of degrees in temperature, and then cool slowly, Ths result is a crusty, even charred top and a slow-cooked interior, much liked by old-fashioned-oven enthusiasts. There are many of those; modern civilization has not even displaced them from New Mexico, where the Spanish introduced them in the 17^th century. There, they once produced sourdough bread of amazing quality, but the cultures are now hard to find. In west and central Asia and Mediterranean Europe, beehive ovens survive abundantly. They gave rise to the modern pizza oven, which has imitated with electricity the blazing start and slow cooling.

            One early invention, probably long in use by the time the above recipes were written, was the tinuru. The word evolved into the modern tandur (Sen 2016:31). This is a large oven, often sunk into the ground. A fire is built at the bottom. Ideally, the ash must be removed somehow. Breads are stuck to the walls, and later peeled off with a peelboard, a long-handled wooden paddle. Tandurs are usually pots about a metre deep, but they can be huge. I saw one in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, in 1974 that was almost as big as a room. It was sunk into the ground. Retrieving breads from it was a true art. One had to use a very long and heavy peelboard, and any bread that fell was lost forever. There was nothing else to eat in town, but the bread was made from freshly-ground hard mountain wheat, and was among the finest bread I have ever tasted.

            The tandur became universal in Iran and Central Asia. It also spread to China along with the characteristic tandur bread, which became shaobing (“roasted cakes”) in Chinese. This bread is made from white flour and usually sprinkled with sesame seeds. Shaobing became small early on—a miniaturized Persian naan. The classic naan itself is small loaf size.

Contacts with the rest of Asia were already important in Mesopotamia from early times. Soybean, banana (probable), millet (unident. Panicoid), and turmeric, are found in dental calculus at Megiddo and Tel Erani, dating to the 2^nd millennium BCE. Staple foods there were wheat, sesame, and dates; the new exotic foods must have provided exciting variety (Scott et al. 2021).

Zebus—a separate species from the European and Near Eastern ox—appear in the Near East by the 3^rd millenn BCE; they are common in Egypt by the 16^th  century BCE. Chickens, originally from south China and southeast Asia, appear in the Near East about the same time. Citron, presumably from India, was common by the 1^st millennium. Pepper appears by 1300 BCE and cloves by 1700 BCE in Egypt and the Near East (Scott et al. 2021).

In ancient Egypt, the period just before the dynasties began was characterized by building subsistence on emmer, barley, peas, and lentils. By dynastic times (after 3100), flax is important; the Egyptians were famous for their linen clothing from then onward until cotton came to rule. Condiments like dill and oregano were used, becoming more important over time (Marinova et al. 2024).

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Nayeri 2018) records a good deal about ecology. Gilgamesh (the name belonged to an actual Sumerian king) was the quintessential city man, sophisticated, well-dressed, well-educated. He acquired a sidekick, Enkidu, who was the prototypic “wild man”—described in terms almost identical to those used for the yei, sasquatch, Bigfoot, and other imaginary forest fellows. He is, in fact, the first portrayal in literature of the stereotypic “savage.” The contrast of urban and rural is overdrawn to the point of satire. Both of them then go to raid the Cedar Forest, protected by a monstrous guard. We know from many sources that cedar forests were among the most valuable properties in the Near East, since the wood was by far the best in quality, necessary for ships and other goods. We even know the name of one actual forest guardian. King Nehemiah, in the Bible, ordered “…a letter unto Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the palace…and for the wall of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into” (Nehemiah 2:8). Making these real, important, very human guards into monsters is another bit of urban arrogance in the Gilgamesh epic, otherwise one of the great literary achievements of all time.

       The importance of the Bible as an ecological text has been greatly underappreciated, thanks to poor knowledge of ecology by divines and poor knowledge of divinity by too many ecologists. What could be done was shown many years ago by a former shepherd, Phillip Keller, in a book called A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23. He explained how incredibly deep was the knowledge of sheepherding displayed in that short poem. Every verse of it required a chapter of explanation. The shepherd really does lead his flock beside still waters and to green pastures.

       In the Bible we first hear of tabooing many animals, notably including pigs and dogs, not only for food but, in the case of pigs, even for contact. They are unclean and polluting. Many reasons have been given for the suite of animals condemned.

       The earliest, and major, source for this is the Book of Leviticus, supposedly revealed by God to Moses, and incorporating much ancient material, though probably put in modern form around 500 BCE. The taboos on animals are found in Chapter 11 (repeated in Deuteronomy 14), which appears to preserve very old material. The taboos are of animals that chew the cud or similarly linger over vegetable food, but do not have cloven hoofs, like camels (they have pads, not hooves), “coneys” (hyraxes), and hares. Next come animals that have cloven hooves but do not chew the cud, like swine. Then come water creatures: those with fins and scales are clean, those without are not. Of birds, including bats, a list is provided that consists basically of eagles, hawks, vultures, and other predators. Finally, all animals that “creep, going upon all four” and close to the ground, are taboo, with the explicit exception of grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets, which are fine.

       A range of explanations have been offered for these taboos, and clearly they cannot be covered by one single explanation. The taboo on cuds and hooves is clearly part of a general ban in Leviticus and Deuteronomy on anything that seems to mix up two categories or violate categorization rules, as shown by Mary Douglas (1966). (The same rule outlaws wearing mixed-fibre garments, plowing with a mixed-species team, and homosexual activity—seen as a category violation.)

       The rest of the rules, and also the pig taboo, are neatly predicted by one factor: the tabooed creatures are all eaters of meat or carrion, as shown by Eugene Hunn (1979). Elsewhere in Leviticus it is made clear that blood is sacred to the Lord, and must be shed in ritual fashion. Otherwise it is intensely dangerous and polluting. This is why kosher butchering is such an extremely important aspect of Jewish rules, and also why halal butchering is so important in Islam, which maintained many of the Jewish food rules. Animals that live by eating other animals, or blood, or carrion—which pigs do, with enthusiasm—are tabooed. After that, a miscellany of crawling things is tabooed simply because they are not obviously clean feeders—as grasshoppers are.

        The pig taboo has been extensively discussed over time, notably by Frederick Simoons (1994) and Max Price (2021). They argue for multiple factors. Carleton Coon (1958) pointed out long ago that pigs are hard to herd, don’t like desert vegetation, are not useful for milk, need water and mud, and otherwise do not fit well with mobile desert-dwelling nomads. Wild pigs thrive and flourish in the riverine and forest lands of the Near East, however, and can be kept and herded there, but the nomadic tribes had little love for the settled pig-herders, as Egyptian records tell us. Very likely, such rivalry was involved.

            In any case, the pig taboo goes far beyond ancient Israel. In fact, it extends throughout the Near East and India (though very “low caste” Indian groups sometimes keep pigs). Several Christian groups maintain the ban. Everywhere, it is justified by the filthy habits of pigs, which notoriously eat garbage, excrement, snakes, and the like, and wallow in mud. The Bible nails two unclean animals in one saying: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11) amplified by St. Peter to “The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire” (II Peter 2:22). One wonders how a good Jewish thinker knew that much about dogs and pigs….

            A quite different taboo goes all the way back to Exodus: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19, repeated verbatim in Deuteronomy 14:21). This has long been explained by stating that such a dish was a ritual dish of enemies of the Israelites. This explanation is found in Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed (1948, Hebrew original ca. 1190 CE), one of the greatest religious and philosophical works of all time, and that satisfies me, at any rate. Other explanations have been raised, including Mary Douglas’ category-violation theory, which seems much less persuasive here. Indeed, “kid boiled in its mother’s milk” is a known dish in non-Jewish parts of the Near East, morbid name or no. Naturally, the milk is usually from some quite other animal.

            Other food taboos are discussed extensively by Simoons (1994). It seems that almost every culture has taboos, or at least avoidances, and they usually concern animals, not vegetables. The Buddhist rule against eating onions and garlic has more to do with their bad scent and exciting nature than with uncleanness per se.

       The Biblical Land of Canaan was a land of wine. In a Canaanite city, 40 jars were found, dating to 1700 BCE. They were a meter high, total 2,000 liters (about 3000 bottles’ worth). The wine, some red and some white, was “sweetened with honey and infused with juniper berries, mint, cinnamon and myrtle.” Apparently they had cinnamon then. The whole operation was standardized; evidently the Canaanites had real quality control on a large scale (Netburn 2013).

       Dates were domesticated in Mesopotamia, and became a staple food quite early. Date syrup was produced by piling the dates on a clean floor and taking the liquid pressed out (Høglund 1990). Date syrup remains important, though now produced in more sanitary means. Dates must be pollinated, and many bas-reliefs from Assyrian times show the process, often done by angel-like winged figures.

The early Nubians, in southern Egypt, managed to treat their illnesses, apparently without knowing why; they brewed beer with Terramycin as part of the starter culture. Apparently it was abundant enough to cure bacterial ailments. The beer was a sour porridge, like modern African homemade brews (McNally 2016).

Near Eastern food historian Charles Perry has told me that the first reference to boiled noodles is in the Babylonian Talmud, 5^th C CE.

Medieval Near Eastern Food

            Medieval Near Eastern food is abundantly recorded. Arabs, and people of other backgrounds writing in Arabic, were enormously fond of good food. Many long and detailed recipe books survive. More impressive is the huge literature on food, from daily bread to feasts to famines. Food was medicinally evaluated, according to the classic humoral theory that goes back to Hippocrates (Buell and Anderson 2022). It spread from Greece to Anatolia and Syria, thence to the entire Arabic and Persian world. Persian hot/cold medical evaluation of food may be as old, reaching back to a very ancient common origin with the Hippocratic ideas. In any case, Arabic became the language of medicine by the 700s CE. Among Syro-Arab innovations is the idea that sweet, dulcet, pleasing food must be health-giving and strengthening, or at least digestive (Buell and Anderson 2022). These include sweet drinks, candies, cookies, small cakes, and the like (Yungman 2024). The English words sherbet, sorbet, shrub (the drink, not the plant), and similar words all go back to the Arabic root sh-r-b, “drink,” and were borrowed, mostly via Italian and French, because so many of these drinks were medically important.

Another valuable insight is captured in the saying: “When you sit with good company, sit long, for God does not count against your lifespan the time spent eating in good company” (attributed to Ja’far ibn Muhammad as-Ṣadīq, the Sixth Shi’a Imam, but not reliably nailed to him; see Buell and Anderson 2022 for discussion of this and the whole Medieval Arabic medical context). This remark captures a truth: enjoying good friendly company does prolong life, in proportion to the time spent.

Particulary impressive recent translations and studies by Nawab Nasrallah cover her own Iraqi heritage, and several early Arab cookbooks, translated in great detail and with notable accuracy (Nasrallah 2017, 2021, 2025, etc.). She discusses the medical issues in detail.

Serena Aneli and colleagues (2022) have tracked food and genetics across Central Asia. Genetically, Armenians and Georgians are largely descended from Caucasus hunter-gatherers, plus fair amounts of early Anatolian farmers. They have almost no Yamnaya-related steppe ancestry. Azerbaijan is similar, but has more Yamnaya heritage. Central Asia is broadly similar but has more genetic inheritance from farther east, mainly China: 41% among Kazakhs, 27% in Uzbekistan. Kazakhs, Tajiks and Uzbeks have 15-25% Yamnaya genetics, but very little early Anatolian farmers.

Food choices do not correlate with these genetic influences. They track Islam and Persian culture in Central Asia, though young males were and are more apt to drink than Islam allows. Skeletal data indicates they got few vegetables in the past.

Words traveled far: Farsi and Arabic Psikbaj for vinegar-sour foods became escabeche and ceviche in Spanish, for different foods. In Moorish Spain it evolved into a battered and fried fish dish eaten with vinegar, which was brought to England by Sephardic Jews and became fish and chips (Jurafsky 2014). Portuguese temperar (to season) and tempero (seasoned) were brought to Japan the same way, as batter-fried food, and became tempura (Jurafsky 2014:46).

One fascinating Medieval Near Eastern food was murri, fermented barley dough. The dough was inoculated with starter, wrapped in leaves, and left in a warm place. After much wondering about this substance, Charles Perry, leading scholar of Medieval Near Eastern foodways, decided to follow surviving recipes and create it. To his astonishment, the result was, basically, soy sauce. It disappeared from texts around 1400 (Perry 2012). This is not surprising; the fungi that do the fermenting turn out to be pretty much the same. Kevin John Qiu writes me (email of Feb. 27, 2024) that the starter, burdaj, is basically the same as the Chinese technology for making jiaqu (wine starter), and for Korean nuruk and Indonesian tempeh (fermented boiled soybean cakes). All involve paste wrapped in leaves—fig in the Near East; lotus, hibiscus, mugwort, or mulberry in E Asia. These leaves mostly inhibit wild fungi and bacteria that could spoil the ferment.

Modern Near Eastern, or Middle Eastern, Food

            Persian, or Iranian, food has a very long history. Iran was settled by Indo-European speaking nomads from the steppes, who assimilated whoever was there before, including Elamites in the southwest. The original center of power was Parsa, just north of the Elamites and in the low mountains—a dry, barren area, though with streams that concentrate water from higher peaks. The name gave us “Persia,” and later “Farsi” for the language, as p turned to f in such contexts. Iran always referred to the entire region, roughly the modern nation.

            Iran is basically a vast desert. Better conditions exist in the Zagros Mountains, the spine that runs along the western side of the country, but even they are dry and thinly vegetated. The only lush part of Iran is the Caspian Sea coast and the mountains behind it, which soar over 18,000 feet. They catch rain, and moisture from the Caspian Sea blows over the coast, making it a vast and rich oasis. It produces rice and other wet-climate products.

            The rest of the country is desperately short of water. Mountain chains produce small rivers, which flow into the surrounding basins, there to dry up and die without coming anywhere close to the sea. Cities arise where the rivers leave the mountains. Here, mountain drainages come together. Below the cities near the mountain feet, the rivers spread out into delta fans, and disappear in the sands.

            Water is captured by qanats: tunnels dug back into the outwash fans, to tap underground flow. These can be identified on satellite photographs by the neatly spaced rows of holes—wells that allow access for maintenance. Such management is exceedingly skilled and dangerous work, and is the realm of specialized experts, usually with long family histories. The qanat was probably invented in the borderlands of Mesopotamia. Few are left in Iran, but Afghanistan still has several. The great contemporary home of these water tunnels, though, is Xinjiang, where they were introduced—probably by speakers of Indo-European languages—many centuries ago. They are known there as karez.

            Moving westward, qanats were introduced by the Arabs to Spain, by the Spanish to Mexico (especially the Tehuacan Valley), and by Mexicans to California, where “water tunnels” were dug in the 19^th century to water San Bernardino. This bit of water lore was related to me by old-timers, many decades ago.

            Returning to Iran: current overdraft of rivers and groundwater, plus hotter and drier weather thanks to burning fossil fuels, is a deadly menace to Iran’s survival. An example of how bad things can get is the fate of the province of Sistan. It depends on the Helmand River, which flows from the mountains of Afghanistan, barely reaches Iran, and ends in what was once a huge and wet inland delta. Afghanistan now takes more and more of the Helmand water, and the Taliban government is not interested in the fate of Iran. 

            Far more pleasant is diving into the actual foods. Many foods and food words known all over the Middle East and Mediterranean have Iranian (Persian/Farsi) origins, such as kofta, from Farsi koftan, “to grind.” Nan, for bread, is the familiar Indo-European word pan, this time with n rather than f replacing the p. It has been borrowed from China to North Africa. Less well known, but found all over Central Asia, is kaleh pacheh, “heads and feet,” a stew of those parts of a goat or sheep, usually with other bits and pieces added. Liver, heart, and other organs are possible. (The result tastes much better than it sounds.) This food is eaten in one or another form, under recognizable derivatives of the Farsi name, as far east as the Uyghur cities of China.

            Historical records include a cookbook from 1521 (surviving in later additions; Hassibi and Sayadabdi 2018) that records a cuisine very much like today’s, including a heavy focus on flavorful stews. In it, pilaf did not involve frying the rice first before boiling it, but briyani did; this is the opposite of some modern usages. Pilaf in particular varies all over the map today, with different areas frying or not frying, and often acting differently with different materials (rice, bulgur…there are even fonio pilafs in Africa).

            Iran produces almost all the world’s saffron. This spice consists of the stamens of the saffron crocus (Crocus sativus). There are only three per flower, and they must be collected by hand, so the spice is expensive—often worth more than its weight in gold. It is disinfectant and digestive, but hardly available in enough quantity to make a medicine. Its intense flavor lights up Iranian cuisine and that of neighboring countries, but it is too expensive to have caught on widely. It is perhaps at its best in the meat-and-fruit dishes so typical of Iranian cuisine. It also figures heavily in their rice cookery. Iran grows it on about 50,000 ha of land (Koehler 2013). Spain and Morocco produce tiny amounts.

            Turkish food is a marvelous mix (not fusion; not all has fused) of Central Asian, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Arabic, and others. The Turks came from Central Asia in the 11^th century, and the Osmanlı (Ottoman) Turks completed the conquest of the moribund Byzantine Empire in 1421. Taking over its capital, Byzantion, they renamed it “Istanbul” (from a local phrase for “to the city”) and made it the crown and glory of Near Eastern architecture. It already had the magnificent Santa Sophia church, which became the grand mosque and set the style for further developments. The brilliant architect Sinan in the 17^th century repaired it and went on to build or oversee dozens of mosques, town halls, bridges, and other works all over the Empire, creating a distinctive and beautiful style

            Turkish food is based on a range of grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats (Işin 2013, 2018; Jianu and Barbu 2018). Wheat is the staple, providing not only bread but also bulgur, wheat parboiled and then dried and cracked. This is a rather rice-like staple, found originally in the more remote, mountainous, and poor parts of the Empire, but now worldwide as an excellent and convenient dish. Bulgur could substitute for rice in pilafs, which reached a level of glory in Turkey, now officially Türkiye.

            A major class of dishes consists of stuffed vegetables and fruits, called dolmas, which is Turkish for “stuffed.” This is an old type of dish, native to the Near East rather than Central Asia, and well attested in Medieval Arabic cookbooks. The Turkish Empire brought it to full glory. Not only vegetables such as squash, tomatoes, eggplants, onions, peppers, and even carrots, but also fruits including quinces and apples, are stuffed, usually with a mix of rice, ground meat, pine nuts, and herbs and spices. A striking eggplant dish is a lukewarm or cold salad, with the hollowed-out roasted eggplant holding a mix of chopped eggplant flesh, tomatoes, garlic, onions, pine nuts, herbs, and whatever else seems appropriate, dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. This is known as “The Imam Swooned,” the Imam being the head of the congregation of a mosque; depending on what folktale you hear, the imam swooned with joy at tasting it, with sorrow at not getting it, or with horror at the expense of the top-quality olive oil required. 

Armenian food includes ghapama: pumpkin stuffed with rice, nuts, seeds, honey, etc., and baked. It can also be stuffed with the usual stuffing mix of rice, pine nuts, spices, herbs, and sometimes tomatoes.

The food of the Levant—the eastern Mediterranean coastlands—is broadly similar from Greece through Syria and Palestine. Palestinian food has been chronicled by Sami Tamimi in Falastin and The Gaza Kitchen, and Reem Kassis, The Palestinian Table.

            Georgian food is one of the miracles of the human spirit. This tiny country on the east Black Sea coast has its own language family, unrelated to any other. It has a fair claim to being the true home of wine. The wine grape and the relevant strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewers’ yeast) come from there. The wine tradition is ancient, and after pressure to go into lowest-level industrial wine production in USSR days, traditional winemaking has returned (Capalbo 2017). The wine is aged in huge ceramic jars known as qvevri, which develop a particularly rich flavor.

            The staple is bread, but wheat is also made into many other products, the favorite of which is khinkali, dumplings. These are the local variant of the standard Near Eastern and Central Asian tradition. They are stuffed with ground meat or cheese, appropriately seasoned. Otherwise, stews abound, some preserving the ancient mix of meat and fruit that characterizes the Iranian cultural world. Also similar to Iran is the near-invariable serving of fresh herbs, including tarragon, green onions, and others, with the food. This is an art of which I am particularly fond.

            Georgian feasts are memorable and unforgettable. They are chronicled by Darra Goldstein (1999), to say nothing of Georgian literature. Food and wine, and often vodka, keep coming until the diner has lost all track of time (and probably everything else). Toasts are offered, and must be accepted, which involves downing a glass. My introduction occurred at a wine pairing feast, comparing French and Georgian wines, to show the superiority of the latter. I lost count of the courses at ten; each was followed by a full glass of each nationality’s appropriate wine. I had not been so drunk since graduate student days. I managed to get back to our hotel, fortunately only a block away.

            An odd Georgian delicacy in rural areas consists of green pine cones boiled in syrup.

A Near Eastern food that has gone worldwide is qaliya. The word is Arabic for “fried” (root q-l-y), so it can mean anything. It has been borrowed into languages from India (for curries based on fried meat) and Tibet to Sicily (calia, roasted chickpeas). All sorts of spicing and cooking methods occur. (Tom Hoogervorst’s 2022 article on it is possibly the most mouth-watering article in recent history). Sometimes the meat starts by boiling and then winds up frying, as the fat cooks out of it and the water boils away. This medieval Near Eastern method seems to lie behind Mexican carnitas, if they are not an independent Native American invention, which is possible; in any case, they use that method.

Central Asia

            Among many myths about Central Asia is the story of nomads preparing meat by putting it under their thighs, on the horses’ backs, and eating it thus raw. This story goes back to Ammianus Marcellinus, and appears to be anti-Hun war propaganda rather than reality, in spite of its being retailed by Bernard de Joinville in his life of St. Louis (1928).

            A tomb of a noble woman in Mongolia in the 13^th century contained yak milk (Ventresca Miller et al. 2023).

Europe

Perhaps “as much as 20 percent of the Neanderthal genome” persists in modern people (Shipman 2015:29). A huge eruption of Campanian crater covered cent Eur w ignimbrite around 39,300 years ago (Shipman 2015:52). Neanderthalss lived on big mammals and preferred cold. They apparently withdrew from the Levant around 70,000 years ago, then reinvaded when it got really cold again, persisting till 42,000 years ago. They preferred big game whenever they could get it, though they were flexible when necessary. They had higher caloric needs than we do today  (Shipman 2015:55-83).

Pat Shipman (2015:215-16) notes that humans and wolves (and coyotes and jackals) have conspicuous whites of the eyes and thus can show gaze direction to others. Other social canids too, and/or distinct fur patterns around eyes to emphasize. Other primates, and loner canids, do not have this feature.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around 45,000 years ago. “A single founder lineage” accounts for all before 14,000. It broke into groups in different areas. Neanderthal genes declined steadily from 4.3-5.7% to current 1.1-2.2, indicating selection against some genes.

Food processing was already happening. People were grinding oats into flour in Italy 36,000 years ago (Lippi et al. 2015)—some of the oldest known flour in the world.

Complex population moves took place in western Europe around 14,000 years ago (Posth et al 2023). There were new lineages, and more mixing from central Europe into western genetic pools. After 14,000, there was more and more Near Eastern input, especially after agriculture spread into Europe. There was even some East Asian mixing, notable even in far western Europe (Fu et al. 2016).

               Around 7000 years ago, all were overwhelmed demographically by the Anatolian farmers moving in, and later steppe people probably bringing Indo-European languages. The western group was dark-skinned but with lightish eyes, the later eastern in-migrants had lighter skin but darker eyes. From 2000 BCE, people from the steppe-derived groups became still more prevalent in Iberia, with dominance of Y chromosomes proving it was mainly males.

From 7500 to 3500 BP, Neolithic migrants from the Near East came in relatively small numbers, mixed with local hunter-gatherers, and formed very persistent and rather isolated local population (Valdiosera 2018).

A “ghost lineage”—previously unknown, totally absorbed into the general population now—brought a new genome to Europe 4000-5000 years ago, more in Scandinavia and extreme northeast Europe, where it goes back to 8000. Timing and are right for this being the bearers of the Corded Ware culture. The genetics are similar to that of the Mal’ta boy from 24000 years ago in Siberia. Some of this genome also occurs in Native America, so spread in both directions (Reich et al. 2019).

Earlier genomes in Europe include people “among the first people to split from the modern human population that swept out of Africa ome 60,000 years ago” (1107). The hunter-gatherer group had blue (or light) eyes, dark hair, dark skin; the farmers had brown eyes, dark hair, and lighter skin [classic Alpines]. Nobody knows about the third group’s colors (Gibbons 2014; Olalde 2014). There was selection for lighter skin color after 5000 BP, give or take several centuries, and for lactase production. This was associated with agriculture, which drastically reduced vitamin D consumption as compared to hunting and fishing (Wilde et al. 2014).

Agriculture probably came to North Africa from Iberia about 7400 years ago. Farming people mixed with local hunter-gatherers. Then Levantine immigrants brought stockraising around 6000-6500 years ago (Simões, Luciana, et al. 2023).

There was much aquatic food in over 1000 pottery shards analyzed from one site on the way into Africa. Fishers learned from local hunter-gatherers. Dairying is also attested by residues on the pottery (Lucquin et al. 2023).

A spread of farming from Anatolia occurred in 7000-6000 BC, possibly as early as 7500. These Anatolian farmers spread rapidly across Europe, expanding at about a kilometer a year. They introduced farming in most areas. Local hunter-gatherers were sometimes quick to pic it up, but sometimes stayed refractory and distinct for centuries. This expansion has been thought to be due to spread of Indo-Anatolian and/or Indo-European peoples, but took place improbably early for the phylum to have risen, or at least become identifiable as the linguistic world we know. Possibly Basque is a last holdout of the original farming languages.

Anatolia developed “proto-industrial exploitation of copper, gold and salt,” after 4600. Nomads came from the steppes after 4500 BC, but some had probably come earlier, mixing with the locals.

Older Southeastern European villages fell around 4400-4250. They were soon replaced by the huge towns of the Cucuteni-Trypillia (Tripolye) culture, largely or entirely of the Trypillia culture during the middle period, flourishing by 4300-3650. These depended on wheat (largely einkorn and emmer), barley, legumes (peas, broad beans, vetches), and animal husbandry, with heavy use of dung for fertilizer. The communities were democratically organized in neighborhoods with assembly halls. Some towns held around 15,000 inhabitants, on spacious lots in beautifully organized and laid-out communities.

These towns maintained a striking amount of equality, as shown by houses and burials; there is little difference in possessions. Consolidation of political power and rise of inequality in later Typillia, as well as Yamnaya incursion, led to more dispersal and smaller settlements (Hofmann et al. 2024; Kirleis et al. 2024).

The Trypillia-related cultures stemmed largely from the diaspora of farmers from Anatolia at an earlier time. Expected mixing with local people occurred, but was slow to become important (Nikitin et al. 2025). These cultures, with their large and peaceful towns and settled farming and herding life, were transformed by the Yamnaya expansion after 3700. Marija Gimbutas famously saw this as patriarchal, ferocious chariot-drivers attacking and devastating settle matrilineal farmers (Gimbutas 1965, 1974). Possibly; evidence is thin, but enough to indicate that Yamnaya did indeed replace the peaceful villagers (Nikitin et al. 2025). It is also important to note, however, that in Europe as elsewhere, a sharp cooling and drying took place from 4200 to 4000 BCE. It had local effects: serious in China, spottily in Europe (Marshall 2022). The fact that it comes at about the time of Trypillia decline is surely significant.

Full-scale steppe herding societies flourished by 3300 BC. New techniques for working land, dairying, making arsenical-copper alloys, etc. arose during all this time. The Chernavoda and Usatove cultures transferred a lot of knowledge from Cucuteni and Trypillia eastward, ca. 4000-3200 BC. Dairying arrived with the first Linearbandkeramik people around 5400 BCE.

There was very little lactose tolerance at that time; it increased enormously in later millennia. There is no evidence for selection for lactase persistence at the time when dairying comes in and becomes important. Instead, it appears after hard times, when subsistence was stretched. Richard Evershed and colleagues (2022) conclude that famine and disease make digesting lactose important and, especially, failure to digest it often fatal. Mild diarrhea in good times becomes major fatal diarrhea in bad ones.

Dairying reached the British Isles and north and west Eur about 6500 BCE, getting common by 5500, by which time clearly a major food source all over Europe. Selection for lactase persistence started in the southeast, the home of intensive livestock production, and spread. In Finland dairy foods were not a major food source until the early 3^rd millennium BCE. Lactase persistence dates back to 4700-4600 BCE, but was rare until around 2000 BCE, becoming common from then on.

Significantly, milk words, including “milk” itself, go back to proto-Indo-European, and converge on the steppes. Possibly the Yamnaya culture brought them (Garnier, Sagart, and Sagot 2017). It was almost certainly an Indo-European-speaking radiation, and certainly depended on stockraising.

Dairying restored Europeans to Paleolithic size. There had been a steady shrinking in height and body mass since 33,000 years ago. It leveled off around 9000 years ago, reversed 6000 years ago, and brought Europeans back to Paleolithic bulk by 3000, but with some decline again since then. Dairying is clearly associated, possibly the whole cause. A growth factor in milk, destroyed by fermentation, made unfermented whole milk particularly significant (Stock et al. 2023). No such decline appears in the Near East.

The huge sites “suddenly disappeared and were succeeded around 3300 BC by fully established pastoralists associated with the Yamnaya cultural complex” (Penske et al. 2023:359).  These were genetically a wild mix. There was some continuity from much older Mesolithic cultures, lots of genes from the Anatolian farmer expansion, much ancestry from earlier steppe nomads.

Very little genetic diversity existed in southern Southeast Europe; people were largely of Anatolian farmer ancestry. There were, however, many genes from local preagricultural people. The great steppe expansion of the Yamnaya culture showed a complicated and locally-varying mix of steppe, Caucasus, East European, and other genes on the steppes around 3000 BCE. Moreover, there was “a resurgence of HG [hunter-gatherer] ancestry observed widely in Europe during the fourth millennium BC… This indicates the presence of remnant HG groups in various non-farmed regions, for example, highlands and uplands or densely forested zones and wetlands…” (Penske et al. 364).

In what is now Moldova and Ukraine, the Trypillia towns had up to 15,000 people by 6000 years ago. They covered up to 320 acres. These were the biggest settlements in the world at the time. Grain and peas were the staple foods. Livestock were penned; the dung was used for fertilizer, especially on the peas (Kiel University 2023), which fix their own nitrogen but can profit from the compost and mulch and get some additional nitrogen.

Dairying was basic to these communities, and one assumes that milk was prepared in many ways, including yogurt and cheese. The lactase-persistence gene was rare in these groups, so they had to do something. Cheesemaking appears in Europe by the 6^th millennium BCE, but was already in Anatolia by the 7^th, as shown by residues in pots (Salque et al. 2013). The earliest cheese in Central Asia comes much later, but associated with probable Indo-European speakers. In Europe it was extremely important from early times. A history by Paul Kindstedt, Cheese and Culture (2012), focuses on its importance in ancient Greece and later.

Meanwhile: “Genetic diversity in west Eurasian human populations was largely shaped by three major prehistoric migrations: anatomically modern hunter-gathers (HGs) occupying the area from around 45,000 BP…; Neolithic farmers expanding from the Middle East from around 11,000 BP…; and steppe pastoralists coming out of the Pontic steppe around 5000 BP….” (Allentoft et al. 2024:1). These trends were pan-European. West European, east European, and Caucasus Mountains hunter-gatherers were genetically rather different.

The Anatolian farmers spread to south Europe around 6700 BCE, reaching all Europe over the next 3000 years. The steppe people, associated with the Yamnaya culture (in a broad sense), had eastern European and Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestors. While expanding west, they also expanded eastward, begetting the Sintasha and Andronovo cultures in Bronze Age Central Asia (Allentoft et al. 2024).

The western hunter-gatherer groups largely disappeared, but genes from them are not rare among modern Baltic and Belarus populations. Eastern hunter-gatherers survive largely in the Central Asian mixes that followed Yamnaya. Caucasus hunter-gatherers did better, leaving a large genetic legacy in Iran. The Anatolian farmers make up anywhere from 60% downward in Europe today, with the steppe people supplying the rest (Irving-Pease et al. 2024). Lactase persistence increased especially after 3000 BCE. Heavy dependence on grain came earlier, with genetic markers. Lighter skin and hair color probably tracked need for vitamin D manufacture in skin as people moved into the foggy northwest and ate less animal food (which contains D) (Irving-Pease 2024).

In Denmark, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers depending heavily on fish were almost entirely replaced by Neolithic farmers of Anatolian derivation after 3900 BCE. This was a thousand years later than similar Neolithic invasion farther south. Then came the people of steppe origin (again with much Yamnaya ancestry) from 2600 BCE. After this, Denmark remained about half steppe by ancestry, near half Anatolian, and a small but stable bit tracing back to pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers. During this time, hair color got lighter, and blue eyes somewhat commoner; Mesolithic people were generally dark (Allentoft et al. 2024; Allentoft, Sikora et al. 2024).

Some of the oldest beer in the western world turned up in southwest Germany, ca. 2,550 years old, thus associated with Celtic people. It had lactobacilli as well as yeast, and probably tasted as the Romans said: “like a billy goat” (from a poem by Emperor Julian, ca. 400).

Beer has continued to be the drink of much of Europe, and later the world (Schiefenhövel and  Macbeth 2011).

The debate between water and wine achieved classic form in the Middle Ages, and persisted in countless forms, declining from scholarly poetry to folklore (Hanford 1913). Water leads by saying that wine drives men mad and they often kill each other or lose their wealth. Wine responds that water is full of garbage and sewage, and kills people through disease, showing that sanitation was a very real concern in the Medieval period. The best version may be the earliest (Whicher 1949:238-247). The corresponding Chinese debate is between water, tea, and ale, with similar arguments, but water wins by pointing out that the other two are made from it. Wine, of course, is not made directly from water, but from grape juice; the grapes do the job of cleaning the water in the process of taking it up through their roots.

Around 1200 BCE, the climate grew somewhat dryer after a wet period. There wa a major sociopolitical crash in the Aegean area and the Near East. Mycenean forts and cities fell, Hittites declined, and Dark Ages set in. There was decline in the Pannonian Plain, with large forts abandoned, and in Scandinavia. Outside of those areas, Europe kept on without much change It certainly seems that the climate does not explain the level of decline in the Anatolia-Greece axis (Molloy 2023).

            Major ancient sources on European food include Xenophon’s Oikonomos, the source of our word “economy” (Xenophon 1990, Greek original ca 300 BCE). Xenophon was a student of Socrates, and gives us a Socratic dialogue about farming. It is an excellent guide, as well done as a modern gardening manual. Xenophon also wrote about horses, Persian culture, and many other matters. The modern word “ecology”—“household study”—was coined from “economy,” literally “household naming,” i.e. describing the household. Around 330 BCE, Archestratus of Sicily wrote a poetic treatise on luxury that survives in fragments (Archestratus 2011). It relates the delights of fish above all.

            Another major source was the poet Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (1928, Latin original ca. 55 BCE). It is a very long poem on the universe—its creation and form.

            Later came Geoponika, a Byzantine-era farming manual made up of quotes from earlier sources (Dalby 2011). It reveals a mix of good advice and classical mythology. It explains Apollo’s link with the laurel tree by the laurel’s value as hot-burning firewood, which connects it with the sun and thus the sun god—an odd attempt to make sense out of a myth that originally had Apollo chasing the nymph Daphne until she prayed to be saved from his lust by turning into a tree. The book explains how to make many medicinal wines, including rose-infused wine, and claims one can grow medicinal wine by inserting medicine into the vine slip (p. 117). It quotes a story that Bactrian camels are born from mating a male wild boar with a female dromedary. In spite of such oddities, most of the book is actually excellent advice on planting and growing Mediterranean foods and trees.

            Popular in the Roman Empire was garum, a fish sauce made by allowing fish to autodigest in salt, like southeast Asian sauces such as patis, nuoc mam, and nam pla. Some fermentation took place in some forms. As in southeast Asia, there were many types of garum, made from various fish parts including entrails, and various species of fish, and by various methods (Grainger 2016).

            The Romans famously used spices heavily. Spices were medicinal, but also a way to show off wealth and ability to get rare, exotic trade goods. They were imported in enormous quantities from south and southeast Asia, many of them coming via the Egyptian port of Berenike. This town lay at the mouth of an east-flowing wadi that could be tapped for underground flow of water, and headed near a west-flowing wadi reaching the Nile, allowing for caravans to carry goods back and forth to that great river. Black pepper was basic to the trade, but cinnamon, cloves, and other foreign spices. Produced at home were fennel, coriander, caraway, celery, summer savory, black mustard, parsley, and dill. Of these, coriander and possibly caraway were native to the Near East, but the rest were Italian. They dispersed with empire to the rest of Europe, but shrank back again during the Dark Ages (Livarda and Van der Veen 2008).

            The Avars, known in China as Rouran, were defeated by Turkic and Mongolic peoples and chased from today’s Xinjiang in China in the 500s AD. They settled in what are now Hungary and Austria around 567-8, remaining a distinctive and independent people until conquered by Frankish troops around 800, after which they dispersed and are lost to history (Wang 2025). They were among many “wandering folk” of the period, known to German historians as the Völkerwanderung. They and others from the east introduced many foods, probably including varius dairy and dumpling preparations.

Knotgrass seeds were used for porridge in the Dark Ages. Seeds of gold-of-pleasure, Camelina sativa, were used for oil. White-leaved spear orach was used for food and purge. Yields of grain 2 ½ to 3 ½ times the seed sown (compare to hundreds for maize today). In 16^th-century Sweden, beer consumption was 40 times what it is at present, partly because so much food was salted. (The beer was weaker than today, probably quite a bit weaker.) 835 cal/day/person from beer was typical, from a total around 4000/d/adult. Early beer used myrtle, rosemary, costmary, etc. instead of or along with hops. In the Harz Mountains, a harvest ration of beer was 7 litres/day. Buckwheat came to Netherlands by 1394-5 (earliest documentation). (Slicher von Bath, B. H. 1963).

Less choice was the raw or undercooked fish of eastern Europe. It transmitted tapeworms and other intestinal parasites (Yeh et al. 2014). This was still a problem well into the 20^th century (Desowitz 1981).

Meanwhile, Spain was ruled by Muslim Moorish dynasties, who conquered northward from Morocco in the 800s. They declined slowly, as Christian states expanded southward at their expense. The conquest was completed with the fall of Grenada in 1492; the loot allowed Ferdinand and Isabela to finance Columbus.

An archaeological window into the time is provided by Sarah Inskip and colleagues (2019). In the small city of Ecija, people lived on wheat bread. Barley was used, and after about 1200, sorghum. Sugarcane had come by the high Medieval period. Meat was from sheep and rabbits. The domestic rabbit is native to Spain; by this time it had been introduced widely in western Europe.

Such a roster was typical. During the time, however, not only sugarcane but many other crops came with the Moors. Arab culture spread rapidly to northwest Africa after the Muslim conquest in the 700s. Morocco has become a center of cooking, much of which is based on styles of cuisine going back to very early times in Iran and Arabia. Some traits include use of fruit in meat dishes, sweet-sour combinations, and complex spice mixes based on coriander, cumin, black pepper, cinnamon, and other warm spices. Only some of this caught on in Spain, but more widespread were new foods such as bitter (and much later sweet) oranges, lemons, limes, and other citrus, as well as useful plants like cotton and alfalfa (Watson 1983). Foods like almonds, pomegranates, wine grapes, and the commoner spices were already well known.

The linguistic effects were enormous. Just in the last paragraph, we have seen several words that came to English from Arabic via Spanish: orange (naranj), alfalfa, cotton (qutun, qoton in Andalusian Arabic). Less direct is sugar, from French sucre, Arabic sakkar, Persian shakar, ultimately Sanskrit (or derivative) sharkara. We can add tapas, from Andalusian Arabic tapashur, “tidbit, delicacy,” in spite of the delightful folk etymology that the snacks were used to cover (tapar) wine glasses. Sephardic Jewish adafina for cholent, the stew set up Friday to cook for the Sabbath when cooking is forbidden, is from Arabic al-dafina, buried (Schwartz 2001).

Catalan Medieval food was recorded by one Joan Santanach in the Llibre de Sent Soví, recently translated by Robin Vogelzang (Book of Sent Soví, 2008). It too has many Arabic influences.

Famines struck Europe in the 14^th century, because of population growth colliding with the cold, wet weather of the Little Ice Age. There were huge rains in 1315-16, up to four or five times normal. These not only caused famine but often eroded the soil to bare rock all round the North Sea; maybe half the topsoil loss in all history there; about 5 to 12% of the population of northern Europe died between then and 1322 (Rosen 2014:110-133). France fell from 17-20 million people to around 10 million after 100 yrs’ war and then the plague. Incidentally, Rosen provides data on terms. assarting was the process of a group clearing land, taking it over, and cultivating it—parceling it out. An acre was, originally, the area “that could be plowed by one man behind a single ox in a single day.”  A virgate was that which could reasonably be plowed by two oxen in a season. A hide was four to seven virgates, and made a reasonable estate (Rosen 2014:150-155). forestalling was selling to new clients and thus depriving your regulars.

People ate 2000-2100 cal/day, a very low level, and much of it was beer (Rosen 2014:155-160).

Then disease hit hard. Not only did humans die, but rinderpest, a virus related to measles, struck the animals.  Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), hoof-and-mouth (a viral disease), glanders (Burkholderia mallei), and liver flukes (Fasciola hepatica) all struck the livestock (Rosen 2014:185-275) at about the time the bubonic plague struck humans in 1346-48.

Ken Albala’s wonderful book The  Food History Reader provides short selections from the classic food writing of the world, from ancient Mesopotamia and China to modern classics. It samples Benedict’s Rule, Charlemagne’s Capitularies with incredible directions on what to grow in gardens (233), Al-Ghazzali on manners (251f), Avicenna (256f), Moses Maimonides (266-7), Islamic agriculture (272f), Taillevent’s instructions to Medieval French households (284f), the Menagier de Paris of the same general order (292f), Montezuma’s feasts as described by Bernal Diaz de Castillo (318f), More’s Utopia (332-3), Erasmus on good manners (very modern and proves they were as civilized as now, 339f), and dozens of other sources, down to modern times.

More odd terms and data come to us from Donald McDonald’s collection Agricultural Writers (1908), an anthology of early English texts. Aver was a cargo horse, as opposed to cheveau, a plow or riding horse; the name comes from haber,“to have” in Latin. The word can also refer to farm gear, and in this capacity it is the source of our word “average.”  Estates were very hierarchical—Lord, seneschal, then bailiff below him, then provost, then the various dairymaids (one was head), shepherd, cowherd, plowmen, etc. Yields were 1:3 or even worse. A typical sheep estate had around 400 wethers (castrated rams), 300 ewes, 200 hoggets (one- to two-year-old sheep), etc. (p. 99). Sheep that died of a murrain or the like were promptly skinned—saving the wool—and salted heavily. Herders were expected to sleep with their animals—grooms with horses, cowherds with cows, shepherd “and his dog” with the sheep, “dog boy” with the hunting hounds. They could not go home except on holidays (pp. 114-115).

Following that passage is a quote from John Worlidge, late 17^th century: “In several places in Germany whenever they fell a tree they always plant a young one near the place, and no young farmer is permitted to marry a wife till he brings proof that he hath planted and is a father of a stated number of trees” (p. 116). Clearly, the Germans had sense; no wonder they later became the guiding spirits of forestry in Europe. 

Among medieval writers was Walter of Henley (Lamond 1890).

A later writer, John Worlidge, commented in the late 17^th century: “In several places in Germany whenever they fell a tree they always plant a young one near the place, and no young farmer is permitted to marry a wife till he brings proof that he hath planted and is a father of a stated number of trees” (Lamond 1890:141). We desperately need this law.

            Among drinks were braggot: beer brewed with honey and sometimes spices (McGovern 2017:41-42).

            Wine arrived in France by 525 BCE, possibly introduced from Etruria (McGovern et al. 2013). At that time, it was preserved with pine resin, of which traces are found in the ancient jars. Modern Greek retsina maintains this tradition simply for the flavor.

            Spices came in Renaissance centuries to the far north. The first evidence of diverse spices in Scandinavia is provided by a wreck. King Hans of Denmark and Norway in 1495 sailed to a council meeting, hoping to play politics with the goal of taking over Sweden (Larsson and Foley 2023). His ship blew up (he was not on it at the time, but one suspects something…), preserving in deep water a record of the first saffron and ginger recorded in Scandinavia. There were also pepper, mustard, raspberries, hops, henbane, grapes, cloves, cucumber, dill, caraway, and a sturgeon, barrelled. High living.

            Early Scotland lived mainly on foods made from oatmeal and barley. They were usuallymade into bread, cakes (nonsweet), and porridge. Other, more mysterious, preparations included “sowens, lithac, drammack” (Bain 1973:20). Lithac is so obscure that it is not even in the OED, let alone in any online source. Drammock (sic) is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “raw meal mixed with water.” Surely this means parched grain, like tsamba; raw meal is inedible. Sowans turn out fascinating—the bran and husks from milling were saved, soaked, strained, and the resulting starchy stuff soaked with salt, which caused lactic fermentation, resulting in swat (the liquid) and sowans (the precipitate). Families would have a sowan-bowie (small barrel) for making and keeping it. Yule sowans was a custom. Apparently, the stuff was about as near to gourmetship as old Scotland could offer (Bain, Robert, 1973, with additional information from Wikipedia).

Problems of modern management are well described by John McNeill (2003). The superiority of older ways are well described by Grove and Rackham (2001). Replacement of sound management by capitalist exploitation devastated many of the mountain regions, and many lowlands.

Bread was the staple food of all Europe in early times, and is still so today in some areas. Jim Chevalier (2019, 2020) provides a detailed history of bread and baking in France. >GO FILL THIS OUT< Chevalier (2021) has also reconstructed the foodways of early Medieval France, before the days of heavy Italian influence. The food was, unsurprisingly, much like that of the late Roman Empire. Polenta (grain gruel; maize was not there yet) as well as bread were staples. Wine was the drink of choice, but beer and water were common. Olive oil was common in the far south, but elsewhere animal fats were used.

Nutritional medicine followed Galen, but his work was far from well known. A great deal of it had been lost in Europe, to be discovered later in Arabic translations and re-translated into Latin in the late Medieval period.

Nuts, fruits, and some vegetables were widely available. Presumably people did a great deal of foraging for wild foods, as they did in England and elsewhere. Enough folksongs turn on the dangers of women out in the forest harvesting nuts and wild fruits to show that this was a common thing but did expose women to raiders.

Pasta evolved in western Asia and south Europe independently from that of eastern Asia. (The stories of Marco Polo introducing it are fiction.) Early terms include the Iranian lakhsha for possibly for pasta in general, and rishta for long, thin types (noodles). These terms are still used, and lakhsha has been borrowed as far as Indonesia and China, where it fused with China’s own pasta dishes to beget laksa mian with southeast Asian spicing.

A worthy case study to illustrate many points about food history is A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce, by the Italian food historian Massimo Montanari (2021), profitably combined with the classic work Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food,by Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban (2002). All these authors are outstanding food historians of long experience.

Flat dry cakes were called laganon in ancient Greek, which became lagana in Latin (Montanari 2021:31). Another Latin word, tracta, appeared later, from trahere, to pull (Montanari 2021:32). Finally, a widespread word, itria (variously itrium, tria, tri, etc.; Arabic itriyya), appeared in late antiquity. The Arabic word fidawsh appeared in early Arabic society. It has spread into European languages, e.g. Italian fedelini (Montanari 2021:36). Spanish uses a straight borrowing, fideos, reflecting an Andalusian dialect of Arabic, which, like many Arabic vernaculars, converted short a to e and w (or short u) in o. It continues to be standard Spanish for thin noodles, and is often taken wrongly as a plural form. By Medieval times, pasta came into use as a general term in Italian, and macharoni for the dried types (Montanari 2021:40-43). More and more terms for specific types appeared. Spagho applied to “a wire for piercing the dough,” and did not give its name to spaghetti until the 19^th century (Montanari 2021:43).

Pasta was normally eaten with cheese, and often butter. Of course, it still is; for many, no pasta dish beats cacio e pepe, pasta with just salt, pepper, and the classic cheeses. In Sicily, primarily during the Arab reign (ca. 800-1100), the dish of macaroni and cheese evolved, strikingly similar to the modern form—one of the oldest dishes in the world. They also seem to have invented lasagna. Recall that Sicily was Greek before it was Arab, and laganon was a known word. Interlayering lagana (the plural)with cheese was an obvious idea. Toasting cheese on bread was also an easy thing to image, evolving into ancestral pizza. Pizza is apparently an Italian form of the widely used east Mediterranean term pita for bread or pie. Greece invented tyropita, cheese pie, pastry stuffed with good Greek cheese (tyically sheeps’ cheese). I recall staying in Greece many decades ago on very limited money and living largely on tyropita.

Being hot and slippery, string pastas called for forks, which were brought in as table ware probably for that very purpose in the Renaissance (Montanari 2021:57-58). Previously, they were large and heavy, their purpose being for cooks’ use to fish hot meat from stew. In ancient Ireland, cooks had their own flesh forks as prized possessions, but eaters used their hands.

Pasta became a staple food in Naples in the 17^th century; the rest of Italy joined on much later. Naples was identified as pasta country. Pasta machines and high costs of meat combined to produce this change (Montanari 2021:62). This may also have been the time that people took to cooking pasta a short time, to leave it al dente (Montanari 2021:65-67).

At present, a single factory in Parma, Italy, produces a wondrous 93,200 miles of spaghetti per day (Benton 2024:107).

One major advantage of pasta is that it is made of hard, protein-rich durum wheat (a form of emmer, not of bread wheat). It is thus slow to digest, resulting in a low glycemic index, much lower than such foods as potatoes, white bread, or white rice. It is relatively safe for prediabetics.

Tomato sauce, of course, had to await the exploration of Mexico. Tomatoes and chiles came in the 16^th century. Chiles were quickly accepted as spice, fitting into the pepper niche, but tomatoes were feared, being nightshades and similar to eggplant—a disliked vegetable regarded as unhealthy or worse (Montanari 2021:73-89). The revisionist idea that tomatoes were not regarded as poison is shown wrong by several quotes from the 16^th century (Montanari 2021:74).

The long-standing claim that tomato sauce is first noted in Italy, as “Spanish sauce,” is correct: it occurs in “Scalco alla Moderna (The Modern Steward) by Antionio Latini,” who had worked for a Spanish family. His sauce used tomatoes, roasted and skinned, cut up; chiles, onion, thyme, salt, oil, and vinegar (Montanari 2021:78-79). This is recognizable Mexican salsa (tomatoes, chiles, onion) converted into a salad. Later sauces are similar; more herbs were gradually added, from rosemary to—finally—basil. Garlic and other ingredients came soon. Montanari found no clear origin point for spaghetti with tomato sauce. It is an obvious enough thing to invent. It may have had multiple origins.

The meatball so identified in America with Neapolitan-style spaghetti and tomato sauce is an American addition, though likely by Neapolitan immigrants. Heavy immigration from Naples shaped American ideas of Italy and Italians, from food habits (pizza, spaghetti with tomato sauce) to songs, stereotypic costumes, and cusswords. Many of us born in mid-twentieth-century America got our introduction to Italian food from Chef Boy-ar-dee cans; Chef Boyardi was a real person, an Italian-American, and his canned food was not that bad.

Most of Italy is wheat country, but the central Po River Valley is rice country. Mile after mile of rice paddies occupy the horizon. Towns are devoted to rice; they are bare, stark places where finding a restaurant, even one specializing in rice dishes, is surprisingly difficult. Risotto is the local dish. It is apparently derived from pilaf, being based on rice fried in butter and then boiled in stock. The classic risotto rices, Carnaroli and Arborio, were developed in Italy surprisingly recently: in 1945 and 1946, respectively. Mussolini had pushed for growing more rice. Unlike most of his heritage, this was advantageous and persisted (Moyer-Nocchi 2015).

Pizza, the other world-famous carbohydrate dish, was a Naples specialty, with a low reputation (Moyer-Nocchi 2022). It was considered an unclean, disreputable street food, associated with cholera-ridden Naples (Nowak 2014). Workers bought slices of it as quick bites. Eventually, quality pizzas appeared, and the pizzeria got some degree of respect. But when I was in Italy as recently as 1988, pizza was despised outside of the Neapolitan area. My then-teenage daughter asked for it in northern Italy and drew scathing contempt for such an order. I warned her it wouldn’t be very good, and it wasn’t. Pizza’s conquest of the United States was also a matter of swimming upstream. When I was young and living in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was regarded as a lowly Italian food of dubious merit; a letter in 1954 to the local paper said that it was foreign and therefore Communist and therefore should be banned. Its success had much to do with the fact that the pizzeria filled an empty niche for a place for quick, filling food, relaxation, good times, eating with the hands, and generally unwinding. Even hamburger joints had become too staid for the rising younger generation. We of my generation thus betook ourselves in our teenage years to pizza joints and submarine sandwich shops, subs being the other great Italian introduction in the post-WWII era. It was part of the liberalization that gave us rock’n’roll and other abominations to our elders.

Like many Italians, Montanari casts a somewhat askance eye at “the Mediterranean diet,” noting there is nothing remotely close to one Mediterranean diet, and the various things that non-Italians mean by the term were assembled late and from various sources. Possibly more sensible is the folkloric division of Europe into “potato Europe and tomato Europe,” the line being roughly similar to the divide between north-draining and south-draining rivers (plus Iberia), though one notes that most of the Alps are potato country whichever way the rivers run. And a Hungarian would surely protest “We love both!

Wine and beer have a long and distinguished history in Europe.

Lager beer resulted from a cross between a German brewers’ strain, Saccharomyces pastorianus, apparently a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus, this apparently taking place in Munich, where the original lager apparently originated at the original Hofbräuhaus, between 1602 and 1615 (Gibbons 2023). It involves a long cool storage (lagering) process during which the beer matures and develops flavoring.

Champagne was an ordinary though good wine till the 18^th century. It rarely had gas bubbles. Then English taste, English access to corks, and English superior glass conspired to move it to the bubbly. There were three French gourmets in the 17^th century who would drink wine from only Champagne slopes (Van Dyk 2015; see esp. p. 84).

A whole class of fermented products occurs in Albania (Quave and Pieroni 2014). These include fruit drinks and other products as well as a range of dairy products. Many are regarded as medicinal.

British food has a somewhat unfair reputation for blandness. It was spicier in the past. It also had many vegetables from early on (Thick 2014), in London and other areas with relatively wide-ranging tastes, even Scotland.

The British Isles developed a dish notable for tastiness, “Welsh rabbit,” cheddar (or similar) cheese on bread, toasted together. No rabbits; the word was originally “rare bit.” This was long a staple food in our house, my older son depending heavily on it during teen years. It is sometimes flavored with Worcester sauce and the like, but he and many others prefer the pure form.

That great Scottish dish, the haggis, was originally English and more varied and good than now. Many variants existed, with cream, eggs, currants, spices, and more. They were all in a stomach of some kind but not all with lungs or other innards used in the proper Scottish classic. That form today consists of finely-chopped lungs, liver, heart, and possibly other bits, in a matrix of oatmeal, steamed in a sheep’s stomach. It nested in Scotland at some unspecified early time but did not become the Scottish national dish till Burns immortalized it and England dropped it (Brears 2015). It is traditionally served with Scotch whisky (note there is no “e” in Scottish spelling), sometimes flambé in it but always consumed along with it. Some say a good deal of Scotch is necessary to make it palatable. Actually it tastes like a meatloaf, with quality depending on the cook.

The potato was soon introduced to Europe after being encountered in the western hemisphere, but did not catch on quickly. Contrary to myth, it was not widely rejected because it looked leprous or was not in the Bible (Earle 2020); the problem was that the original potatoes are tropical, and could not adjust to Europe’s exceedingly long summer days and short winter ones. The spread of the potato awaited introduction of potatoes selected by the Mapuche of Chile to flourish under such temperate regimes (Salaman 1949). Chilean potatoes reached Europe before 1700 (Knapp 2008). Chiloe Island was, and remains, the great source of temperate-zone potatoes. The Mapuche and mixed-ethnic farmers of Chiloe continue to grow a vast variety of potatoes, because the people and potatoes are routinely sought out by breeders needing new genes for resistance against potato blight and other diseases.

Nevertheless, there was initial resistance to an unfamiliar crop (Salaman 1949). Parmentier established a seedbed and put heavily armed guards around it—the guards instructed to ignore anyone trying to steal planting stock. Soon the garden was heavily looted, and potatoes were growing more and more widely in France. For this he became the nominate individual of many potato dishes in French cuisine. Supposedly (but dubiously), Catherine the Great wore wreaths of potato flowers in her hair.

Acceptance finally came with a rush. By the 1840s, the potato was the staple food of the colder, wetter parts of Europe. Then came the even colder and wetter weather of the 1846-48 years. Crops failed everywhere, and the potato was devastated, especially by late blight carried by Phytophthora infestans. This plant is usually called a “fungus,” but is in fact a seaweed; its closest familiar relative is kelp. It thus depends on water, and thrives only in very wet weather when the potato beds cannot dry out. A strain from Mexico (Goss et al. 2014) reached Europe and proliferated. By 1848, it had killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions to desperation, often migration to America (Lang 2001; Salaman 1949; Woodham-Smith 1962). England stood by, providing some relief (grain and more potatoes; see Geber et al. 2019) but very little, on the assumption that the “free market” would lead to plentiful supplies. This failed to occur, and Ireland never forgave the English, breaking away in independence in 1921. Today, in one of history’s more amazing ironies, Ireland has the highest per capita income in the world, far exceeding that of the UK.

Not only Ireland, but also all of northern continental Europe, was devastated. This had much to do with the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, which inspired the Communist Manifesto and the whole Marxist movement. The United States was demographically and culturally transformed by thousands—ultimately hundreds of thousands—of Irish and German immigrants. There are now many times as many people of Irish descent in the United States than there are in Ireland. Latin America also received heavy immigration, the linguistic unfamiliarity offset by the familiarity of the Catholic religion. As late as 1916, potato blight led to 700,000 hunger deaths in Germany, war having taken the copper used for fungicides (Walters 2017). The blight continues to devastate crops in Asia.

The potato continues to evolve and develop. The domestic plant is tetraploid, making it hard to breed, so diploid varieties have been bred. Europe long remained the center of potatoes, but they are now more important in Asia (especially montane areas) and North America (Stokstad 2019). Ironically, they are possibly least important in their South American home, where they have never overcome an identification with the Indigenous people, who until recently were despised, oppressed, and as thoroughly ignored as possible in that continent.

Faroese food runs heavily to meat and fat. Among the delicacies are fermented mutton. Skerpikjøt is wind-dried mutton, raestkjøt the fermented form. These have a very complex bacteriology, but Lactobacillus is the key to preserving and providing taste. A gourmet tourism is now featuring it (Svanberg 2021, 2023). One recalls pinikjøt, dried sheep’s thorax, a delicacy I have enjoyed in Norway.

Michel De Certeau’s fascination with everyday life has led to some wonderful food ethnography in Lyon, France (De Certeau et al. 1998). Bread is still respected to almost sacred level. Wine is of course the complement, routinely consumed. White wine is sometimes flavored with blackcurrant liqueur, but not to the point of a Dijon Kir or a Lyonnaise Communard (red wine and blackcurrant mix).

            Russian food history is its own universe, covering a vast tract of Eurasia. It was a realm of scattered hunter-gatherers until agriculture slowly spread north and east via the Caucasus and the Pontic steppes. Stockraising nomadism developed in what are now Ukraine and Kazakhstan in the 3^rd and 4^th millennia BCE, as horse domestication progressed. Horses were first kept for meat and milk, then for pulling carts, finally for riding, and with that invention the steppes were open for long-range nomadism. Indo-European speakers were in at the birth of this, and spread the new technology rapidly into a land inhabited by Uralic, Turkic, and various less-known and distinctive langauges such as Ket and Yukaghir. Reindeer were domesticated possibly in the upper Yenisei drainage, possibly in far north Europe; either way, they were evidently domesticated in imitation of earlier domestication of livestock, and probably by people who already had herds (Vainstein 1980). Reindeer are thoroughly domesticated in those areas, but as one moves northeast, the reindeer are less and less domesticated, until in the extremely remote wilds of far northeast Siberia the Chukchi and Koryak try to manage wild or almost-wild herds.

            Early agriculture was, as elsewhere in west Eurasia, based on wheat and barley, with legume crops. By 2000 BCE, broomcorn millet was moving into central Asia from China. Between about 2000 and 1000, it became a staple crop, since it can tolerate drought and cold better than the western crops. It was the main crop in northern Russia until the early Medieval period.

            In the early Medieval centuries, the Vikings, locally called Rus, moved via rivers from Scandinavia to the Caspian Sea, and set up local states. Kiev became the main capital, and the country took the name Russia.

Arab travelers from the 10^th and 11^th centuries, notably Ibn Fadlān, report millet as the main crop, and introduced some superior strains of it (Ibn Fadlān 2012). They also note the making of birch beer from birch sap, in such a confusing way that the suffering modern editor concluded they were describing palm wine far from its real home. (Ibn Fadlān’s description is, however, perfectly clear to anyone familiar with the region; Ibn Fadlān 2012:34.) Ibn Fadlān and others were fed some hilarious tall stories. One was told that beavers keep enslaved weaker beavers, consigned to lower parts of their lodges, and this explains mangy skins; also that Christianity was better than Islam because it allows wine but only one wife, and women weaken but wine strengthens (Abū Hāmid in Ibn Fadlān 2012:83). The Arabs, and later writers (Goldstein 2020), report enormous numbers of beehives in the forest, and thus great consumptioin of honey. Bees, and honey-hunting bears, were common enough to be a danger. The Russians share the widespread fear of calling bears by name, and thus the word medved, “honey-eater,” came to be standard (Goldstein 2020:65ff).

Russia soon found rye to be superior to millet, leading to the rapid increase of the former at the expense of the latter. Darra Goldstein’s superb history of Russian food is even titled The Kingdom of Rye (2022). From her we learn that rye took over after 900—evidently considerably after, given the Arab accounts. It became the major food crop in the colder parts of Russia, though wheat and barley were grown as luxuries and continued to dominate the warmer south. Later, the Russians, and Germans in Russia, developed the extremely cold-tolerant wheats that took over much of the steppes. These are hard red wheats, superior for bread making. Many of the Germans were religious minorities, especially Anabaptists, encouraged by Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to come to Russia, escape intolerance at home, and introduce modern farming practices. They moved in large numbers to the Plains of North America in the 19^th century, and thus the hard red cold-loving wheats came to dominate wheat production in the Dakotas and the Canadian Prairie Provinces.

They also introduced the “mammoth Russian” sunflower, which now dominates vast acreages in the Plains—an ironic case of a plant “not without honor save in his own country” (as Jesus said), since the sunflower is native to central North America and was domesticated there and in north Mexico, but was perfected as a major crop far away in Russia and Ukraine, and then returned from that distant realm to its native home. (A good deal of the above is from narratives I heard in youth; I was raised in Nebraska and went to school with many children of Russian German families, and later learned more about their stories.)

Bread was the staple, and was considred sacred, as elsewhere. The Russians picked up Near Eastern bread types, and with them the widespread taboo against letting a crumb fall and be stepped on. Bread, however, was a luxury in really hardscrabble areas like Belarus in the old days. Grain porridge and potatoes were daily fare (Bolotnikova et al. 1979).

Then as now, river fish were important, often the main source of protein. Some in eastern Russia are anadromous, living in the Pacific and running up rivers to breed. Huge runs of sturgeons formerly ran upriver from the Caspian Sea. These included the enormous beluga or huso (Huso huso), which could weigh over 1500 kg. Female sturgeons produced up to hundreds of pounds of eggs, and given Russia’s pickling culture, caviar resulted. It was at first a local staple food; it became a luxury in urban Russia, and then a super-luxury when rich Russian landlords and nobles introduced it to France in recent centuries. Alas, its popularity was its destruction. Sturgeon fishing soon went out of control. Now, the rewards of poaching in Russia, Iran, and other bordering countries, as well as for Pacific sturgeon in eastern Russia, are enough to tempt poachers to ignore high risks, and wild sturgeons will certainly be extinct in Eurasia before 2100 unless a miracle happens. The beluga is critically endangered. Sturgeons survive in North America, in tiny fractions of their former numbers, but the only real hope for caviar comes from sturgeon farming, perfected at the University of California, Davis, and catching on worldwide as disease problems are addressed.

Beyond sturgeon, many forms of carp, pike, and sander (Sander spp.) occur, as well as other more obscure species. Catfish grew to enormous size in the past. The wels or sheatfish (Silurus glanis), found in major rivers throughout eastern Europe and into Central Asia, may grow to almost 3 meters in length. It too is getting rare.

Cabbages grow well into the far north, producing enough vitamin C to sustain life. Vitamin C also comes from wild forest foods. The forest produced not only greens, berries, and medicinal herbs, but game and protein-rich mushrooms; hunting and gathering were thus often necessary to life in the old days. Fireweed was an important source of greens rich in vitamin C (Goldstein 2022:39), as in North American Indigenous societies.

Potatoes came in the 18^th century but still met resistance in the 19^th (Goldstein 2022:49). They were inevitably accepted, and became a staple food, necessary to survival in the many subsequent famines.

            Another cold-tolerant crop was the beet, which prospered in the warmer southwest. Russian cooking depends heavily on the sharp, intense flavorings that manage to grow in a cold climate: dill, horseradish, celery, wild greens and mushrooms. Also, fermentation comes into its own, to make those sharp intense flavorings out of ordinary foods. Sour cream, sourdough bread, pickled cucumbers, pickled mushrooms, pickled beets, pickled fish, and anything else easily fermented by Lactobacillus provide much of the flavor of Russian and East European food.

            One of the ferments is kvass, basically bread beer. Bread, or some similar cooked grain food, is left in water, sometimes with a starter, and kept warm. It produces a sour, slightly alcoholic drink. Far more serious is vodka, usually made from grain in spite of the legend that it is made from potatoes. (It can be, but rarely is.) Vodka (“little water” in Russian) is essentially unaged whiskey. Basically raw alcohol cut with water (some), it usually has no taste, but is often flavored with anything from chile peppers to lemons. In Poland, the traditional flavoring is buffalo grass, more or less similar to American sweetgrass. Yorsh, vodka and beer (Goldstein 2022:26), resembles the American boilermaker (whiskey with beer either mixed in or as a side shot).

A final alcoholic drink is mead, brewed from the honey that abounds in eastern Europe. It was a major indulgent before vodka entered the picture. Other drinks include a wide range of nonalcoholic fruit and honey drinks, to say nothing of pickle juice.

            Russian dumplings clearly derive from the Iranian-Turkic universe, but they have local names. Pel’meni comes from the Komi-Perm language, an obscure tongue related to Finnish, and means “dough ears.” Vareniki derives from an old Russian root, var-, for boiling (Goldstein 2022:27, 36). Kreplach is the Yiddish word, going back to older German krapfe “pastry.”

             The Tatars, a Turkic minority widely distributed in Russia and locally in Finland and elsewhere, have their own dumpling, pärämäts or peremech. It is a flat, circular dumpling with the usual variety of stuffings—meat, mushrooms, cheese, berries, and so on—which is baked or fried. Like dumplings throughout the Turkic, Russian, Chinese, and other realms, they have an enormous cultural significance (Ståhlberg and Svanberg 2025). They are a symbol of home, family, and good times, and thus have become major ethnic markers in the multiethnic world of the Tatars. As with pel’meni, and as with Chinese jiaozi, they are made in large quantities by the whole family or even groups of neighbors. Rolling out the dough, making the stuffing, and finally pleating the dough to make the necessary folds on top, is a good-time activity. The whole cult of dumplings and the good times that families and groups of friends have in making them together is a major part of life in central Asia and areas influenced from it.

Ukrainian cooking is like Russian, but with more ingredients, and fairly luxurious use of some that were scarce in Russia. and Ukraine. Borscht centers in Ukraine. It not always made from beets, but typically is. There are probably more borscht recipes than there are Ukrainian and southwest Russian cooks; everyone seems to have their own favorites, not just one favorite. My Ukrainian cookbook (Georgievsky et al. 1975) includes 24 borscht recipes, and a couple for holodnik, more or less borscht without beets. Varenitzi is the dumpling word.

            An example of how a culinary myth can begin and propagate is provided by the word “brunch.” For decades, the invention of this word and concept was credited to one Guy Beringer in 1896. Hannah Reff (2016) finally ran him down, and found he existed only in a short story in the British humor magazine Punch. Someone took the story seriously, probably from a joke reference, and the same line with the same attribution was solemnly repeated from author to author for decades. Reff found that the word was actually invented by English college students at about that time; Oxford blames Cambridge and Cambridge blames Oxford.

            This is all too typical of what passed for culinary history before recent decades. The claim that Marco Polo introduced spaghetti to Europe also originated in humorous fiction. French food history is full of myths, most of them enthusiastically propagated in the 20^th century by the Larousse Gastronomique, a food dictionary. It has taken much effort to run down and correct these stories.

            I have personally watched a few errors creep into the literature through mistranslations of Chinese. The Chinese, like other people in this world, oten named foreign crops after their own local equivalent. Just as English has “Tahiti apple, “rose apple,” and for that matter “pineapple” for fruits nothing like an apple (or a pine cone—“pineapple” originally meant “pine cone”), Chinese named the pineapple the “foreign jakfruit,” guava the “foreign pomegranate,” asparagus “foreign wildrice-shoot,” sunflower the “foreign mallow,” and so on. These tend to lose the “foreign” qualifier over time, and then westerners think the plant was found in China centuries before it could have been there.

Africa

            Africa is the home of humanity. We evolved from ape ancestors there, over the last two million or more years. Most of the action seems to have taken place in east and south Africa, but conditions for preserving fossils are poor in the central and west, so expect exciting results from those areas someday.

Africa still has large numbers of people dependent on hunting and gathering. Most are genetically different from cultivators around them.

The most famous groups are the San (variously named locally) of southern Africa, the “Bushmen” of past colonial naming. They have been made famous by the work of Richard Lee (1979) and many others. Also famous are the Hadza, a tiny group that still hunts in the wild, rugged, and difficult country east of Lake Eyasi and west of Lake Manyara in Tanzania. Most are now settled, but a stalwart group of a few hundred refuses to give up their free lifestyle. They live largely on meat, wild roots, and on honey from wild bees, which are smoked into calmness and seem used to being robbed.

Herman Pontzer’s wonderful book Burn (2022)provides a great introduction to the Hadza. His own introduction was dramatic enough: in their tents, he and other researchers new to the area heard lions growling and scuffling around their tents. The researchers cowered in fear. When morning came, they were treated to a wonderful fresh meat breakfast by their new Hadza friends. “You guys heard th elinons list night, right?….Well, we figured they were up to something, so we went and checked it out. Turns out they had just killed this kudu…so we took it” (Pontzer 2022:5). People who think nothing of taking a fresh kill from a pair of lions are definitely tough. I have watched hyenas try to do it and be terrified into retreat.

I have never met the Hadza, but I had a strong sense of homecoming when I first went into their country, coming down to Lake Manyara. It is high enough to be pleasantly cool compared to the burning plains of much of Africa. It is a large fresh lake, surrounded by marsh, swamp, riparian forest, and grassland. You reach it by dropping from a high plateau through savannah country with grass and scattered trees. The whole picture is exactly the sort of mixed ecosystem where you would expect humans to evolve. We re-create such landscapes in gardens and parks, from Japan to Renaissance Italy and from old Persia to modern California.  Most of the land on the high plateaus above Manyara was Maasai country when I was first there, and I have spent some time with the Maasai. Cultivation is now rapidly encroaching on the Maasai and Hadza, as Tanzania’s population rapidly expands. One hopes for a bearable future.

In spite of getting a lot of meat, the Hadza live to a large extent on roots and on honey. An odd bird, the Indicator, whose scientific name is Indicator indicator, often leads them to beehives, and then eats the larvae and wax—it can digest beeswax. I have had the experience of being led in a beehive direction by an indicator bird; it is a rather surrealistic experience.

Rainforest areas of central Africa have their own hunter-gatherers, in the richest forests. They are small people, adapted to a world where protein is largely unreachable in the treetops. They preserve genetic differences from the cultivators around them, who moved in from the northwest in the last few thousand years. Connectivity of hunter-gatherer populations in the forest zones diminished during ice ages, but got back to current levels between. They have been around for at least 120,000 years. Connectivity increased around 105-110 thousand years ago, again at 68-87 thousand, and yet again at 17 to 12, because of drastic reduction in forest range due to the Ice Ages. This reduction forced them into small areas and brought them into more contact with settled farmers. The current population of hunter-gatherers in central Africa is about 200,000 people (Padilla-Iglesias et al. 2022).

            The San (with their Khoi or Khoekhoe relatives, who herd livestock) and the Hadza both speak isolated languages without surviving relatives. Both stocks are click languages, making phonemes by implosion, unlike all other world languages. San is also extremely phoneme-rich. One suspects many such languages are long lost.

            Outside of these, modern Africa has only three great language phyla: Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo. These are all native to the continent. Afro-Asiatic has a center of diversity in the southern highlands of Ethiopia, and I am fairly sure it developed there. Its most famous branch is Semitic, which probably started in the central highlands of Ethiopia, where Amharic and several relatives survive, but soon reached the Near East and differentiated there. Babylonian and Assyrian go back more than 4000 years, and the Semitic languages were probably already in the Near East by 5000 BCE. Sumerian, their predecessor language in Mesopotamia, was completely replaced by Semitic languages, which soon gave rise to Hebrew, the Arabic languages, and relatives. It has occurred to several that the Biblical Eden is a paradise surronded by desert and watered by four rivers draining north, east, south, and west—a perfect description of the Ethiopian highlands, with the rivers being the Awash, Webi Jubba, Omo, and Blue Nile.

            The Nilo-Saharan phylum goes back more than 10,500 years, to an ancestral language somewhere near Lake Chad or in the southeast Sahara. Most of the Nilo-Saharan languages are incredibly obscure, spoken by small groups in remote areas. The best-known groups to the outside world are the Maasai and their cattle-herding neighbors in interior East Africa.

            The Niger-Congo languages center in west Africa, where a fantastic diversity exists from Senegal through Nigeria. 2000 to 3000 years ago, one branch, the Bantu, grew in one of the most amazing expansions in linguistic history. Within a few centuries, the world from Nigeria to South Africa was speaking Bantu languages. Swahili is the one best known to the world. I have some experience with both ends of the phylum, knowing a tiny bit of Wolof from the far west, and having studied Swahili briefly in the far east.  

            Agriculture apparently did not begin in Africa, but it acquired wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, and other major cultigens from the Near East almost as soon as those were domesticated. Nilo-Saharan does not have a shared agricultural vocabulary, but its main branches do (especially for livestock; these are herding peoples), showing that agriculture came about the time they were differentiating, some 10,500 years ago (Ehret 2017). Afro-Asiatic has many shared terms going back at least that far. Niger-Congo’s earliest agricultural words appeared about the same time, around 5000 BCE (the proto-language had a word for fonio [Ehret 2017:72), but it was probably gathered wild). Agriculture moved rapidly into the African world. By the time the Bantu began their epic migrations, they had words for oil palm, groundnuts, goats, gourds, yam, and black-eyed peas (Ehret 2017:76), among other things.

The Nile Valley of Egypt became the heartland of African agriculture, and served as a corridor for it to move rapidly south. As the Ethiopian highlands were reached, new crops were domesticated at some uncertain but probably early time. Beer spread with the Near Eastern crops (Arthur 2021). A beer in Nubia around 3000 years ago proved to contain terramycin—the mold was one of the fermentation agents—and the people of the day were presumably healthy.

            In general, northern Africa was populated from Europe, northeast Africa was always more or less part of the Near East demographically, and sub-Saharan Africa was a different world genetically, with intergrading only in Ethiopia and along the Nile. Little is known about the Sahara, now largely uninhabitable. But in the early Holocene, it was all woodland and grassland, except for a small area of desert around the Nile. Lake Chad was as big as Germany.  Recently, two mummified women who lived 5000 years ago in Takarkori, in the middle of the Sahara, were genetically analyzed. The two are representatives of a lineage known previously only as a mysterious component in the genomes of a few individuals from Morocco. It is not related to sub-Saharan people, and only distantly to Mediterranean populations (Salem et al. 2025). By this time sheep and goats were herded there, but they were ordinary Near Eastern ones.

Herding appeared by 5000 BP in Kenya. It was highly specialized, with heavy milk dependence and probable lactase persistence gene, by 3000 BP. In 5000 BP the cattle were largely for meat, though milk was used. Milk dominated by 3000 (Grillo et al. 2020). The timing is similar to that for central Asia and a bit later than that for eastern Europe. 

Ethiopia and neighboring areas were characterized by agro-pastoralism from 1600-900 BCE, then agriculture. The usual Near Eastern crops appeared: emmer, barley, flax. Tef, millets, and possibly sorghum had also appeared by then (Beldados et al. 2023).

Chief among these was tef (Eragrostis tef), a species of weeping lovegrass that is adapted to the cold, moist climate there. It became the staple food, which was fortunate, since it is high in iron, otherwise desperately short in many African diets. It is made into injera, a large sourdough pancake. Food is placed on this pancake and eaten by hand with further injeras. A bite of food picked up by a small piece of injera is a gursha in Amharic, and gurshas are exchanged between family members as a bonding ritual. New barley varieties suited to the climate also emerged. An oilseed, Guizotia abyssinica, was developed and remains important. A range of minor crops appeared. Ethiopian food, in sharp contrast to most African food, is one of the great gourmet cuisines of the planet.

Injera at its best is as good as any bread on earth. It is eaten with highly spiced stews of beef, mutton, goat, and chicken, as well as many leguminous crops, green vegetables, and other foods. Spiced butter, extremely hot chiles, and a range of spices from the Near East and India add flavor; turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, and black pepper are widely present. A unique touch is provided by red onions sliced very thin and slowly caramelized in a dry pan.

Shiro flour is made of yellow split peas, often with fava beans (of which Eth is the world’s 5^th biggest exporter), grass peas, field peas, and spices. (Favas are called by the Arabic name of fuul.) Mitin shiro has vetch, garlic, ginger, salt, and chile powder and other spices, and is used in shiro alich’a, yellow split pea stew. Shiro powder can include all sorts of spices, incl black cumin, hell (whatever that is), coriander, kemune (unident.), onion, sunflower, nutmeg, long pepper, thyme, etc. They have chem analyses. The commoner spice powder is berbere, blazing hot with chiles, but also including bishopsweed, fenugreek, cardamom, basil, garlic, rue, rosemary, cumin, cinnamon, etc., to taste. Enkulal firfir is scrambled eggs with berbere. (Zeru et al. 2023).

            Farther south and in hotter climes, a range of heat-adapted grains developed. Sorghum (Sorghum biocolor) was the most important, going worldwide by 2000 BCE as it spread through Egypt, Ethiopia, and India. Its weedy relative S. halapense (Johnson grass) is a hated weed, but sometimes used for forage and erosion control.

            All along the Sahel—Arabic for “shore”—the Sahara grades slowly into the cultivatable lands of rainfed Africa. The Sahara is the province of camel nomads. The Sahel is disputed, or sometimes cooperatively managed, by stockraisers dependent on cattle and by cultivators dependent on tough, drought-resistant millets. One, the bulrush millet Pennisetum americanum, can grow on four inches of rain. It is a tall, beautiful, impressive plant that deserves more attention. The name comes from its superficial similarity to cattails (bulrushes in England). Fonio, a domesticated crabgrass (Digitaria exilis and the less appealing D. iburua), is comparably tough. Finger millet (Eleusine coracana and relatives) is slightly less drought-resistant, but high in yields. These are now promoted as “ancient grains,” which they are, but to me they taste rather like dust. The Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam has enthusiastic words about fonio in his cookbooks (Thiam 2008, 2015), but I am less than excited.

Their great limit is their susceptibility to birds. My experiments with growing bulrush millet in desert California ended summarily when house finches and goldfinches discovered the seed heads. The African equivalent is the red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea), which occurs in millions and can be almost as devastating as the locusts that also infest the Sahel. Bulrush millet remains the staff of life in regions too dry for anything else. Bulrush and finger millets and sorghum reached India by 1700 BCE. Fonio has stayed in West Africa.

            Also domesticated about 2000-4000 years ago were the Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) and the similar Hausa groundnut (Macrotyloma geocarpum), which like the peanut plant their fruits in the soil—the flower grows downward and into the earth.

            In tropical Africa, a whole suite of plants adapted to hot, wet conditions was added. The major ones were yams, lily relatives of the genus Dioscorea—similar to, but not related to, the tuber-bearing morning glory from South America that was assimilated to “yams” by enslaved Africans and still bears the name in the United States. Dioscorea of many species—Asian as well as African—still grow in the Western Hemisphere tropics, but are rare in U.S. markets. Less well known in the African pumpkin or ash gourd (Telfairia occidentalis), grown for its large and highly nutritious seeds rather than for its flesh. It has enormous potential, but somehow has never caught on anywhere outside of west-central Africa. (On all these crops, see the wonderful accounts in National Academy of Sciences 1996, 2006.)

            Finally, and much more hopeful from a gourmet standpoint, was an independent domestication of rice that took place by 2000 years ago in the Niger River valley, especially the internal delta in Mali. This is a different species (Oryza glaberrima) from Chinese rice, not close enough to hybridize easily, though hybridization is now under way in a search for resistance to pests and other problems. It was grown widely in interior and coastal West Africa. Carried to the New World by enslaved people, it spread widely (Carney 2001).

            James Webb (1995) describes the interaction in his book Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850, and makes it sound very much like Mongol-Chinese relations in north China in old times, and Roderick McIntosh (2005) has made the comparison. Interesting is that in some parts of the zone “white” meant herder, “black” meant farmer, as if skin color sorted with lifestyle—which it does not. The old Chinese classification into “barbarians” and “civilized” is quite comparable.

            More wide-ranging is Tadeusz Lewicki’s major work West African Food in the Middle Ages According to Arabic Sources (1974). This book stresses the importance of the native rice and millets, and of livestock, and the lack of other foods, though indigenous spices were important not only in food but in trade. Grains of Paradise (a native cardamom, Aframomum spp.) was a major staple of international trade, largely replaced in later centuries by Asian cardamom and other spices. It continues to have some medical use.

Roderick McIntosh (2005) gives a striking account of the interior delta of the Niger. This is a vast tract where the river is obstructed and spreads out in a huge channeled wetland. The soils arepoor and most areas are either too dry or too wet or flood-prone for much agriculture, but there enough wet channels and marshes for cultivation. The area has had some bursts of serious urbanization with high culture including Jenne-Jeno which rached 42,000 people or more in 1200-1400 CE (McIntosh 2005:210), but no large citadels, monumental construction, or huge sculptures. Dense and close-spaced settlements cultivated fonio, bulrush millet, sorghum, Guinea millet Brachiaria deflexa, Bambara groundnut Vigna subterranea, and African rice, which very possibly was domesticated there (McIntosh 2005:80-94). 80-84, climate history; complex, only broad outlines same as elsewhere. Ethnic groups specialized in the old days: Marka raised the rice, Bozo net-fished, Somono fish big channels, Bambara (who invaded in the medieval period) farm millet, Tuareg and Fulani herded. Jenne-Jeno and area ca 1200-1400 covered 190 ha and had some 42,000. McIntosh intriguingly talks of a high philosophic tradition in the Mandingo world, but says very little about it.

Rice dominates the far west coast from Sierra Leone north to Senegal. This became known as the Rice Coast. Today, the true African rice is rare, being replaced by the Asian species. Most of the area was once dominated by the Mandingo Empire. The Mandinka language and the empire’s high culture are still widespread. A great range of languages, distantly related but often strikingly different, is spoken, and people tend to be multilingual. Our principal friend in Senegal was fluent in his own language (a tiny minority speech), Mandinka, Wolof (the country’s lingua franca), French, and English; we can vouch for his near-native-speaker competence in the last two. He was learning Spanish.

The empire excelled in music. The traditional, highly distinctive music of this area not only survives and flourishes today, but it developed into the blues in the United States. It contributed the banjo (bania in Mandinka) to America and the world. The blues, the old-time ring shout, and United States gospel music are derived from this musical world, with various contributions from Europe, and in the case of the guitar from Mexico and the Caribbean. The reason that only the United States had the blues (originally) was that American plantation owners had trouble growing sugar north of Florida, switched to rice, and needed enslaved people who were experts at growing it. These introduced not only rice technology but also okra and watermelon, among various natives of their homeland. Watermelon has recently been discovered to have been developed by local people in the central Sahel. the rest of the story is told below in the North America section.

Senegal can stand as an example of the foodways of the region. Since most of the population lives along the coast or along rivers, rice and fish are staple foods. The fish is often smoked, producing a characteristic pleasant scent throughout markets and along shorelines. In the dry interior, the millets take over. Animals are largely sheep and goats; the area is largely Muslim. Cattle are common in some areas. The Fulani, a nomadic or seminomadic herding people, herd vast flocks of sheep, goats, and some cattle over the dry grasslands where agriculture is shaky or impossible.

A signature dish that more or less anchors the cuisine is thibou djenn (variously spelled tibu jen, etc.), fish stew. It consists of large chunks of sizable white-fleshed fish boiled with okra, carrots, onions, tomatoes, eggplants, and sometimes greens and herbs. Rice is cooked in the broth and served separately. Thibou yasa is stewed meat, similar except that the rice is not usually cooked in the stock. Thibou yapp is the lamb or goat version. Mafé is food stewed with ground peanuts, a very common and widespread technique all over West Africa. Black-eyed peas, niébé, are common, often added to stews and soups, or made into the universal West African fried dumpling known as akara, more or less a falafel made with blackeyes instead of chickpeas. A notable vegetable of the region is “sour tomato,” actually a local species of eggplant with a wonderful sharp flavor, somewhat like the round green eggplants of southeast Asia.

The French colonial regime had its main headquarters for all of northwest Africa in Dakar, which is now an extremely sophisticated, vibrant, active, and lively city. French bread, pastries, and salads are universal. Senegalese food is not highly spiced, but has distinctive and rich flavors from the local greens, herbs, and grains.

Gambia, a small country completely surrounded by Senegal except for a small coastline, is said to be the home of Jollof rice, a dish of rice cooked with chicken and/or shellfish and the usual vegetables. It is the ancestor of jambalaya. “Jollof” is a variant form of Wolof, associated with the old Wolof state, and “jambalaya” is Wolof for “mixed grain stew,” so the ethnic base of this dish are clear. In the New World, it added tomatoes and chile pepper—typically cayenne—and these have made it back home, to become part of Jollof rice. In New Orleans, it acquired French herbs and sausages.

More general and basic is red rice or Spanish rice, rice cooked in tomato stock with various vegetables, and usually with sea food or sausages or bacon. Usually the stock is made first, then the rice is cooked in it. It is a Caribbean development of rice cooked in stock, typical of the Rice Coast. Various forms have spread throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, the United States (especially the south), and elsewhere. Typically, red rice is simply rice in tomato stock, but elaborate forms verge on or become identical with jambalaya (e.g. Cross and Crawford 2023:163-164). Rarely, the rice is fried, then the stock poured in, as is the case in some forms of pilau; I assume this technique was learned from Indian immigrants.

Moroccan and other Arab influence shows itself in the very widespread use of cumin ni all these dishes, and the frequency of cinnamon, black pepper, and coriander. Coriander greens (cilantro) are widespread. The most famous native West African spice is malagueta pepper, also known as Grains of Paradise, alligator pepper, and various other names. It was once universal in the southern part of the region and influential throughout. It is a local species of cardamom (Aframomum melegueta). It even spread to the Mediterranean and became important and widespread there in Medieval and Renaissance times. It was often used medicinally as a stimulant. It has been largely replaced by chiles and black pepper, but it has not gone totally away. Medieval medicine and cooking re-enactors know it as Grains of Paradise, and seek it out by mail-order.

West African staple foods from farther south than the Rice Coast are largely root crops. Whether you depend on rice, millets, or roots is ultimately driven by what grows best in your area, but cultures institutionize one or another as staple. There is rumored to be a place where two rivers join, dividing three ethnic groups, each dependent on one of those staples—but none eating all of them. The roots, traditionally local yam (Dioscorea) species but now usually manioc, are pounded into a soft, gooey mass known as fufu. It is consumed in bits called “swallows” in English. These are picked off the main lump and dipped in stew or otherwise combined with a relish. They are insufferably bland and stodgy to some outsiders, but there is a connoisseurship of swallows in their native home. They may be “soft, stretchy, and fluffy (pounded yam) to slightly gritty [maize cooked down to a solid, like polenta], chewy (tapioca starch) and sticky [rice cooked down]” (Sokoh 2025:211).

Foods eaten with the staple include egusi, a stew of goat, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, and sometimes other spices; puff puffs: doughtnut-like fried dough; eforiro, a Nigerian dish with greens and smoked fish; and dodo: bits of soft, cartamelized plantains. Moi moi or moin moin is the Yoruba word for a black-eyed pea puree.

Nigerian food is ably introduced to the world by the chef Ozoz Sokoh, from the Yoruba southwest corner of the nation. Her book Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria not only provides recipes and stunning photographs, but provides a whole ethnography of foodways in that large and diverse country. Spices include Monodora myristica, ehuru. Oil bean is Pentaclethra macrophylla. Xylopia aethiopica are grains of Selim or uda; uziza is Piper guineense. Telfairia seeds are important, as egusi. Ogbono are seeds of local mango species, ground. A range of local greens, some spicy and flavorful, is described, but not always identified. Moringa, basil, and squash leaves are among the identifiable. A linguistic note is that “sweet mouth” has the same double meaning that it has in United States Black English, showing a very likely origin for the American usage (p. 287). Her Jollof rice adds tomato paste early, then tomato stew base later, for a truly tomato-rich dish; it does not include meat or sea food, allowing improvisation.

Farther southeast, in Central Africa, Cameroon (Leypey 2018) is typical in depending on root crops, often made into fufu, a paste created by beating cooked roots until the starch turns unctious and slippery. Slippery textures are enjoyed widely in Africa. Palm oil from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm (Elaeis guineense) is the standard oil. Palm wine is a standard drink. The sap of the oil palm or other palms—many species are used—is fermented quickly.

            Meanwhile in East Africa, the Swahili coast became a major distination for trade. Even the Chinese came to call, in the massive voyages of Zheng He in the early Ming dynasty. The Swahili traded all manner of foods, as well as ivory and other African commodities. Medieval Swahili towns became prosperous and refined, with good food. Excavations by Quintana Morales and others (2022) in a town in southern Tanzania revealed stone houses and simpler wattle-and-daub ones. People in the stone houses ate better than those in daub. Millets, bananas, coconuts, rice, fish, sheep, and goats appeared, but fish were more of a staple. Some people ate turtles and dugongs, shakily legal in Islam. They note that Ibn Battuta recorded the food of Mogadishu (Somalia) as involving rice cooked in ghee and topped with stews of meat and chicken, fish, etc., plus bananas and “chillies”—a plant unknown in Africa at the time, and clearly a mistranslation, possibly for long pepper.

Persian traders were settling in large numbers, marrying into the community, and leaving many descendants. The old Swahili trading communities of the  island and port cities of Kenya and Tanzania in medieval times had Persian male ancestors and African female ones, as shown by recent genetic research. The African women appear to have been mostly Makwasinyi, already a mix of “pastoralists” and (mostly) “Bantu,” which I assume means they were a mix of possibly Nilo-Saharan herders with Niger-Congo (largely Bantu) farmers. The Persians did not get south of central Tanzania. South of there, genetics reveals some late Arabian mixture and slight Indian mixture, though not in the farthest south. The Kilwa Chronicles, Swahili texts long dismissed as legend, stated that the Swahili were a Persian-African fusion. Swahili has about 3% Persian loanwords and 16-20% Arabic. Modern Swahili, compared to the medieval ones are much more African on paternal side, over 50% vs only 17%; they are essentially the same—basically African—on maternal side (Brielle et al. 2023).

Outside of the ports, though, East Africa is no gourmet paradise. The staple in most areas is ugali, originally (and locally still) millet or sorghum mush, but usually maize mush cooked solid. It was memorably described in an old Lonely Planet guide to Kenya: “it weighs on your stomach like a royal corgi.” (The reference is to the Pembroke corgis traditionally raised by the British court; they wax exceedingly fat.) It is flavored with whatever is at hand: milk, berries, wild fruit, bits of meat or fish, anything. It is rarely in a class with grits or corn meal mush, let alone polenta. It also accompanies Vitamin B3 (niacin) and mineral deficiencies, because the phytic acid in the grain is not processed away.

Most of the land is under grazing, with local cattle. Food is milk, usually soured, often with astringent tree bark that acts as preservative and health-giving addition. Meat is eaten by traditional herders only when an animal is sacrificed for a major ritual occasion. It is then distributed so widely that few get more than a bite. The Maasai traditionally do not eat anything they do not raise themselves. Thus, Maasai country was once a vast game refuge; in fact, the famous African refuges, such as Ngoro Ngoro Crater and the Serengeti, were Maasai country (sometimes used by others). Alas, today, the Maasai have been pushed off much of their homeland to establish hunting parks for rich tourists—the ultimate hurt and insult to a noble people. Moreover, population growth on their remaining lands has been harder and harder on the wildlife, which can catch diseases from domestic stock. Overgrazing, formerly controlled by very rigid—indeed model—standards, is now inescapable (the above from my personal research and from friends).

Other herding peoples of East Africa have been hit by drought as well as population increase, and have entered into more and more savage wars with each other, leading to tragic desolation.

            Genetic engineering may yet save Africa from some of its worst problems. Crispr-editing is introducing resistance to witchweed (Striga hermonthica), a terrible plant parasite, from wild sorghums into domestic strains. Similar attempts may soon make maize more resistant, pearl millet flour spoil less fast, groundnuts resist the aflatoxin fungus, and cattle do better in Africa’s heat and dryness (Ledford 2024).

            Chocolate is native to the New World, but now West Africa produces most of it. A great deal is produced by child labor, often under slavery-like conditions. This has been an open scandal for decades. Cadbury and Hershey used to produce slavery-free chocolate, but now the giant corporations wink at the situation. In Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, 2.1 million children work on some 2 million cocoa farms. Wages of $400 a year are considered good. These countries produce 2/3 of the world crop (Pilling 2020).

            Wild foods are extremely important in Africa. In Tanzania, nibbling on wild foods as one works in the fields is a major source of vitamins and minerals, which abound in the wild foods but are far too sparse in the daily ugali (corn meal or similar mush). Moving to town and eating higher-status food can thus cause malnutrition (Sakamoto et al. 2023).

South Asia

            South Asia was settled from several directions, with groups entering from the west (including African influence), the northwest, and the northeast. The main northwestern influence has been from Indo-Iranian language speakers; Sanskrit and its modern descendants such as Hindi and Bengali are from that family. The Dravidian languages, which are completely unrelated, may also have come from that direction, emerging in southern Iran while the Indo-Iranian family was developing in the Russian and Kazakhstan steppes. The northeastern influence is largely associated with Tibeto-Burman langauges, which originated in northwest China and spread in all directions.

Finally, the mysterious Munda languages, spoken by very large “tribal” communities in central-eastern India, are included in the Austroasiatic phylum. It may have originated in India, but a strong argument has recently been made by George van Driem that the phylum originated in the general area now mostly included in Myanmar, with the Munda being very likely a mix of Austroasiatic speakers with speakers of lost, unknown languages (van Driem 2021). The languages of the Andamans may be related to these, but are quite distinctive.

Van Driem has received spectacular confirmation from genetics: a distinctive genetic profile has been discovered in central Yunnan in remains of persons who lived around 5000 years ago, and, with increasing dilution from in-migrants from northern and eastern China, until today (T. Wang et al. 2025). This “Central Yunnan” variant of the broad East Asian spectrum is conspicuously present in Austroasiatic minorities all over southeast Asia (though not the Munda). It is also found, somewhat more mixed with recent Northern East Asian and sometimes Southern East Asian genomes, among neighboring Sino-Tibetan and Thai-Kadai groups. It is clearly a marker of Austroasiatic heritage, and dramatically confirms van Driem from a quite independent line of research. 

Genetics loosely tracks languages, with gene flow from the relevant directions quite clear, and the linguistic groups showing vague but discernible correlations with languages spoken (Basu et al. 2016; GenomeAsia100K Consortium 2019). In general, the subcontinent shows influences from almost everywhere: Africa in the south, southeast Asia in the east, China in the northeast, Iran and the steppes in the northwest, and so on. The Andamans are extremely different genetically from the mainland.

            Naturally, the food reflects this diversity (Acharya 1998; Antani and Mahapatra 2022). Many varieties of wheat and barley came from various parts of the Near East and central Asia. Foxtail millet and also domesticated rice, came from China, the rice hybridizing in India with native rices that may already have been somewhat cultivated (Clift and d’Alpoim Guedes 2021). By 1700 BCE, African millets and sorghum were coming in, probably via Iran but also directly by sea; we have no evidence of the millets in the Near East.

            Rice diversity is threatened, but is being maintained by the heroic efforts of people like Deb Debal (2019), who are saving and growing out heritage varieties—small, local equivalents of the vast International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, with its hundreds of thousands of rice varieties.

            Dairying is attested by the mid-3^rd millennium BCE (Chakraborty et al. 2020), but was surely far older. At that particular site, cattle were killed only when old, indicating they were used for dairying and work; sheep were killed young, for meat. 

Indo-Aryan tribes depending on herding, including dairying, came in soon after.

Alcohol in India has been covered in an outstanding book, An Unholy Brew by James McHugh (2021). It began with ales (grain brews) of various kinds, called surā. Sugar cane ferments were very common from early times. Honey, fruit, and other sweets were also brewed into alcoholic drinks, but not distilled. Madhu, from the Indo-European root for honey (cf. “mead” in English), was used not only for mead but for these various sweet drinks, also called āsava. These were consumed in the usual settings, from weddings to the equivalent of Saturday nights. Drunkenness was not particularly downvalued in early centuries. Young women were considered sexy and appealing when a bit high. Plays and poems attest to this. Moralists, on the other hand, were sour about such goings-on.

Meat was slowly but surely erased from cookbooks and food writings over time. An extreme case is The Delight of the Mind, a Sanskrit record of court culture in poetic form, ascribed to King Somesvara III (r. 1126-1138) and released in 1131 (Gutiérrez 2024). It records cooking and eating everything from hedgehogs and curlews to water monitors and tortoises. A fine recipe for barbecuing bandicoot rats is included. As a king, of the kshatriya caste, Somesvara would have eaten a lot of meat and enjoyed highly spiced dishes (as the recipes show). Over time, editions, summaries, and later works lost more and more meat recipes, as upper-caste Hindus were more and more influenced by vegetarianism. Recent summary and encyclopedic works on medieval food eliminate meat totally.

A 17^th-century work records medical and food traditions of India at the time (Pandey 2014).

By far the major external influence on South Asian food, over time, has been the Near East. Persian is closest and thus the most important source. The basic staples, such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils, came via the northwest before 2000 BCE. Herbs and vegetables presumably came about the same time, but leave less record. Later, the rise of sophisticated cuisine in the ancient and Medieval Near East quickly affected India.

Meanwhile, foods came from China; first were apparently foxtail millet and japonica rice, by about the same time. India duly domesticated its own native indica rice, and that quickly hybridized with Chinese, though they are genetically different enough to present some initial problems. Today, most rice is hybrid. Pure or fairly pure japonica remains the rice of Japan, and of California, where cool and often dry growing conditions favor it; it also dominates much of Korea, and sticky forms of it are used for many purposes all over east Asia. Otherwise, the hybrids dominate. India and Pakistan have a particularly distinctive group of rices, the basmati rices, growing in the Punjab and neighboring Himalayan states. Basmatis are fragrant, with a wonderful grainy scent, and cook up to a very long grain. India and Pakistan had a hard fight protecting the name, which is a somewhat vague descriptive term rather than an actual genetic variety; American growers were trying to pass off their local rices as “basmati” in spite of lacking the true qualities (see Shiva).

Today, the subcontinent has a whole range of dishes with Near Eastern names. Colleen Taylor Sen lists their origins: “Arabic (halim, harissa, halwa, sanbusa), Persian (kashk, shirbirij, pulao, zard birinj, dampukht, bandijan) and Turkic (qutab, qima, boghra, shulla)” (Sen 2016:185). We can add briyani, now a rice dish with stewed meat mixed in or cooked with the rice, from a Farsi word meaning “roasted” (Sen 2016:185). To unpack these somewhat, harissa is meat stewed with grain, a rather stodgy dish; halwa is anything sweet and cakelike; sanbusa became samosa, stuffed dumplings, deep-fried; pulao (pilaf) is rice cooked with various spices and anything else the cook feels like adding; dampukht is a word for stewing; qima is minced meat; shulla is a rich grain dish. 

Much of the most recent and sophisticated fusion was done at the courts of the Mughal emperors. “Mughal” is a derivative of “Mongol,” and the Mughals did have a very slight degree of Mongol ancestry, purportedly from Genghis Khan himself, but in fact they were Central Asians of largely Turkic and Persian ancestry. They thus favored a classic Persian-influenced cookery. It was established in the early Medieval period in the northwest; it did not spread to Bengal until the 1300s, and then only slightly, becoming more popular after 1700 (Sengupta 2023). There and elsewhere, it slowly became Indianized, with many more spices but many fewer fresh green herbs than in Iran. Thus “the blatantly exogenous became prototypically authentic” (Sengupta 2023:146).

This cookery was increasingly confined to local royal courts under the British raj, but it emerged into the world limelight when Kundan Lal Gujral opened the Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi in the mid-20^th century (Sen 2016:282-284). He revived the classic cuisine, and added his own inventions, such as butter chicken. His signature dish was tandoori: meats marinated and then cooked in a tandur. I managed to dine in the Moti Mahal in 1978. It was a large, cavernous, barnlike structure, with fairly basic tables, chairs, and other appointments, but the food was superb.

The Moti Mahal was imitated worldwide. In the United States, the vast majority of Indian restaurants recapitulate its menu with considerable fidelity. (If they are Punjabi, it will be less spicy than the original; if south Indian, more spicy, and probably with some southern dishes added.) The UK, with its very heavy Indian and Pakistani immigration, has a greater variety and more originality in its Indo-Pak food, but still shows considerable Gujral influence.

New World crops transformed India after 1500 (Mazumdar 1999). The Portuguese were probably the main introducers. Chiles may have been the most transformative to the food. They were enthusiastically accepted and incorporated into every type of spicy dish. Over time, potatoes (especially white), maize, peanuts, squash, beans, and other staples made far more contributions to calories and health, but chiles remained the most visible and tasteable New World contribution. In India there arose an apparently spontaneous hybrid of habanero and tabasco chiles, the ghost pepper, which was even hotter than its parents. It has been bred to new heights of incandescence, as breeders vie to create the hottest pepper.

Indian food actually varies greatly in spiciness, especially in its use of chile. There is a rough cline from northwest to southeast. Punjabi food is straightforward and relatively simple, with less spiciness than most other traditions. At the other extreme is Tamil Nadu, in the far southeast, whose foods can be beyond even a hardened chile-lover’s ability to consume. Andhra Pradesh is also high in fire. There is a scurrilous and highly dubious rumor that this has something to do with invitational feasts and stingy feast-givers. If the food is too hot to eat, not much will be eaten, but of course the eaters try to develop a high tolerance level.

A major exception to the north-south gradient is the use of some of the world’s hottest chiles in the Himalayas. The akubari chiles of the Bhutia of Sikkim (the peppers are dalle khorsani in Nepali) are habaneros, or a cross of habanero and Tabasco chiles. They are the parents of the ghost and Carolina reaper chiles of the United States. They are regarded by the Bhutia as kinfolk (Bhutia 2024), other-than-human persons who are actual relatives.        Controversy continues to surround the coming of Green Revolution palnts to India. They certainly allowed an enormous increase in grain production, saving countless lives, but they also led to enormous increases in use of fertilizer, pesticides, machinery with its fossil fuels, and other modern inputs. The costs of these ruined many poor farmers. Ironically, the pesticides proved all too available for suicide, and many farmers in desperate economic straits died. The question of local improvement vs. imported technology with expensive inputs remains a vexed one, not helped by a government that is more concerned with Hindu supremacy and Muslim suppression than with feeding the people.

            It turns out that even the super-productive new wheat, maize and rice varieties of the post-Green Revolution era do not outproduce millets and sorghum under some of the more difficult Indian field conditions (Davis et al. 2019). An international center for developnig these “coarse” grains has been established, by parallel with the International Rice Research Center in the Philippines and CIMMYT in Mexico.

            An apotheosis of curry recipes is found in Raghavan Iyer’s 660 Curries (2023). This amazing encyclopedia contains, indeed, 660 recipes, all superb and many gathered from his family and friends. A major sorrow of my life is that will not live long enough to work my way through all of them.

Rajasthan food, as found in the vegetarian Bhookhe restaurant in Artesia, California, is heavily dependent on chickpeas. Gatte ke sabzi is a thickened soup with chickpea flour (besan) dumplings (like veggie franks); kadhi pakoda is a thickened yellow vegetarian soup with more chickpeas; bati are hard whole wheat dumplings to break up in dal. The food is accompanied by very hot and good chile-onion-oil chatni. Dahi (yogurt) came with cooked chickpeas, fried onions, and wondrous spices in it. Sweets were bland.

The breadstuffs are interesting. Corn chapatis resemble thick tortillas. Bajri roti (pearl millet tortilla) is tasteless and dry.

Kashmir has pink tea—boil green but fermented tea w soda and it turns red; then milk, salt, chai spices.

East Asia

            Pottery was invented first in East Asia. China had it by 18,000-16,000 years ago, Japan by 15,000 (Lucquin et al. 2018). It spread almost immediately to northeast China and thence to Siberia, and westward to Europe and the Near East. It was independently invented in the Western Hemisphere later, but it seems to have been invented only once in Eurasia.

            Widely throughout the world, there is a word for “staple food” and another word for “things to eat with the staple.” In Mandarin Chinese, fan is staple cooked grain: rice, millet, locally barley and others. Cai, pronounced “tsai,” means “vegetables,” but by extension it means “cooked dishes,” and by even further extension it means “stuff to eat with fan.” In Cantonese, fan is also the staple and essentially always means cooked rice, but there is a special word, sung, for anything eaten with the rice as topping or accompaniment. Korean (CHECK…).

            Elsewhere in the world, the same distinction is made. Ancient Greek sitos meant the staple: bread, porridge, meal cake. Opson (or hopson; it begins with an aspiration) meant cooked food to go with the staple. American dialectic English has usages like “potatoes and with-it.”

Culinary nationalism has grown in eastern Asia and elsewhere (King 2019). Countries are increasingly proud of their distinctive foodways, and increasingly eager to sell them. Flashy restaurants and huge world trade fairs are only one result. More and more books, articles, and prideful cooking programs appear all the time. The relevant foods can even be moral (Leung and Caldwell 2020). Rice as staple, milk as superfood (the west having convinced Asians to use formula and cows’ milk), and other items take on moral qualities.

Rice may become better for the planet; a gene brought in from barley allows it to grow with less methane production (Su et al. 2015).

The Chinese, throughout history, got fatty acids from meat, fish, grains, and seeds, including soybeans. In spite of the last, the Chinese generally got a good balance, since they used the soybeans for bean curd and fermented products, not for oil. Most food oil came from lard and other animal fats or from mustard and cabbage seed oils. Over time, as farming got more intensive and animal meat more expensive, more and more fat came from the mustard seeds. This was equivalent to our modern “canola oil” (canola is a mustard), overwhelmingly made up of monounsaturated fatty acids.

            Korean food is as dependent on grain staples as other East Asian foods. Rice was traditionally the prestige starch, but was a luxury everywhere, the more so as one went north from subtropical Jeju Island to the subarctic cold of the northern mountains. Usually, people depended on barley, millets, and buckwheat, in various combinations. These often became noodles. Lacking gluten, they were variously prepared; I assume they were often forced through a sieve into boiling water, as in China.

            Rice is pap (or bap). Food to accompany the grain staple has its own special word, as elsewhere. Side dishes with a meal are served in small separate plates and known as banchan. A meal is bapsang (bap for rice of course), soup kuk. Jang is salted side dishes. Chopped spices and herbs as banchan are yangnyom.

A main meal will have about seven of these—less for a minor occasion, more for a feast. Meat was a luxury in the old days, but was consumed in large quantities when available, and today Korean food is meat-heavy. Do-it-yourself barbecue on metal cones over a live fire is overwhelmingly popular, and has gone worldwide. Hot pot, noodle dishes, and various dumplings are also extremely popular. The dumplings betray Central Asian origin by their Turkic name, mantu or mandu.

            Korean food depends heavily on fermentation. Kinchi, pickled Chinese cabbage with chiles, is the most famous (the following information on it comes from Surya and Lee 2022). It involves Lactobacillus fermentation, heavy salting being used to prevent spoilage. Kimjang is the process of making it, specifically the huge fall rush. It is most often made from baechu, white cabbage. Sea food in kimchi is jeotgal. In 2021 a Chinese pair of characters was invented for it, pron xinqi. Chile was introduced about the time of the Imjin wars, Japan’s attempted conquest of Korea around 1592. The Korean word for chile is gochu, but that term is found in older texts. so must have been used for some other plant. Kkakdugi is kinchi with white radish, chonggak includes the variety called ponytail radish, yeolmu is the product from fresh young summer radish. Tongbaechu uses whole cabbages (mak is the usual cut-up one), yangbaechu green cabbages. Pa is made with green onions, gat with mustard leaves, buchu with garlic chives, kkaenip with perilla leaves. Green pepper and cucumber stuffed with chopped carrot and chives make gochu sobagi and oi sobagi. Dongchimi and nabak use more mul—water, brine.

Kimchi is often used in stew, kimchi jjigae. Kimchi in pancakes gives us kimchi buchimgae. Kimchi soup is simply named kimchi guk, guk meaningsoup  Kimchi fried rice is kimchi bokkeumbap. Gochugaru, red chile powder, generally gets into kimchi. Over 16 bacteria species, plus yeasts etc., are involved, including Lactobacillus kimchii and Weisella kimchii. Even Leuconostoc and Candida get into it. There is even a philosophy of kimchi, which includes the usual East Asian ideas of yin and yang, the five elements, balance and harmony, beauty, filial piety, and patience. In short: Bogi joeun tteogi meokgido jota, “what looks good tastes good” (Surya and Lee 2022).

More complex is jang, the Korean form of the Chinese word jiang and the item it describes: fermented soybean paste. Not only Lactobacillus, but a large number of other bacteria, as well as yeasts and other fungi, go into the various forms of jang. The beans are steamed, dried, and then fermented in brine. Ground with chiles, they become gochujang, the famous Korean sauce for many purposes. It has a strong soy paste flavor as well as varying but often high levels of capsaicin “heat.”

            Pickles, generally Lactobacillus ferments, often with other agents, accompany, or used to accompany, every Korean meal. They still appear at every major occasion among the banchan.

            Dependence on pickles for vegetables during the harsh Korean winters was associated with high rates of stroke (cerebrovascular accident); Korea long led the world in this cause of death. Cold storage and good transportation reduced the need for pickles, and the stroke rate has rapidly and steadily dropped.

            (On Korean food, see Maangchi 2019.)

            The national distilled drink is soju, monographed by Hyunhee Park (2021). It is a low-alcohol vodka, made from grains and distilled fairly gently, and often diluted, so its alcohol content is usually closer to 20% than true vodka’s 40%. It has gone worldwide, its popularity spreading outward from Korean restaurants. The best forms have the advantage of a pleasant grain taste along with lower alcohol than hard liquor. Samsu (from Chinese sanshu, “triple-distilled”) is stronger, more directly comparable to vodka, and is often made from sweet potatoes instead of grain. A drink whose popularity is still largely confined to Koreans is makkolli (makgeolli), a mild rice beer, carbonated and wonderfully flavorful. It is the perfect soothing and cooling accompaniment to Korean food fiery with chiles. I expect a boom in its popularity soon.

            Japanese food has been chronicled in the west by Eric Rath (2010a, 2010b). HERE ADD

            Like the rest of eastern Asia, Japan depends heavily on pickled foods, though far less than in the past. Within living memory, remote parts of northern Japan, especially the “snow country” of the northwest, had no other way of obtaining vegetables in winter. The vegetables were cut up and heavily brined, then fermented by Lactobacillus and other microorganisms into tsukemono. As in Korea, depending on such heavily salted foods was associated with high incidence of stroke, and also with stomach cancer. Modern cold storage and shipping led to precipitous decline in these conditions in recent decades.

Japanese food has substantially conquered the world (Stalker 2018). Japanese restaurants are everywhere (Farrer and Wank 2023). Sushi and sashimi have run well beyond the restaurants, and are borrowed freely by non-Japanese eateries. Most dramatic of all is the spread of instant ramen (Gewertz et al. 2013). The original ramen is a Japanese version of Chinese la mian; the Chinese original is often extremely spicy, and variously flavored but always dramatic in taste, though the simple base of beef-noodle soup is simple enough. The Japanese version cut down the spice considerably, and of course the international instant form has little beyond a lot of salt and soy powders. But all it requires is hot water to convert it into a meal, so it is the starving students’ food worldwide.

Southeast Asia

            Homo erectus reached southeast Asia about a million years ago, flourishing and populating the region widely, as shown by huge choppers and chopping tools made from large hard-stone cobbles. These were presumably used not only to kill and cut up animals, but to prepare more specifically targeted and designed tools from wood and bamboo. The specialized stone tools of the western world never developed in erectus days; apparently wood was more versatile. Homo floresiensis, the hobbit-like people of Flores, may be derived from this early migration. Later, Neanderthal and Denisovan genes reached southeast Asia early. The Denisovan genes fall into two groups, one in the Australia-New Guinea axis, the other in East Asia. People managed to get as far as the Solomon Islands by 42,000 years ago, showing astonishing seafaring ability (O’Connell et al. 2018).

            Homo sapiens is first recorded, so far, from Laos, about 77,000 to 86,000 years ago. Small, dark-skinned people moved in early, with groups widely scattered, surviving on islands and remote uplands. Later migrations from Africa along the coasts are evident. This hunter-gatherer substrate remains genetically detectable, particularly on islands (Lipson et al. 2014, 2018).           A series of very early skeletons, analyzed for genetic relationships, showed contacts literally all over the map. By several thousand years ago, influences from all directions were already visible (McColl et al. 2018). A trend of migration from west to east, and another from north to south, was established, and continued into historic times, reaching the most remote islands. Only central and southern Australia remained uninfluenced.

Once eastern Asia was fully populated, north-south movement became important, and dominated the demographic history of eastern southeast Asia as China became the regional superpower. Chinese first displaced other groups south, thus adding to a tendency already evident for groups like the Thai to move in that direction.

            Then in historic times the Han Chinese themselves moved down. They reached northern Vietnam early, and traded widely for 2000 years, but came to the Philippines and Malaysia largely after 1400 CE, when trade and commerce led to massive immigration.

            Southeast Asian agriculture has been summarized as “root, fruit and shoot.” The roots are taro and related tubers and corms, of which more below. The shoots are largely from bamboo, but many local species provide theirs. The fruits are an amazing riot of food, ranging from protein-rich coconut to starchy breadfruit to sugary mangosteen. The extent of southeast Asian use of plants is shown in the vast compendium of local products assembled by I. H. Burkill for British Malaya (1966). Hundreds of crop and wild plants are detailed. Agriculture reached a stunning level of sophistication and complexity, with ordinary farms growing dozens of species.

            The widespread cooling and drying period around 2200 BCE hit southeast Asia hard (Griffiths et al. 2020). It must have stressed what agriculture was there, but also induced people to put more effort into it, to keep food available.

            Agriculture reached southeast Asia from China and India before 2000 BCE. I suspect strongly that root agriculture was very long established. It certainly was in New Guinea, where we have evidence going back many thousand years. The mainland was surely not far behind, but we have no record so far.

Once it came, there were periodic lulls in development, around 1200 BCE and 300-500 CE (Chew 2018). Millet was in Yunnan by 2600 BCE, in Thailand by 2300. Bronze reached Thailand by the late 2^nd millennium BCE (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020; Higham 2021). Rice was there by then, but possibly not earlier; wild rice occurs widely, so one cannot be sure. When clearly domesticated rice appears, it is the Chinese japonica form. Pomelos, tangerines, citrons, various legumes, and other crops appeared. The earliest rice in Indonesia occurs at 1500 BCE, but it is far out in Sulawesi, and rice must have reached more accessible parts of the archipelago long before that.

Chickens were domesticated in southeast Asia (possibly including what is now south China). The oldest clearly domesticated ones so far are from Ban Non Wat, Thailand, around 1650-1250 BCE (Peters et al. 2022), but it is impossible to tell early domesticated chickens from the wild Red Jungle Fowl, Gallus gallus, that is their parent. Many of us who were in upcountry southeast Asia a few decades ago will probably remember the indeterminate birds that scratched around hill villages—self-taming jungle fowl, or chickens little removed from that status and constantly mixing back with their parentage. I am sure this situation existed for hundreds or thousands of years before the Ban Non Wat birds. Significantly, Thai has a shared word, kai, for chickens, but it probably was used for jungle fowl long before true domestication. The word has traveled: it was borrowed straightforwardly into Cantonese, spread to Mandarin where it is now pronounced ji, and then traveled farther to produce a wide range of “chicken” words throughout Eurasia.

Joris Peters and his group traced out the travels of the chicken (Peters et al. 2022). The Ban Non Wat site was a large site with a defensive moat, showing much sophistication for the time. Over 95% of bird bones were chicken, making it clear that they had been domesticated for a long time. Grave offerings witho pigs, dogs, and bovines also appeared (“bovines” because several species of cattle occur in southeast Asia, all domesticated at some point). In India, chickens about after 1500-1200. In northern China, they are clearly present only by late Shang, around 1100 BCE. In Japan they do not occur until the Yayoi culture moved in from Korea and then nativized, around 100 BCE-100 CE. Central Asia shows no certain evidence till 800-500 BCE. In Oceania, chickens reached Tonga, the Solomons, and Vanuatu by the early 1^st millennium BCE, Hawaii by 1200 CE. They had reached the Near East by 1200 BCE, and are often mentioned in the Bible. They got to Ethiopia around 800 BCE, but elsewhere in Africa not until many southeast Asian crops came, around 200-300 CE. They reached West Africa by the mid-1^st-millenn BCE. In Europe they were widely present by 800-600 BCE,

Details of climate, climatic history, and early agriculture have been meticulously detailed by Peter Clift and Jade d’Alpoim Guedes (2021). The region is dominated by the monsoon, but is tropical enough to show much less seasonality than India or China. Basically, winter is a bit cooler, especially in the north. Spring heats up, leading to a sharp and blistering-hot dry season in May and June—longer in the dry center of Myanmar and some other areas. Summer is wet, with huge thunderstorms. Typhoons sweep the region in fall, hitting the Philippines especially hard. Global warming has increased their number and ferocity.

The pervasive rain allows rice to be the dominant crop everywhere. It is usually paddy-grown, but the rain is so heavy that even dry rice does perfectly well on hills and uplands, though it yields only 500-1000 pounds per acre at most, as opposed to 2500 (traditionally) to 10,000 and more today in wet fields. Even dry central Myanmar has no lack of water, from streams draining nearby mountains, and thus irrigation allows rice to be the dominant crop. In early times—and still in many areas—Chinese foxtail millet was the major crop of uplands. Root crops such as taro and yams (Dioscorea spp.) grew in moist lowlands and hills. An incredible variety of minor crops supplemented these.

On the other hand, grain agriculture peters out in far eastern Indonesia, and is absent from New Guinea and Oceania. The limit coincides with the limit of highly reliable rainfall, necessary to rice (Dewar 2003). There are clearly cultural factors at work—Oceanic people love their root crops and fruit trees—but rainfall sets a firm limit. On small islands, there is the additional factor that typhoons and storms regularly sweep over, destroying any and all grain in their path. Only the toughest trees and the safely-buried root crops survive.

Maize was a major addition to the roster, allowing intensive cultivation of hills and mountains—and thus devastating soil erosion over time. Sweet potatoes revolutionized New Guinea agriculture after 1800, and contributed to farming everywhere. More interesting was their introduction from South America by Polynesians who reached that continent well before 1400. Bringing back the kumara (from a native South American word), they introduced it to the Polynesian islands, where it became the staple food of the New Zealand Maori. It remains very important there, with dozens of varieties.

Traditional agriculture in southeast Asia was highly successful, adapted to local conditions, and sparing of inputs. It usually surpassed traditional European agriculture in yields and variety, produced highly nutritious foods, and was easy on the environment (Marten 1986). Rice production involves serious risks in this environment, with heavy rains, droughts, typhoons, blights, and other dangers. Farmers are highly competent at calculating and managing risks without the need of computers, mathematical simulations, or other modern arrangements (Roumasset 1976). Their religious dedication to the crop is one reason. Knowledge is part of sacred lore. In addition to risk awareness, saving good seed is religiously constructed. Among many groups, the spirit of the Rice Goddess is a beautiful young girl, sometimes seen hovering over the ricefields on misty nights. She plans her reincarnation every year by moving into the rice heads at harvest time. These heads are identified by their superior beauty, productiveness, and healthiness, and are thus saved for seed instead of being eaten like the rest of the crop (Hamilton 2003). This belief has minimized risk and selected for better and better seed stock over thousands of years.

Throughout southeast Asia, there is ongoing complementarity between wet-field farmers, growing rice and water-demanding root crops like taro, and the dry farmers. The latter are usually swiddeners, cutting a field, burning the cut vegetation, cultivating for a year or a few years, and moving on. The old English word “swidden” was introduced to anthropology by the Swedish ethnography Karl Izikowitz, who used it to describe the agriculture of the Lamet of Laos (Izikowitz 1951). The field may be abandoned if the soil is particularly infertile, but very often a large number of fruit trees and other useful perennials are established, and these are tended, often carefully, as the forest grows up. Depending on soil fertility, local taste, and local strength of tenure over many years, a former swidden will range from total abandonment to careful and regular management, with everything in between being attested somewhere.

Swidden fields range from purely rice, in wet and fertile hillsides, to wildly varied farms that reproduce to a limited extent the multispecies and multilayer structure of the tropical forest. Vegetable fields in the lowlands do the same, with dozens of crops growing, and a multilayered structure. Emergent trees include coconut and durian. Below them is a layer of medium-sized trees: citrus, mangosteen, and many others. At sunny edges, there will then be a layer of tall shrubby plants, such as guavas and the smaller citrus. Finally, annual and herbaceous plants grow near the ground, though they cannot grow in the shade of a full two- or three-layer grove. Where they are intended to live, only a high layer of coconuts and sometimes other species is usual, though shrubs are often interspersed with them (on these matters see Conklin 1957; Spencer 1966).

Swiddeners are notoriously independent. James C. Scott (2009) has even idealized northern southeast Asia as Zomia, a home of freedom-loving or even anarchist people who reject the state to live in blissful liberty. This is a bit romantic, but sober research confirms the general picture (e.g. Wang 2013). Jean Michaud, for instance, agrees that the Hmong try to maintain freedom, disagreeing even over use of scripts to write their languages. They maintain they once had writing and books, but during a famine they had to eat these, thus losing writing but acquiring superb memory (Michaud 2020). Edmund Leach showed in a famous study that many parts of that area oscillated back and forth over time between small states and kinship-based chiefdom systems (Leach 1973), which fits well with Scott’s model (in fact, Scott relied heavily on it). However, resistance to the state may be due to sheer fear. The Semai and Temiar of Malaysia are famous for nonviolence (Dentan 1979), but this is explained by their need to flee slave-hunting (and in the past, head-hunting) Malays and others. Resistance may also be simply a function of moving frequently. Whole communities have to move at regular intervals, sometimes for long distances. Independence leads them into frequent conflict with lowlanders (see e.g. Dentan 1979; Geddes 1976; Hickey 1982).

Another factor is the exquisitely careful management of resources practised by many of the swiddeners. The image of the wasteful, destructive swiddeners who burn down forests for a few bushels of rice, without care for the biota or the future, is not entirely wrong. I have seen it in remote parts of the world. However, it is almost totally wrong for southeast Asia, so far as my observations and readings go (see Conklin 1957; Dove 1985; Pinkaew 2001; Spencer 1966; Wang 2013; Yos 2003, 2008). Some up-country groups are models of managing forest farming and regrowth (Pinkaew 2001 on the Karen and Wang 2013 on the Akha are really exemplary). The rare exceptions are groups that have moved as refugees into new and often already-occupied areas. They are forced onto marginal land, often high-altitude and very fragile, and they are often forced to move rapidly to escape tensions (Geddes 1976 describes Hmong in this situation). Long-established groups like the Akha (Wang 2013; Yos 2003) are model land managers.

The first know city was Oc Eo, which once covered some 2500 ha in the Mekong delta. It depended on sophisticated paddy rice agriculture, fairly new in that area at the time.

A recent study revealed early curries there. A footed spice-grinding slab from about 300 CE still retained starch grains. This type of slab was widespread in India and SEA since around 500 BCE (W. Wang et al. 2023).

The grains include relics of turmeric, ginger, fingerroot (Boesenbergia rotunda, a ginger relative), sand ginger (Kaempferia galanga), clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, galangal (Alpinia galanga), and, no surprise, rice. Several of these also show up in the sites noted just above (D’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2020).

The authors of the study provided a brief history of early spices in south and southeast Asia. Turmeric was known from Harappan sites from 2000 BCE or earlier. Ginger was found there, and in Warring States and Han sites in China. There is no archaeological record of galangal, but lesser galangal (Alpinia officinalis) is in the Mawangdui tomb from ancient China. Cloves go back to early Han China; they appear a bit later in Rome, a bit earlier in India. Nutmeg goes back a few centures BCE in India, and known much earlier from its native Banda Ids, back to perhaps 1500 BCE on Pulau Ay. An actual nutmeg was found in Oc Eo, dating 120-248 CE. Cinnamon was known widely by 1000 BCE. Previous southeast Asia research had revealed long pepper, cardamom, black pepper, mustard seed, clove, and nutmeg before Oc Eo rose.

Slightly earlier, two sites in far south Thailand were occupied around 400 BCE-20 CE. Rice, foxtail millet, and, fascinatingly, finger millet (eleusine, originally from Africa) were found. Also found was the oldest known pomelo (at both sites). Mung beans (green and black), grass pea, pigeon pea, horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), rice bean (Vigna cf. unbellata), occurred, along with cotton and sesame. All this indicates major contact and trade with India. The reach of African eleusine, long known in India, had extended itself surprisingly far (Castillo et al. 2016).

The great Khmer civilization in Cambodia flourished from early Medieval times until the 15^th century. The main occupation of Angkor Wat and the great cities was the 11^th to13th centuries. Some lasted till the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and even into the 18^th, but by then the communities were only the barest shadows of their former selves. Changes were slow and erratic (Carter et al. 2019).

The coming of chaotic weather with the Little Ice Age probably had much to do with its decline and the abandonment of the great cities. The Intertropical Convergence Zone shifted south (Buckley et al. 2010; Day et al. 2012). Droughts became frequent, being particularly extreme around 1400. Floods also occurred. War with Thai and Vietnamese spreading southward was also a major problem. The Vietnamese conquered the Cham, who had adopted a Khmer-inspired culture, and then went on to conquer the Khmer in the Mekong Delta.

In all these matters, southeast Asia was a single region. Victor Lieberman’s superb history (Lieberman 2003, 2008) shows that the effects of the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age, and other climatic events were similar from Myanmar to Vietnam, and of course had influences worldwide. Moreover, from the Roman Empire onward, Eurasia was tied together by trade and communication. Political and social developments were increasingly related over time. The effects of the Little Ice Age in the 17^th century, for instance, were felt throughout, and the responses of different polities were not made alone. Responses at one end of the Eurasian system influenced the other ends. The Khmer cities were dispersed, with trees and probably rice paddies among the buildings. Such dispersed cities existed from Sri Lanka to Indonesia, and they all went down then the dorughts came (Lucero et al. 2015).

Trade in the Indian Ocean has been the subject of rapidly increasing research in the last 150 years. The Indian Ocean proves to have been an enormous highway, involving southeast Asia in world trade to a far greater extent than anyone thought in the early 20^th century (Beaujard 2009, 2012; Chaudhuri 1985; Reid 1988, 1993). This trade led to rapid adoptions of introduced foods, from rice in earliest times to chiles and other American crops in the 16^th century. The region proved open to influences, taking the old name “Indo-China” from the mix of Indian and Chinese cultural developments that local people added onto their already rich cultures.

Medieval contacts brought Indian and Chinese foods to Southeast Asia (Wheatley 1961). In particular, dairying and yogurt making came from India (Wheatley 1965), and in northern Southeast Asia from Tibet. This led to a striking extension of yogurt to unexpected places. Most of Southeast Asia shares the Chinese aversion to dairy foods, but yogurt persists in remote areas. I found it among the Toba Batak in Sumatera, who normally do not use dairy products, but still make water buffalo yogurt as a luxury.

Widely in Asia, trees are worshiped. In south and southeast Asia, the banyan (Ficus religiosa) is especially venerated, as the tree under which the Buddha was enlightened. Other similar trees, such as the small-leaved banyan (F. microphylla), substitute where Buddha’s banyan is not present.

However, sanctity is not confined to banyans. Any tree, especially any large old one, is venerated. This has enabled conservation movements in modern India and Thailand to designate local shade trees, groves, and even whole forests as sacred, to save them from the axe. In India sacred groves abounded already, but in Thailand, Buddhist monks have led the movement to designate new groves, for ecology. Susan Darlington gives a thorough account of this movement in her book The Ordination of a Tree (2013). Leslie Sponsel (2012) has written extensively on religious protection of the environment in Thailand and elsewhere, and has consequently launched a movement of spiritual ecology to try to involve more religious effort in the cause.

Farther upslope, the Akha are a typical case of hill people who regard forests as the domain of protective tree spirits. Forests range from sacred ones that cannot be disturbed to ones available for swidden farming, with intermediate cases (Wang 2013; Yos 2003, 2008). The woods are the realm of forest spirits, the gardens and villages are the domain of domestic ones. This is a pattern very common among southern Chinese minorities. It encourages a pattern of respect for the land (Wang 2013). Such respect is religiously taught, and is very widespread in Asia, from the Near East to Siberia.

In the 19^th century, the British took over Burma (now Myanmar), and did very little with it. They governed it indirectly, via local kings, and treated it rather as a lost stepchild of the Indian Empire. This neglect has handicapped the country to this day, but it had one important effect: it released the restrictions on settlement that had kept farmers from developing the vast Burma Delta. This was an enormous swamp where the Irrawaddy, Yangon, Sinang, and Salween Rivers and minor side streams all pour sediments into the sea. It swarmed with tigers, crocodiles, and poisonous snakes. Even so, thousands of farmers poured in, turning the delta into a huge rice bowl (Adas 2011). This was one of the greatest settlement moves of all time, comparable to—if far less extensive than—the opening of the American west at the same time. It is the ultimate proof that traditional small farmers can take the initiative in development, face enormous risks, and prevail. Nothing comparable was undertaken by the British or by post-Colonial governments. Small farmer initiative did all.

Throughout Southeast Asia are highly spiced pastes used for flavoring foods. These go by the Indian name of sambal in Malaysia and Indonesia. They are rich in chile peppers, and often involve fermentation. Countless forms exist, with local variants of each (see Surya and Tedjakusuma 2023).

Vietnam has a long history, closely connected with China’s (Kiernan 2017). It is, in some sense, the modern incarnation of the Hundred Yue of ancient Chinese history, later subjected under the Kingdom of Yue in the 3^rd century BCE. This became modern Fujian and Guangdong. Viet is the same word as Yue, subjected to different changes in pronunciation over time, and “Vietnam” (Yuenan in modern Chinese) means “southern Yue.” The Vietnamese people, presumably originating among those Hundred Yue, speak a language basically close to Khmer in the Mon-Khmer language family, but so influenced by Thai and Chinese that it not only consists largely of loanwords, but it has borrowed the Thai tone system. (Khmer and related languages are not tonal.) Vietnam was formerly inhabited by Cham people in the center; they were conquered and absorbed in the Medieval period. Khmer occupied the south, and many still live there. A large range of groups, speaking languages in the Thai or Mon-Khmer families, live in the mountainous interior.

The name was given to the country in 1804 by the Nguyen Dynasty, the emperor recording that it meant “southern Yue” rather than the alternative interpretation “south of Yue” (Dutton et al. 2012:258-59).

Vietnam, at least the northern part, spent a great deal of time under Chinese rule. It became independent when China was weak, and then permanently independent after the Ming Dynasty. It is worth recording, from the country’s checkered history, that there appeared in the 10^th century a white dog with black spots on his back that were interpreted as spelling out the characters for “Heaven’s Son,” implying a new emperor was at hand. Indeed, the Le Dynasty gave way to the Ly Dynasty (Dutton et al. 2012:61).

The Medieval Warm Period brought good rain, “rice from the sky,” but the Little Ice Age brought disastrous drought (Kiernan 2017:153, 177).

Vietnamese life in the early 19^th century is recorded in a fascinating document. One Cai Tinglan, a Chinese official, was shipwrecked in the dangerous waters near the border of China and Vietnam, and welcomed by Chinese and local people in the latter country until he could make his way home. He recorded with care and sensitivity the modest affluence of the country, including details of food and farming (Cai 2023). For instance, along one main road, “jackfruit trees were planted on both sides. There was one tree every ten paces. Their leaves and branches intertwined…. People cultivated bamboo all around their houses with many banana and betel plants….” (Cai 2023:70).  Bandits would sneak poison into travelers’ food in one wild disctrict. “The antidote is foreign ginger. (Also called chili pepper, the seeds are from Holland, the flower is white, and the stigma is green, when the fruit is cooked it turns bright red. It is filled with spicy seeds. One can eat it with the hull. Some are long and ponited, some are round and slightly pointed.) People add them to their food to guard against poison” (Cai’s italics; Cai 2023:89). He notes their fondness for raw or rare meat and fish (p. 123).

Later, the French took Vietnam, more because of nationalist urgings than because it wsa of great value to them. Peters (2012) finds that famines and mismanagement ensued. Pho was invented when the French took so much of the beef that people were left with bits and pieces to flavor their noodle soup; the classic form includes tendons, bones, and other odd bits. It was invented in Hanoi, where the classic beef form survives robustly. Elsewhere, more and more variety has entered.

Modern Vietnam has managed not only to feed its incredibly dense population, but to become a food exporter, by an adroit combination of communist services and overall planning with relatively free enterprise on the farm (Avieli 2012). It logs 875.4 people per square mile, according to the World Almanac for 2024, which makes it about as dense as an American suburb (Riverside, CA, where I live, has 3953 per square mile). Much of Vietnam is too mountainous for intensive farming; most farming is in coastal river valleys and deltas, especially the deltas of the Red and Mekong Rivers. Typical Vietnamese farms are about the size of Riverside city lots, yet the country exports rice and other agricultural products. Pierre Gourou (1955) described traditional farming on such tiny plots; rice covered the ground, fruit trees extended production into three dimensions, animals lived in and around the paddy fields, and everyone worked all the time. The situation was similar to that described by Geertz for Java (see below). Bamboo is exceedingly important, and is the subject of detailed modern study (Hieu and Poisson 2023).

One notably pleasant feature of traditional Vietnamese food is the garnish of fresh herbs once served with almost everything. Leaves used include mint, perilla, Vietnamese/Thai basil, rau ram (Polygona odorata), and sometimes tender young collards, mustard greens, Peking cabbage, mizuna (a beautiful Japanese mustard-green variety, and other herbs. This custom is, alas, disappearing. One is lucky now to get mint and basil. Persian and Georgian food also comes with fresh garnishes, but they are totally different and the custom seems unrelated.

Even so, food insecurity and anxiety inevitably exist (Ehlert and Faltmann 2020). Policy overshoot and sheer pressure of people on resources—especially wild-caught fish—cannot be avoided. Farming fish has become common, as elsewhere in eastern Asia.

            Feasting is a huge part of traditional Southeast Asian and Oceanian society. Feasts are given for every occasion (see Hayden 2016 for summary account, but every detailed ethnography of the area describes them). They are highly ritualized. In many of the small-scale societies of southeast Asia, this involves drinking beer from the same pot, using straws, an idea that may come from ancient China. The main dish is usually a pig or water buffalo, but can be anything. Small feasts involve chickens, domesticated in southeast Asia, in an area probably including what is now south China. The chicken was probably taken into domestication partly for feast use. In parts of Oceania it is a human; cannibalism is occasional in New Guinea and known as far as Fiji and Tonga.

The general purpose of ceremonial commemoration of ancestors or great events affords the occasion, but the actual social importance includes group solidarity, and most certainly display by the feast-giver or givers. In Melanesia, “big men”—local leaders—must give feasts to show their generosity, reward their backers, and indicate their wealth and power. They gain followers and support, partly by showing how many contacts they have and can use to gain resources.

The Philippines were settled from both north (via Taiwan) and south (via mainland southeast Asia and the Indonesian islands). They acquired rice very early, and eventually became famous for the rice terraces of Luzon, among the wonders of premodern agriculture. Involving countless hours of work and irrigation canals miles long, these were constructed in societies where kinship was the only organizing institution. No states were needed.

Fishing has always been important, and involves exceedingly complex and sophisticated decision-making (Randall 1977).

Among fruits, king of all is the durian (Bahasa Malaysia for “thorny one”), a huge thorn-covered fruit born on a gigantic rainforest tree. Fresh off the tree, its large, meaty arils have a heavenly flavor of peaches and chestnuts. Within a few hours, it takes on an oniony flavor. In a day or two, it was memorably described in early British Colonial times as smelling like “a sewer full of rotten onions.” True durian addicts learn to love it even in that stage. Various preserving techniques convert into tempoyak (dried and fermented) and other preparations, which have the spoiled-onion aroma.

In the late 20^th century, one Tan Eow Chong snitched a graft from a lady with superior durians and brought them back to his farm on Penang Island. Now the trees are mature, and he managed to attract the attention of Stanley Ho (the gambling billionaire of Macau) and Li Ka-Shing. Tan became successful, and sells countless durians in China (and elsewhere). He called the variety Rajah Kunyit (“turmeric king”), but: “Growers on the Malaysian mainland developed an identical hybrid, but called it the Musang King, which means Mountain Cat King. The latter name stuck” (Pierson 2019; the musang is actually a civet, not a mountain cat).

            Bali’s rice terraces are famous for their beauty, but also for their efficient agriculture. The island is one huge volcano. At its 10,000-foot top is a crater lake. From this lake drains the basic water supply of the island, augmented by heavy but seasonal rains. The water is allocated by the priestly hierarchy of Bali, headed by the head priest of the main water temple at the high outlet of the crater lake. In one of the best-known projects in cultural ecology, J. Stephen Lansing showed by a succession of computer models that the water allocation is close to ideal, not only for distributing water fairly to the many cultivators, but also for suppressing insect pests. Draining the fields at specific intervals disrupts their life cycles (Lansing 1991; Lansing et al. 2017). Bali’s traditional government consisted of small kingdoms that often fought and rarely managed anything very thoroughly. Clifford Geertz called them “theatre states” (Geertz 1980), since they indulged in magnificent shows of art, music, and drama, but seemed to do little else. This was rather unfair, since they did fight and collect taxes and otherwise do what governments do. They heroically resisted the Dutch colonial takeover in the early 20^th century. But they sensibly left the irrigation system to the priests.

            Java’s intensive rice agriculture led to rapid population growth under the Dutch colonial regime, and later in modern Indonesia. The Dutch repressed modernization and change, for their own reasons, which forced the rice farmers to work harder and harder on smaller and smaller plots to produce enough rice to feed the growing population. This led to what Clifford Geertz memorably called “agricultural involution” (1973). The concept has been widely misinterpreted as “blaming the victim,” since Geertz’ extensive account of colonialism and its effect—and his citation of Dutch scholarship that made the point even more strongly—was widely ignored by readers. In any case, the term has been widely applied elsewhere, to forced intensification without progress or benefit. Independence changed the situation somewhat, with modern factor inputs moving in rapidly. The situation is being slowly ameliorated, also, by falling birth rates. The whole issue is discussed with real brilliance by James Wood in The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming (2020).

            Farther out, in Sumatera, land is more easily available, and agriculture can be more extensive. The Toba Batak of the Lake Toba area, however, intensify, because they must terrace their steep crater-wall habitat to farm it. Lake Toba is a huge crater lake. The explosions that created it occurred about 73,000 years ago, autoclaving a good deal of southeast Asia and blanketing much, if not all, the world with dust. The human species was concentrated in the areas affected, and was reduced to a small population. Fortunately for us but unfortunately for the rest of the world’s biota, people survived in less affected zones. The ultimate result included extremely fertile soil around the lake. This allows the Toba Batak to cultivate rice and other crops with great success. Labor is organized by patrilineages, a striking example of simple kinship literally moving mountains. The old nonsense that a state is required to organize large-scale and highly sophisticated irrigation works is disproved by this case (Lando 1979), and by many others in southeast Asia. In fact, if anything, the reverse is true: irrigation there was traditionally organized along local kinship lines, which could be patrilineal, matrilineal (as among the Minangkabau), or cognatic (drawing on all sides of the family). Vast irrigation works from Thailand to Luzon were done this way.

            In Borneo, the Punan Batu are now one of the many groups in the Punan ethnicity, but they show evidence of a different and strange history. They retain a ritual language, found only in songs and chants, very different from the Punan language. They also differ genetically from other inhabitants of Borneo (Lansing et al. 2022). Their affiliations remain unknown.

            A signature food of southern Sumatera, especially of the Minangkabau people, is rendang, beef cooked in coconut cream and spices. The true rendang is blistering hot with chiles, enough to deter even those used to other Indonesian food. It has been the subject of a major monograph by Fadly Rahman (2020), who sees Portuguese influences in its heavy-duty meat focus and its spicing; the Portuguese introduced chiles to the area.

            The Philippines were evidently the first place settled by Malayo-Polynesians radiating out from Taiwan. They were, however, not the first people there. A little-known small hominin, Homo luzonensis, predates Homo sapiens there. Later, modern humans related to the dark-skinned peoples of the Andamans, Nicobars, and Melanesia reached the islands. Some of their ancestry survives in the “Negrito” populations. Other groups from parts of the mainland came also (Larena et al. 2021). The Malayo-Polynesians arrived a few thousand years ago.

Southeast Asia produces edible birds’ nests, very popular in soup in China. They are the nests of the swiftlet Collocalia esculenta and its relatives. That species produces the best; lesser species produce nests not entirely edible. (They are not “swallows’ nests.” The mistranslation is due to the Chinese language having one word for swifts and swallows.) They are tasteless, but absorb flavors of the soup and provide a wonderful succulent texture. The claimed reason for eating them, however, is their alleged health value. They are an easily digestible protein, produced by the birds’ salivary glands, with a fair amount of calcium, and thus quite nutritious, though far too expensive to be much of a medical source. They are eaten largely as a status food, obligatory—at least in the past—at formal banquets. In the late 20^th century, this led to overcollecting. Previously, conservation had been strictly enforced, but it crumbled in the face of skyrocketing demand. One response has been to set up artificial nesting venues (Thorburn 2014).

            Malaysia’s and Indonesia’s foodways include a highly distinctive tradition, the “Nonya” cuisine developed by Chinese settlers from the 16^th century onward (Oh et al. 2019). “Nonya” is an old Bahasa (a.k.a. Malay) word for a Chinese lady (i.e. a woman of some substance). Much of the vocabulary is derived from Hokkien (Southern Min), specifically the dialect spoken around Xiamen. This city, known as Amoy (long a, and moy nasalized) or Emng in Hokkien, is the main port in southern Fujian, and was the port of embarcation for many Chinese headed for the Nanyang (“south seas”).

Hokkien so dominated the Nanyang that Hokkien literary readings of Chinese—based on court pronunciation over a thousand years ago—became the learned language. Speakers of Mandarin were often surprised to find in Singapore and Penang that what the local people thought was formal official Chinese had no resemblance to Mandarin. This old tradition died in the late 20^th century. The Amoy region sent out most of the Chinese who reached the Nanyang from the 1500s to the late 19^th century, but after that large numbers of Hakka, Cantonese, and Teochiu (the last speaking a dialect of Hokkien). Among Chinese, Amoy Hokkien remained the language of general trade and communication until Mandarin and English took strong hold in the 21^st century. However, the Nonya cooks usually spoke Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia as a first or second language.

Food words were widely borrowed from Hokkien into Malaysian and Indonesian languages. Thus fermented soybeans are tausi, bean cake is tauhu, spring rolls are po pia (the –ia strongly nasalized), fish sauce is ke jiap (the source of English ketchup), noodles are mi (with nasalized i replacing the –ien of other Chinese languages), and so on.

            The food is flavored with soybean ferments: soy sauce, fermented beans and pastes, and the rest. A unique Indonesian contribution is tempeh, a cake of boiled soybeans inoculated with a fungus starter that makes them into a delicius cake. It has the great advantage of being rich in vitamin B12, lacking in vegetable foods but found in fungus and yeasts. Other popular flavorings include ginger (of course), rice and palm-sap vinegars, white pepper,

            Otherwise, the food is a blend of Malaysian, Indonesian, and Hokkien traditions. Rice is the usual staple, but noodles are exceedingly important, often outranking rice on some days. Vegetables are basic. The usual cooking oil in the old days was lard, making the food inaccessible to the majority of Malaysian and Indonesian people, who are Muslims, but from very early there were vegetable-oil alternatives.  Noodles fried in lard with bits of vegetables (mi goreng) are a popular food. 

            One staple is kueh, Hokkien kue’, sweet cakes. These are made of sticky rice and sugar, variously flavored. Traditionally, a major flavoring was Pandanus odorifer, sweet pandanus, a treelike spiky-leaved succulent native to the region. Sugar was often raw sugar from palm sap, but from very early times, sugar from sugar cane was also available. Cultivated sugar cane is native to New Guinea and possibly Southeast Asia. Countless varieties of kueh are available (Karuzaman et al. 2020). They have a most unfortunate effect on many children. They are constantly available and cheap, and young children cry for them. They become a major part of childhood foods. The combination of sticky rice and sugar makes them stick to the teeth and cause tooth decay, which in turn spreads through the system. Dental care being sporadic at best for the less affluent, this leads to disastrous effects on health in general. They also are pure calories of the most easily assimilated forms—sugar and white rice starch—and thus lead to obesity and metabolic syndrome. Diabetes rates skyrocket in areas with many kueh.

            Coffee is kopi, as Bahasa Malaysia/Indonesia has no f. It is made with strong coffee, condensed sweetened milk, and a spoonful or two of added sugar, and is thus sugary enough to be almost a solid. Asking for kopi o kosong—unsweetened black coffee (o is Hokkien for “black,” kosong is Bahasa for “empty”)—was once not only necessary but very difficult to achieve, since people usually assumed that foreigners who asked for such a nightmarish drink were simply making a verbal mistake. Traditionally, coffee was made and sold by people from Hainan Island, an island in China’s deep south whose language is a dialect of Hokkien quite different from Amoy’s.

Cynthia Fowler studied burning on Flores (2013). Flores is seasonally dry, and controlled burns are used to create fields (swiddening) and to open the forest up and drive away poisonous animals. The Komodo Dragon, a huge monitor lizard with a poisonous bite, still survives very locally on Flores, and is not the sort of animal one would like to meet in the woods.

Nearby, the island of Roti is also seasonally dry, to the point of being hopeless for rice, taro, or most grains. Some millet and large quantities of beans are grown, but the staple food in traditional times was palm sugar, made from the sap of local palm trees. This unusual diet should have been incredibly unhealthy, but no bad effects are recorded. The island was the subject of an outstanding ethnography by James Fox (1977), who moved to Australia and trained a couple of generations of Indonesian anthropologists, enormously influencing social science in that country.

Michael Alvard with David Nolin studied cooperation in Lamalera, a whale-hunting village in Indonesia. They hunt sperm whales, and face all the horrors portrayed by Herman Melville in Moby Dick. Cooperation is so vital, since crews have to work as a near-perfect team or die. They thus test well above any other population studied anywhere in the world for sheer cooperation, interpersonal generosity, and sharing.

Oceania

            Oceania was settled from Asia, but by different groups at different times. Early humans (Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, others) managed to reach quite remote islands early. Homo sapiens got as far as New Guinea and Australia at least 60,000 years ago. These were dark-skinned people, ancestors of today’s Melanesians and Australian Aborigines, and they had a fair amount of Denisovan admixture, of a different branch of that group from others known from genetic traces. Later migrations clearly occurred, but are obscure until East Asians began to move down from Taiwan—and surely from other places—by 2000-1500 BCE. The results are unclear. Taiwanese-derived Malayo-Polynesian languages are now spoken throughout Indonesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, except for New Guinean (Papuan) languages of several families on New Guinea and a few neighboring islands.

Genetically, there has been more mixing than this linguistic uniformity would suggest. Even the linguistic uniformity is only relative, since the Malayo-Polynesian languages are exceedingly numerous and diverse. Micronesia’s small population derives from at least two distinct migrations from the Philippines, another from the south but still clearly Malayo-Polynesian, and a couple from Melanesia (Liu et al. 2022)’ there is surely yet more to learn about this, let alone the more complex migrations elsewhere. People speaking Malayo-Polynesian languages range from looking like Chinese to looking like southeast Asians to looking like New Guinea and Australian people, and genetics shows this has a migration history.

Australia has its own unrelated language families. Most of the continent spoke languages of the Pama-Nyungan family, which seems to have radiated from the east about 3500 years ago. It has mixed enough with other languages to make its history and radiation unclear. Indeed, the old conventional wisdom of dark-skinned people coming early and Malayo-Polynesians coming later has been made more complex by genetics (Choin et al. 2021). Other, virtually unknown migrations appear in the record.

            Falling and rising sea levels importantly affected the spread of people, since many of the island groups sink under water during times of high sea level (Sefton et al. 2022). Whole island nations are threatened today by global warming. Kiribati, Tuvalu, and many Micronesian island groups will disappear.

The islands of the western Pacific have produced a highly disproportionate number of the best ethnographies of food and agriculture. The most famous studies of the Pacific islands in anthropology are the early classic ethnographies by Bronislaw Malinowski, who went from Poland to England, and his New Zealander student Raymond Firth. Their documentation of the Trobriand Islands and Tikopia, respectively, are the most thorough and intensively analyzed ethnographic records from the early period of anthropology (Firth 1936, 1940, 1959, 1961; Malinowski 1961 [1922], 1935).

This was a world of root crops. The Trobriand Island staple was the greater yam, Dioscorea alata. Other yam species occurred in the region. Taro (Colocasia antiquorum) was a widespread staple, originating from the southeast Asian mainland. The Trobrianders vied to produce the biggest yam. Malinowski’s book Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) has a romantic title, but consists of a meticulous record of agriculture in the islands, including the many magical practices used in hopes of getting the yams and other crops to grow bigger and better.

Many more recent works are at least as good in ethnographic quality, though much less extensive in terms of sheer documentation. Among these we may single out Hanunoo Agriculture by Harold Conklin (1957), a classic of ethnobotany and of studies of shifting cultivation.

Another notable work is The Banana Tree at the Gate: A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo by Michael Dove (2011).

Paul Sillitoe’s From Land to Mouth: The Agricultural “Economy” of the Wola of the New Guinea Highlands (2010), is less well known and deserves some special note. Sillitoe examines the degree to which our economic concepts transfer. “It is an indisputable fact of life—even for navel-dwelling postmodernists—that all human beings are mortal, and that for everyone (Wola, Inuit, English, or whoever) there are no more or less than twenty-four hours to each of our days” (p. 253).though he admits that hours are a western concept and time can feel longer or shorter depending on whether one is working the field or relaxing with friends. He goes on to say that people economize it in different ways, and some have plenty of spare time, but still there is a single limit.

The Wola were still using stone tools when he started to work there.  Stone vs steel did not make much difference (contra early, wrong claims by Salisbury and others); they just cut fewer trees with stone, and then and cut them up less. It was horribly hard work making a garden. However, they likde it, and he quotes a more extreme earlier New Guinea team (on p. 361) that a New Guinean’s “attitude towards his gardening is more like that of an amateur rose-fancier” than a commercial one.

Burning released nutrients but they quickly leached, so first-year crops usually do best. Crops included the vital staple sweet potato (fairly new in New Guinea), Nasturtium schlechteri, amaranths of three species, squash, Chinese cabbage, taro, maize, and Setaria palmifolia (pitpit), grown for shoots. The area has returned to local autonomy and self-sufficiency with the decline of local governance. People exchange garden produce all the time, with taro and pandanus figuring especially. Taro was hard to grow and hedged with taboos and spells. Also, it crops all at once instead of being harvestable daily on a land-to-mouth basis as sweet potato was (Sillitoe 2010:399).

Polynesia was the last area on earth to be settled before modern European expansion after 1450. Voyagers reached Hawaii and New Zealand around 2000 years ago or less. In New Zealand, the classic tropical crops such as taro did not flourish south of the northern parts of North Island (Prebble et al. 2019). People lived by fishing and hunting, exterminating the moas in the process, and by eating fern roots, not a great diet. The sweet potato, introduced from South America a few hundred years before Columbus, revolutionized agriculture there.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island), known for its enormous stone sculptures, was in contact with South America by 1,000 years ago. Obsidian blades revealed starch grains from taro and yam (known there historically), breadfruit, ginger, and Tahiti apple (common in Polynesia but not previously documented from Rapa Nui), and, much more interestingly, manioc, sweet potato, and achira (Killgrove 2024). These are South American root crops, not native to Asia or occurring there before contact. Sweet potato was known all over eastern Polynesia and as far as New Zealand, where the Maaori depended heavily on it, well before modern European contact, but manioc and achira were not known from ancient Oceania before.

Chickens spread through most of remote Oceania along with the Melanesians and Polynesians. They are a distinctive breed, or group of breeds, characterized by unique haplotypes. These are not shared with South America, a bit of evidence against the long-debated question of whether Polynesians introduced chickens there (Thompson et al. 2014). Chicken breeds known among the Mapuche in Chile have fairly clear Southeast Asian input, but it probably came via the Spanish after 1500.

Central America and Mexico

            Mexican agriculture is famous for its incredible inventiveness in pre-Columbian times. Most important was its invention of the crop combination that became known as the Three Sisters: Maize, beans, and squash. Maize (Zea mays) was domesticated in Mexico, a brilliant and creative development from teosinte, a most unpromising-looking wild grass. Beans of several species were domesticated, with the common or frijol bean Phaseolus vulgaris becoming the world success. Several species of squash were also created, with winter squash Cucurbita maxima, butternut squash and kabocha C. moschata, and cushaw C. mixta most important. The most important one worldwide today is C. pepo, pumpkins, summer squashes, and ornamental gourds. Butternut squash in many forms is more successful in the tropics, and is thus the squash or pumpkin throughout the tropical world and northward throughout eastern Asia.

            The Three Sisters are a perfect combination. The maize provides the calories, the beans the protein, and the squash the vitamins and minerals—especially if you eat the flowers and tender young stems, as Mexicans do. Chiles, really a fourth sister, also exist in several species, and provide further vitamin and mineral enhancement. The beans grow up the maize plant and fertilize the whole field by fixing nitrogen. The squash kills pests by shading out weeds and by chemically combatting insects, weeds, and predators; the cucurbitins that make wild gourds too bitter to eat are powerful insecticides, to the point of being occasionally used commercially.

Even underground they all complement each other: maize has shallow roots, beans medium-length ones, squash very deep ones. My Maya farmer friends would test the soil with a digging stick to see how deep it was, and thus what they could plant. This was especially valuable in the soil-filled pockets in Yucatan’s limestone landscape. A shallow pocket would grow maize, and so on. Deep, rich soil would grow not only the Four Sisters, but papayas, eggplants, tomatoes, and other necessities. The best soil was saved for these mixed plantings.

            One problem for ancient Mexicans was getting salt. Salterns along the coasts are well known (Andrews 1983). A Maya city got rich by controlling the salt trade from the salt stream by the city (Woodfill et al. 2015).

            Two species of chile peppers (Nahuatl chilli; Capsicum annuum, ordinary chiles and bell peppers,and C. frutescens, Tabasco pepper) were domesticated in Mexico, and at least two more in South America (C. chinense, habanero, and C. pubescens, rocoto or manzano). They are ancient domesticates, at least in Mexico, probably in South America as well. They appear to have been independently domesticated in both continents. The North American ones spread south, especially C. annuum, the ordinary common chile. It gave rise to many less hot varieties, eventually being bred into the heatless and greatly enlarged bell varieties. The South American varieties spread north early. The habanero spread through the Caribbean islands, hence its name connecting it with Havana. The rocoto reached west Mexico at some indeterminate point, and remains focused there as well as in the Andes.

Their active ingredient in causing pain is the oleoresin capsaicin, which exists in at least five forms in chiles. It directly stimulates the heat receptors in the body. The capsaicin is there to kill fungi—it is particularly defensive against fusarium wilt, a major problem for peppers (Tewksbury and Nabhan 2001; Tewksbury et al. 2001). Chiles in less fungal parts of the genus’ range have less of it (Haak et al. 2008). It is, however, also useful to keep mammals from eating the fruit, and to increase rapidity of throughput in digestion, to speed delivery of seeds. Like many berries—chiles are berries, technically—these plants depend on dispersal by animals that eat the fruit and then excrete the seeds packaged in fertilizer. Birds are not susceptible to capsaicin, and thus eat the fruit happily (Tewksbury and Nabhan 2001). As noted elsewhere, they are loved for their flavor and stimulant quality, not for the pain they produce. Eaters quickly habituate to the pain, and confine their eating to varieties to which they have habituated.

They appealed to Europeans right away. Columbus thought them a spice of the Indies, which he continued to maintain he had reached. Spanish and Portuguese took them around the world. The Portuguese suppressed them in the homeland, to maintain their black pepper import business, but propagated them widely in Asia, as a substitute for black pepper—they could thus lower the price of black pepper and import more of it (Tripodi et al. 2021)!

            The plague that devastated the Aztec Empire before the Spanish, and made it easier for them to conquer, was called cocoliztli, and now turns out to be Salmonella enterica var. Paratyphi, which also decimated Europe at more or less the same time (Warriner 2022). The Native Americans also had to contend with tuberculosis, apparently brought to them by migrating seals long ago—it is a a different strain from European one, which may be from cattle. Meningitis (Neisseria menigitidis) and gonorrhea (N.

gonorrhoeae), there and elsewhere, are both from a harmless oral-cavity N. lactamica (Centeno et al. 2023).

A wonderful description of life among the Nyahnyu people of Mexico was provided by local teacher Jesus Salinas Pedraza (Bernard and Salinas Pedraza 1989).

A modern problem of some importance is the rise of sun-grown coffee at the expense of shade-grown. Coffee is best grown in the shade, which has the side benefit of preserving natural cover and wildlife. Sun-grown coffee is inferior in quality and a biological desert. A good discussion by Perfecto and Armbruster (2003) has the advantage of showing (p. 163) a shade-grown plot in Chiapas that is so similar to ones I have studied there that I suspect it is in fact one of them.

The dreadful role of sugar in American history is all too well known. The plantation economy brought slavery by the early 16^th century. It peaked in the 18^th, with importation of millions of enslaved Africans. Poverty continued in much of the old sugar region and in the later realms of cotton, rice, and other goods produced by enslaved labor. These areas become dependent and peripheralized, economically subservient to urban importing countries—first western Europe, then the American states (Beckford 1972; Mintz 1985).

Cooking and identity is as much an issue in Latin America as elsewhere (Ayora-Diaz 2016, 2019, 2021). Traditional cooking technology is part of this; definite regional and local styles exist. (Ayora-Diaz 2016). Grinding on a metate or in a mortar is widespread, especially in Mexico and (formerly) North America generally. Grinding in a lava mortar, molcajete, is a Mexican art, and the final dish—after grinding and adding anything needed—is often served in the molcajete itself.

Manioc is ground to meal, made into bread, and baked, allowing it to be detoxified. Heat drives off the poison as a gas, so well-cooked—especially ground and baked—products are safe. The large (sometimes huge) tubers are used. They and the old leaves are high in cyanogenic glycosides, which become deadly hydrocyanic acid on damage of the root. Though “sweet” (nonpoisonous) strains exist, people have actually selected over millennia for even more bitter (poisonous) ones, since these are immune to predation and are easily prepared. In parts of Africa, the roots are not quite totally detoxified, since it turns out that a small amount of cyanide in the blood discourages malaria organisms.

Sometimes the young leaves are used, the old ones being poisonous. They are much more used in Asia and Africa where the plant was taken by colonial Portuguese and others in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Mexico received a great deal of its modern cuisine from the Arabic conquest and 800-year occupation of much of Iberia. The reconquista was finally concluded by the conquest of Grenada in 1492. The loot from Grenada financed Columbus’ voyage.

Irredentist Jews and Moors were expelled, and went to Morocco, Tunisia, and the Turkish Empire, but countless conversos remained—Moorish and Jewish families that had converted to Catholicism, sincerely or for survival. (Their cooking and survival are described by Hélène Piñer, 2021 and 2022.) The “Catholic sovereigns” Ferdinand and Isabela grew increasingly repressive; the conversos rebelled; this led to more distrust, more oppression, and more rebellion. Ultimately the Spanish Inquisition became really deadly, murdering perhaps 200,000 people over the next 200 years. More charitably, a very large number were expelled, or allowed to migrate, to New Spain. (The same thing occurred in Portugal, with Brazil as destination.) Many were relocated in the most remote parts of empire, including New Mexico, where a surprising amount of Medieval Iberian Moorish and Jewish culture survives to this day (Gary Nabhan and Carlos Velez-Ibañez, personal communication over many years; see Nabhan 2014, Velez-Ibañez 1996). Traveling in New Mexico years ago, I was surprised to find classic Arabian dishes in a local cookbook compiled by Cleofas Jaramillo (1981, orig. 1942). Gary Nabhan ran it down, and found that the Jaramillo family did indeed descend from converso ancestors (Nabhan 2014:13).

Many, however, managed to stay in the central core, perhaps especially Puebla. Here they fused classic Arab cuisine with New World ingredients (Pilcher 1998). One result was the famous mole poblano, a well-known Moroccan chicken dish with Aztec chile, tomatoes, and chocolate added in a perfect blend that is one of the world’s great dishes. Another blend is chiles en nogada: Poblano chiles—named for the region—stuffed with a thoroughly Levantine mix of fruits, nuts, and spices, with chile sauce over all. The spicing in this cuisine—black pepper, cumin, and coriander seeds and leaves—is classic Arabic.

Among other odd introductions is the tandur oven, a big ceramic jar buried in the ground or in a stove setup (Magaña González 2016). It was probably invented in ancient Mesopotamia, and has gone everywhere that Iranian and Iran-influenced civilization has gone, from China to America. It is found in Oaxaca under the name comixcal, probably an earlier word for an earth oven. The thick tortillas known as totopos and gendarmes are stuck to the walls, and then taken off with a peel (a long-handled paddle), as in a regular tandur.

A fascinating story concerns the vita-migas of Tepito (Hernández 2009). Tepito is the old poverty district of Mexico City, south of the old urban core. Migas means “crumbs,” but is much more; it is a Spanish development of the classic Arabic dish tharīd, bread soaked in meat stock, supposedly the Prophet Muhammad’s favorite food. The good citizens of Tepito took to making cheap migas by salvaging bones from butchers and restaurants and cooking them into stock, then making migas with stale bread and tortillas. With inevitable chilango (Mexico City resident) pride, this got idealized as a marker of the tough, resourceful Tepito chingón (politely translatable as “tough guy”), and thus called “vita-migas.”  The Tepito motto is comer bien, coger fuerte, y enseñar los huevos a la Muerte (eat well, fuck hard, and show your balls to Death), a typical Mexican rhyming refran.

Possibly the best single book about a single nation’s food is a classic monograph on the food of Jamaica, by B. W. Higman (2008). He documents at enormous length how Indigenous Caribbean Island cookery was combined over historic centuries with European food, and above all with African food introduced by enslaved Africans and foods of India brought by indentured laborers. The result includes many cases of Indigenous foodstuffs used in African ways and then often adapted to European and Indian dishes or tastes. Sweet potatoes were assimilated to the unrelated African yams and then used for European pastries. Indigenous butternut squash became a replacement for African and European gourds and pumpkins, and then was made into soup flavored with Indian spices; the result has gone worldwide now in expensive restaurants. Indigenous beans and peanuts were used in African, European, and Indian dishes, all of which blended into each other over time. Indian chicken curry picked up Caribbean chile peppers and other spices. The many Indigenous fruits were used in all possible ways. An extreme of Jamaican fusion is jerking: preparing meat for storage. It is smoked over the barbacoa, a wooden frame used by Indigenous people for smoking and roasting, but is previously (and sometimes also later) marinated in a fantastic mix of spices from all over the world. Higham tells the story of every ingredient and dish, with full historical documentation. A darker note is the horror of the sugar industry, from slavery days to modern poverty and malnutrition. Jamaica also faces the loss of its once-lavish fishing industry, with overfishing depleting stocks and global warming wiping out the corals that once were the home and refuge of the fish and shellfish.

South America

            Native Americans of greater Amazonia have inspired much of the best research on human food. Much of this is due to the work and theorizing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962, 1969) who did research in the wilds of Brazil in the early 1930s. He found that the local people, mostly speakers of Ge languages, differentiated humans from nonhumans by the human use of cooking. Ants had much more impressive societies; leafcutter ant nests can have over a million workers, integrated into a model social order. The Bible saw clothing as the great watershed, but the Ge people wore little or none. Only cooking was uniquely and indisputably human.

            This insight had a bit to do with inspiring Richard Wrangham’s long-standing study of cooking as a critical aspect of, and even driver of, human evolution (see above). Lévi-Strauss went on to theorize that roasting was more “nature”-like, while boiling modified the food more and thus humanized it more. This idea has not stood the test of time.

Native Americans in the Amazon rainforest sometimes increased forest areas, possibly into areas previously deforested by fires (Bush et al. 2021).  More often, they increased the number of useful trees, including araucarias, yerba mate, all sorts of fruits, and various palms. Palms were often cut and left to grow larvae; up to 5 kg. of edible larvae could grow in a metre of rotting palm trunk (Silva Noelli et al. 2022).

Planted trees like Brazil nut, Inga, Pourouma cecropiifolia, Pouteria caimito, and chocolate (cacao) trees are all over the Amazon. Planted-type trees are most diverse near the Peru border but most numerous in the center. Levis and colleagues (2017 mapped the whole Amazon Basin and found enormous evidence of human planting and/or management.

            Deforestation in tropical South America peaked in the late 300s CE, followed by reforestion, especially after 750 and then, dramatically, after 1500, when violence and introduced diseases reduced the Indigenous population by 90 to 95%. Abundant pollen of Cecropia, an invasive tree of open spaces, shows that the reforestation was real, not an artifact of surveying. Maize pollen was not particularly abundant before or after the 300s, showing that people were relying on a mixed farming system with heavy reliance on root crops and fruit (Bush et al. 2021).

In the Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia, archaeologists detected extensive networks of canals and fields in pre-Columbian times. This turned out to be far more extensive and impressive than first expected. Here the Casarabe people flourished from 500 to 1400 CE. They “built hundreds of monumental monds interconnected by canals and causeways across a flat forest-savannah mosaic landscape dominated by seasonally flooded savannahs, with forests restricted to non-flooded…levees” (Lombardo et al. 2025:119). Maize was the main crop and the field crop. They grew manioc, lleren, squash, gourds, and other crops. They lived in large settlements on forested levees along rivers draining otherwise marshy fields, and grew maize in the marshy level areas, draining them with canals and irrigating in the dry season from ponds. The canal system was enormous, with small tributaries leading to large ones and then one giant canal into Lake Francia. Even the small canals were 4 meters wide and 25 cm deep. The next level up was 8 meters wide and 70 cm deep. The enormous canal into the lake was fully 14 m wide and 1.8 to 3.2 m deep, deepening as it came closer to the lake. This is a literally monumental achievement for a society lacking metals, the wheel, or draft animals.

One Native invention is cassareep: boiled-down manioc press liquid, becoming thick and black. It has the umami taste from glutamates (Balston 2020). In Venezuela it is heavily dosed with chile. In Guyana it goes into pepper pot with clove and cinnamon.

The Enawene, a tiny group in central Brazil, depend heavily on this manioc drink. They never drink unboiled liquids. From this beginning, researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel (2020) went on to a brilliant study of the role of fire and cooking in humanizing food (following Lévi-Strauss’ ideas), and the importance of cooking in human evolution (following Richard Wrangham). Indeed cooking makes us human.

Among South American hunter-gatherers, the Ache share food on the basis of reciprocity. So do the culturally similar Hiwi, who have to hunt long and hard for food (it repays effort) The vital important of reciprocity says much about human evolution and society (Gurven 2006).

The usual Native American attitudes toward conservation—protection and wise use based on respect—are amply documented in South America (e.g. Reed 1995, 1997; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971, 1976, 1996).

Modern Brazil relies heavily on fermentations (Mayrink Lima et al. 2022). There is a great variety of local cheeses, using many little-known local microorganisms. Marajo Island, a huge island at the Amazon mouth, produces cheese from water buffalo milk. Italian influence shows up in Lactobacillus-fermented meats, such as socol, local to one city, made from pork loin. Charqui (jerky) is brined, salted, and dried, with some important salt-tolerant microorganisms. There are several fermented manioc products: paste, flour, fermented juice, and others.

Aluá is a beer made of most anything (grain or fruit), is of African origin. Other local beers include calugi, tarubá, and yakupa, Indigenous beers (mostly made from manioc). Caiçuma is an Indigenous peach palm beer. Cauim and caxiri are more manioc or grain or sweet-potato beers. Tiquira, distilled manioc beer, is an Amazonian delicacy.

The common Brazilian rum, cachaça, is actually based on a very complex ferment of the sugar mash. They use the same terms we do, heads and tails, for the throwaway of distillation, and keep the “heart” (coração).

A number of wild berries are commonly used in Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia: Calafate, Berberis microphylla, superb and widely used for drinks and jam; murtilla, Empetrum rubrum, chaura, resembles cranberries and crowberries; Gaultheria mucronata is a close relative of the salal berry (G. shallon) of the Northwest Coast of North America.

Peru, inspired by the success of tequila and mezcal, is producing chawar, a new agave drink.

Guinea pigs, generally known by the Quechua name cuy, are a standard food in Peru and neighboring Andean countries. They have about as much meat as a very small chicken, and tend to be rather tough. They are eaten roasted or stewed, often in a spicy yellow sauce. They achieved artistic fame when Marcos Zapata in 1753 painted a Last Supper for the Cuzco cathedral, with the disciples eating a guinea pig instead of a lamb and drinking from Inca-style qero cups (personal observation, Cuzco, 1997; see Benavente Velarde 1995:139-140). This is part of a significant trend in colonial Andean art to show the victimized apostles and saints as Indigenous and, often, their persecutors as Spanish.

The Spanish did manage to introduce the characteristic European Easter bread. It is known as t’anta wawa, “baby bread,” and is made on All Saints and All Souls’ Days in memory of babies lost. It takes the shape of babies, with baby faces sometimes added (GastroObscura, online, Aug. 29, 2019).

An important article on local crops has a self-explanatory title: “Semi-Domesticated Crops Have Unique Functional Roles in Agroecosystems: Perennial Beans (Phaseolus dumosus and P. coccineus) and Landscape Ethnoecology in the Colombian Andes” (Locqueville et al. 2022). The vines live 3-6 years and climb up into the trees. They need no annual sowing, produce in the worst years, and are good eating. Both are called cacha (Locqueville et al. 2022).

The Cashinahua, or Hunikuin, “real people,” are one of a number of groups that believe that peccaries and other game animals can reincarnate as people, and that people reincarnate as these animals. Zeca, a Cashinahua thinker, recognized different views of reality, and could hold forth to ethnographer Cecilia McCallum (2014) about skepticism, alternative views to keep in mind since we don’t know which is right. He understood cultural differences, personal differences, ontology vs ontologies, epistemology and epistemologies, and differences in standpoints. Zeca appears one of the sharper minds in anthropology.

Similarly, dogs dream the future, among upper Amazon groups, and their owners are very surprised when the dogs die, since they should predict and avoid their fate (Kohn 2007).

North America

            Most of North America lacked agriculture at the time of contact. The north and the Great Basin west were lands of hunting and gathering.

The Arctic and Subarctic are too cold and wintry for agriculture; most of that land is unfarmed even today. People lived by following caribou herds, or by fishing, or by hunting various animals. Gathering provided berries, mushrooms, and locally other foods, from lichens to nuts. Food was often preserved by storing it in cold places, which of course were abundant. Warm weather led to thawing and fermentation, often producing monumentally aromatic or maggot-infested results, which were eaten with relish. This is also true in Siberia (Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014). They are definitely an acquired taste.

A survey of these shows that many could potentially carry pathogens of various sorts (Stemmelmayr and Sheffield 2022), but people of the region understood this, and were usually careful to avoid the dangers. Sealed and stored salmon eggs in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, were called “stink eggs” with good reason, and could potentially kill, but rarely did in traditional times when people knew how to assess dangers.

            Along the Pacific Coast, lack of agriculture did not mean lack of cultivation. Wild plants were widely tended and managed. Tobacco was the only domesticate, grown by the Haida, Karuk (Harrington 1932), and many other local groups, but plants like camas (Camassia quamash) were semi-domesticated—so intensively cultivated by digging the roots and replanting them that they became used to human management. Trees and bushes were transplanted to new areas. Groves of Oregon crabapple (Malus fusca) and other native fruit trees are found at former habitation sites in the Northwest Coast forests.

            Much of the continent was managed by fire. The far north, high mountains, deserts, and Northwest Coast rainforests do not burn, or burn only locally, but other regions were burned at fairly regular intervals. Much of the lore is lost, because of the incredibly foolish custom of suppressing all fires. This idea was introduced in the late 19^th century and peaked in the mid-20^th. It led to fuel buildup and senility of brush and trees, so that when fire did come—as it must, thanks to lightning if not human carelessness—forests, brushlands, and grasslands were devastated. Previously, regular burning occurred thanks to lightning, and Native Americans increased the frequency by deliberately firing small patches to open the landscape. This was especially done for berry and nut stands. Many of these bushes and trees are naturally fire-followers, especially the berries. They require fire to keep them growing and to prevent encroachment of less useful but more shade-loving trees.

            Many of these berries and fruits deserve more attention. Serviceberries (Amelanchier alnifolia)—basically tiny wild plum-colored pears—are grown as dooryard fruit in Canada, and you can find selected varieties there; few fruits are better. The southern species (A. utahensis) is good eating too, but has not been cultivated or selected—another potential garden fruit.

The native California plum (Prunus subcordata) has evolved an exquisite variety in the Warner Mountains of the California-Nevada-Oregon tripoint, and this plum has been grown in orchards near Lakeview, OR, for preserves, jam, and wine. It is unsurpassed for all these purposes, narrowly beating out the beach plum of New England (at least to this observer, but no New Englander would ever admit their beach plums are less than the finest, and they have a case).

A vast wealth of wild currants, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, huckleberries, blueberries, bush cranberries, and other berries gives almost year-round harvests in the more temperate areas. The thimbleberry, a wild raspberry (Rubus parviflorus), is often as good as any domestic raspberry. I once found an abandoned patch of domestic raspberry that had been invaded by wild thimbleberries. I spent a long time eating; it was the best berry feast I ever had. Wild strawberries are also wonderful, and I have grazed happily on them in many a forest. We in California have all the domesticated species as wild plants: Fragaria chiloensis, F. vesca, and F. virginiana. F. vesca extends to Europe, and is cultivated there; ordinary commercial strawberries are hybrids of the other two, which occur very widely in the Western Hemisphere. The wild ones are a very great deal better than the tame ones, which have been bred for size and appearance and have lost almost all flavor.

Root crops other than the Jerusalem artichoke have been much less popular with settlers. Camas is the highline root, and is very good eating. “Wild carrots” (Perideridia spp.) and countless species of Lomatium (sometimes called “wild parsley”) are widespread, and eaten when available. They and other roots are often baked in earth ovens. They are rather tasteless and woody. A range of bitterroots, balsamroots, wild lilies, and other root, bulb, tuber, and corm crops are enthusiastically consumed. For the record, a bulb is a layered thickening of the base of the stem. Lilies and onions are are typical. Their Chinese name “hundred together” describes their appearance. Tubers are underground stems, like potatoes (white and sweet), and have no such structure. Corms are underground or ground-level swollen stems, resembling bulbs but lacking the layered or scaled structure.

Berries and roots are eaten all over the Americas, but roots are particularly important in the interior Northwest—the Columbia Plateau and the vast high areas around it. There, they are the staple food. A wondrous variety exists, so there can be harvesting in many places at many times of year, and people can enjoy different eating experiences.

Nuts include a vast range of acorns from oaks of many species. Chestnuts were one of the most abundant trees in eastern North America before introduced blight from Asia killed virtually all of them; a few resistant ones survive, and are being bred in hopes of restoring this important crop. The walnut family supplied not only walnuts from many local species, but also hickories and pecans. Pinyon pines supplied vast amounts of seeds in good years. Native Americans propagated nuts locally and burned forests (at least near their villages) to preserve the health of the nut trees by eliminating competition, killing pests, clearing brush, and reducing the danger of bigger fires. Thus the nut groves of America were managed to various degrees, often quite intensively. Debate continues on how much was managed at this level, with anthropologists emphasizing intensive management at significant scales (K. Anderson 2005; Delcourt and Delcourt 2004) and biologists often casting a skeptical eye.

            North America received its agriculture largely from Mexico, but probably began experimenting independently from a very early time. A range of crops appeared in the Mississippi drainage, including sumpweed (Iva annua), goosefoot (Chenopodium berlandierii, especially var. jamesii), and others. Sunflowers were domesticated in North America or nearby northern Mexico. So were pumpkins (Cucurbita pepo, orange pumpkins and ornamental gourds, as opposed to winter squash).

Some of the minor crops of the Americas deserve further looks (Minnis 2014). The chenopods and other seed crops, and the many Indigenous-domesticated root crops, are particularly promising. The Jerusalem artichoke, a species of sunflower that has nothing to do with Jerusalem or artichokes, is probably Mississippi Valley domesticate. It produces huge stems and incredible numbers of tubers on very poor soil. Research at the University of California at Davis showed it to have enormous potential for producing biofuel—free fuel from poor land. The tubers are edible after long cooking at high heat, but their starch is mainly inulin, which causes acute indigestion if not thus broken down. They were traditionally prepared in earth ovens.

The Iroquois and their neighbors took up maize agriculture rather late, but came to depend heavily on it. Their fields were extremely productive and could be cropped repeatedly, because they cultivated the best soils and allowed a large number of nitrogen-fixing plants, cultivated and wild, to grow among crops or between cropping years. They grew plants in mounds, which protected the seedlings from early freezes; the seedlings did not break out of the ground till late, and the mounds were above the coldest air at ground level. This allowed permanent cultivation that was as productive as European agriculture of the time, if not more (Mt. Pleasant 2015; Mt. Pleasant and Burt 2010). They processed corn into hominy by using wood ash. A common food, cooked in pots, was sagamité, “hominy corn pounded into meal, boiled in water, and enhanced with meat, fish, berries, or oil if available” (Taché et al. 2025:168; Campanella 2013).

Native American environmental morality is now well known as a major contribution to the world. Respect for animals and plants, knowledge of the resources, and ability to set and enforce limits are vital. Also vital is a real grasp of ecology. Native Americans are generally quite aware of food webs, networks of mutual dependence, predator-prey relationships, and, in generqal, the broader picture. They conserve resources as part of awareness of the wider world (Anderson and Pierotti 2022; Brandt 1953; Davis 2000).

            Native American conservation ideas influenced the United States from the late 19^th century. George Bird Grinnell, a top-notch pioneer ethnographer, was well connected with the New York elite, and managed to convince them of the need to conserve and the wisdom of Native American ways to do it. Among his converts was Theodore Roosevelt, probably the most strong conservationist among American presidents. Also influenced were George Shiras, father of the Migratory Bird Protection Treaty of 1918, which has saved migratory birds ever since—though they are now succumbing to pollution and global climate change. Yet another was William Hornaday, long head of the Bronx Zoo and the New York Zoological Society, who wrote a passionate and fiery work of conservation, Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913).

North America today

            United States farm subsidies are an international scandal and an international tragedy. Huge industrial farms are paid vast sums to plant, or not plant, sugar, soybeans, wheat, maize, cotton, and one or two other items. The environmental effects of this are appalling. Sugar, for instance, is grown by a few huge industrial farms in Florida, who take the water that should go to the Everglades to keep that unique ecosystem functioning. The firms pollute the water heavily with dangerous chemicals before releasing some of it. The sugar is farmed solely for the subsidies; it does not make money by itself.

Reforms in 2014 failed to stop flagrant abuse. At least, subsidies are no longer paid to nonfarmers with no crops. However, inflated prices led to oversupport. Now around $9 billion is spent on commodity subsidies. Most of the money goes to the rich agribusiness companies, not small farmers. The top 1% of recipients got an average of $116,501 in 2016, the median ones got only $2479 (Britschgi 2017).

This applies worldwide. The world subsidy level is at least $700 billion a year, possibly over a trillion. Only 1% of this money is at all good for the environment. Most goes for cattle, deforestation, and heavy use of fertilizer—about the most environmentally destructive things humans do. Some 75% goes to farmers, 15% to research, the rest for other purposes (Carrington 2019, using data from International Food Policy Research Institute and Food and Land Use Coalition). Interestingly, these revelations come from a right-wing and a left-wing journal, respectively; nobody likes farm subsidies except giant agribusinesses.

Food insecurity in the US is astonishingly high, around 12% of households. It rose in the 2008 recession and did not drop back for years, only to rise again in the COVID-19 epidemic (World Almanac 2025:161).

US food consumption changes since 1970 reflect a startling drop in consumption of oranges, peaches, spinach, lettuce,veal, and potatoes, and a huge increase in avocados, broccoli, garlic, high-fructose corn syrup, and chickens (World Almanac 2025:161). Beef consumption has increased only 15% since 1910, but chickens have gone up 520%; butter is down, pork slightly up, fish way up (p. 164). Most crop production is up, but oats have crashed even since 2000, as horses become less prominent. Cotton is somewhat down. Maize production has doubled even since 1980, but wheat and barley are down (p. 165). Soybeans have doubled in production. Beans are down but dry peas are up (165).

Sweet drinks are the major source of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup; sandwiches are the major source of saturated fasts and salt (p. 162).

Restaurants are also in trouble. “Of the nearly 647,286 restaurants in the U.S., chains account for 301,183,” (Peterson 2020). Independent restaurants are squeezed by costs and by local factors. The chains can absorb local failures by compensating from other locals that succeed. The bland, unhealthy food of the chains is a total abomination from the points of view of both taste and health, but they succeed by consistency, flashy advertising, and having all too well-known images and brands.

            Teenagers notoriously eat badly, but do not have to. Most of them realize the food corporations are making huge profits selling junk food, and they resent being suckered by the slick ads and taste sensations. This can motivate them to avoid such food (Bryan 2016; Burris et al. 2020). Many are terribly food-insecure, however, coming from troubled or impoverished households. They often lack easy access to good food when they need it.

Teens need enormous amounts of food. Peg Bracken, in her wonderful I Hate to Cook Book (1960), memorably ended a recipe for a hearty casserole with “Dinner for six, or an afternoon snack for a teenage boy.” All of us who have raised teenage boys will understand.

Ethnic Food Cultures

            Stamdard American food is, after all, an ethnic culture, a synthesis made by white European-ancestry settlers from many sources. One fascinating story is that of ketchup, traced by Claudia Kreklau (2025) in an extremely thorough and well-referenced article. She takes it from its roots in Fujianese fermented fish sauce (ke tsiap) to a mixed anchovy-based category of sauces in 18^th-century England. It led to Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, sugar, spices, onions, garlic, anchovies) and even more fascinating mixes—walnut ketchup had walnuts, anchovies, shallots, mace, pepper, cloves, and garlic, and was then combined with cayenne, soy, etc. in some applications. These spread in due course of time to America, where ketchup generally meant the walnut form. Meanwhile, thanks to spread from the New World to the Mediterranean countries, tomatoes got more and more popular. Tomato ketchup was invented. It then spread over central Europe. Then the migration of Anna and John Henry Heinz from Germany to America brought a new enterprise. Their son Henry John (1844-1919) went from a humble start to spectacular success. He started making ketchup on a large scale in 1876, with more sugar, vinegar, and pulp than others. The recipe changed and simplified over time, becoming the now-universal commodity.

North American Anglo food was heavily influenced by religion, often highly deviant cults, as most recently chronicled by Christina Wang in Holy Food (2023). Most of these banned, and still ban, alcohol, tobacco, and hot spices. Many ban meat and encourage consumption of whole grains and beans. The Seventh-Day Adventists, a particularly successful group, are one such, though most now eat meat and processed grains. They also consume very high amounts of sugar (personal observation), neutralizing some of the advantages of their diet, but they have a noteworthy life expectancy.

The United States forms of African American food have been mentioned above in the Africa section. It is a wildly creative and complex mix. The pies, cakes, breads, and most of the ordinary “made dishes” are British Isles transplants. So are chitlins (chitterlings), traditionally eaten with mustard in England, but presumably intestines were eaten in Africa too. As most people know, African Americans were forced to learn to use the “odd bits” of animals, because the slaveowners took all the good parts. Neckbones was as good as it got, for Blacks in the old south. “Nose to tail” eating was universal in the British Isles, Europe, Africa, and pretty much everywhere at the time. No one could afford the choosiness of modern diners, who reject even excellent “body parts” like liver, oxtails, shanks, and sweetbreads.

A fondness for greens, especially strong-flavored ones, persisted from Africa. Turnip greens and collards were English in background, but filled the bill, and became identified with African American culture: “Corn bread and pepper sauce and good old turnip greens” (in one song). The greens were cooked with bacon or salt pork, if you could get any, and often a chile or two. The pot liquor was delicious, sopped up with the corn bread.

Maize was the staple food in the United States, for southerners of all backgrounds. Native processing into hominy has been noted. Corn bread with white flour was an English invention.

Beans of many sorts were critical to life. The classic African dishes were made with black-eyed peas, an African native. Most famous among these is the thoroughly African dish Hoppin’ John: blackeyes cooked with rice, spiced with chiles to taste, and made with bacon or salt pork if available. No one knows where the name came from. One of many origin myths refers to a lame vendor in old Charleston, whose wife or relative, Limpin’ Susan, gives her name to a rice and okra dish (Cross and Crawford 2023:160-165). Hoppin’ John is traditionally eaten with collards or similar greens on New Year’s Day for good luck, a tradition I religiously maintain. (I am a small but significant part African American, and keep the foodways going.)

Blackeyes are usually cooked in mixed stews or made into falafel-like fritters in Africa, and are used in soups in the United States. Pigeon peas are another African import, possibly originally from India. They have become definingly important in the Caribbean, but remain largely tropical. More common were Native American beans of all possible colors and patterns, with white “Navy” beans probably most common. They were acquired from the Indigenous people immediately, and became the protein staple of the poor and even the middle class of all “races” throughout the old south and southwest, and even as far as Boston with its famed white baked beans.

The other member of the Three Sisters, squash, was adopted immediately, due to its similarity to gourds and to the native West African pumpkin Telfairia occidentalis. In the United States, the native species, Cucurbita pepo, was the source of pumpkins, summer squash, and ornamental gourds. In the Caribbean, the “pumpkin” was butternut squash, C. moschata. The famous Jamaican pumpkin soup is thus “butternut squash soup” on United States menus.

Barbecue, probably the signature African American food complex, is originally Caribbean, but has come a long way since the Arawak and Carib peoples set up simple wooden frames for roasting, smoking, or drying meat over an open fire. The frames were the original barbacoa. Another word for it, boucan, produced the buccaneers—people who may have been pirates when opportunity offered, but normally lived by hunting, fishing, and foraging, cooking their meat on a boucan. They often smoked and dried it and sold it to ships.

In the Caribbean and then in the United States, the term “barbecue” quickly spread to meat cooked over an open fire, grill or no, and then to the pit-cooked meats well known in both African and Native American cultures but not common in Europe. Cooks used increasingly spicy and complex sauces to baste the roasting meats. Smoking survived as a dominant method of preparation. From these origins, barbecue has evolved into one of the most complex, diverse, and elaborate cooking styles in the world.

Wonderful accounts of the golden age of barbecuing and its modern fate may be found in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings on Florida food (Opie 2015) and Black barbecue chef Adrian Miller’s Black Smoke (2023). Hurston, a great and still underappreciated Black author, does a notable job of capturing the life of old-time large-scale barbecues. Any book on African American foodways is bound to touch on the tradition. It has, of course, been enthusiastically adopted by white, Latino, and even Asian-American cooks, with constantly growing diversity.

The Native American contribution was overwhelmingly important in one way: it contributed the staple food of the old south, maize. The Native Americans had developed ways of cracking corn into cookable-sized bits, and of making hominy by boiling kernels in wood ashes. This eliminated the phytic acid and thus eliminated the pellagra problem—which resurfaced, especially among Whites, as milled maize flour and meal became available. People no longer made or lived on hominy. Hoecakes were essentially a Native American food, as were various corn drinks and preparations, but cornbread is English-influenced, usually depending on some white flour and chemical leavening. It is still eaten African and Native American style, sopped in cooking liquids, but more often is eaten English style, with butter and jam. 

I have touched on the rice cookery above. Rice cooking in the American South began as a straightforward transplant from the Rice Coast. The history has been traced by Judith Carney in Black Rice (2001; Carney and Rosomoff 2009), and early by Karen Hess in Carolina Rice Cookery (1992). Pilaf or pilau from India reached America almost as soon as rice did, and morphed into the “perloo” and “peloo” of the South. New Orleans famously added French herbs, sausages, and sophisticated techniques like preparing a roux. But the basic cooking is African, as shown by names like “jambalaya”  (Wolof for “mixed grain stew”) and cala (a West African word for rice), used for rice dumplings that are unbelievably light and flavorful when fresh-cooked.

Native American influence appears in gumbo filé, ground sassafras leaves. They provide a wonderful spicy flavor that quickly caught on with African transplants. Also Native American is the fondness for crayfish, to say nothing of muskrat, alligator, garfish, turtles, and other wild meats.

These more exotic game items are largely eaten by the Cajun people. Supposedly descended from French exiled from Acadia (now New Brunswick) after the English took it over, they are a mixed group, very possibly more Native American than anything else. The original Acadians were described as blond and blue-eyed; modern Cajuns tend to be black-haired, brown-eyed, and olive-skinned. Census figures show a sharp drop in Native American population and an equally sharp rise in French population in Louisiana in the middle 19^th century.

Louisiana cuisine remains one of the great local cuisines, with influences wide-flung over North America. The classic source is the Picayune Creole Cook Book (1901, current available edition by Dover, 1971; the name refers to the main newspaper of the time, which originally cost a picayune, the New Orleans equivalent of a French sou). Among countless modern cookbooks, we may single out Cookin’ with Queen Ida (Guillory 1990), written by a lady whom many would indeed consider the unquestioned queen of Zydeco music, the upbeat Cajun musical tradition. It is basically French Canadian accordion music, with singing, but made a great deal wilder than anything Canadian by the West African rhymic miracles so typical of Louisiana music. (Zydeco itself is a food word; it is a somewhat parodied version of the Cajun pronunciation of les haricots, “the beans,” both green and dried beans being associated with Cajun lifeways.)

One does not have to go to the wilds of Louisiana to eat alligator, however. In the southeast coastal lands, from Florida north to the Carolinas, settlers also learned from Native Americans how to hunt and cook gators. They were a major food in the Okefenokee Swamp in the old days. They are still universal on menus serving local specialties, in Florida and in the Low Country (coastal Georgia and the Carolinas)

Jewish-American food has entered American foodways abundantly. Almost all the signature dishes are Ashkenazic; the Ashkenazim are Jews from north, central, and east Europe, supposedly descended from a small founder group that migrated from Italy to Alsace, originally the valley of Ashkenaz, in the early Medieval period. Genetics more or less confirms the story, but with many additions from local people. (Contrary to a persistent story, the Ashkenazim are not descendants of the Medieval Khazars, whose leaders converted to Judaism.)

The classic American Jewish foods radiated from New York in the 20^th century. They are largely East European foods, taken up by the Jews there during the “Pale of Settlement” period when the Polish-Lithuanian Empire welcomed them and much of western Europe was expelling them. Bagels and lox are possibly the most widely known, involving smoked salmon, as non-Levantine a food as can be imagined. People are fond of pointing out that “lox” is the oldest word in the English language; it is identical to the Indo-European *laks for salmon or large fish. Challah is simply a kosher form of the old European and Near Eastern ritual bread, with milk and butter replaced by oil to satisfy kashruth (kosher requirements). Knishes are Jewish versions of classic East European dumplings. Smoked and pickled herring and other preserved fish preparations are from the Polish-Lithuanian area. And chicken soup is possibly the most universal food on earth.

One American Jewish food that stands out is pastrami: cured, smoked, and steamed beef brisket. Brisket (from the foreparts of cattle) is the traditional Jewish cut, because removing the veins in the abdomens of cattle is difficult but is required by kosher law. In the United States it is considered a New York delicatessen invention. In Canada, however, a very similar commodity—usually salted and dried rather than pickled in brine—is known as “Montreal smoked meat,” and regarded as indigenous there. The Montreal Jewish community is as venerable, well-established, and culturally important as that of New York, though smaller.

All have noted the similarity of the word to Romanian pastrama (smoked mutton, or salted dried meat in general) and its ancestor, Turkish bastırma (beef air-dryed after salting and covering with paprika to preserve it). Yet American pastrami is clearly a descendant of the Alsatian dish pickelfleisch (pickled meat). The Irish scholars Angela Hanratty and Diarmuid Cawley (2024) show convincingly that Romanian Jewish immigrants brought the word pastrama, which in New York was applied to what elsewhere was variously called smoked meat or pickled meat.

Cowboy cooking was an odd mix of traditions. Mexican influence was strong enough to provide the word “coci,” from Mexican cocinero, “cook,” used in southwestern cow camps. Naturally, every part of a butchered animal was used. Of uncertain origin was “son of a bitch stew,” based on the “mar gut” (milk-filled small intestine of a calf; Harris 2011:148). “Son of a gun stew” was more general and less gut-based. In contrast to the lily-white cowboys of movie fame, cowboys were very often Black, Mexican, Native American, or a mix of some of the above with the more stereotypic Scots-Irish wanderers. A fair number still are. The food reflected this. It also reflected field conditions; coffee was supposed to be “black as night, strong as an ox, and hot as hell.” Cowboys were militant in ways not known to Hollywood; they formed an active and fairly successful union in the 19^th century.

            Mexican-American cooking is another tradition with great antiquity and countless variations. Its origin in Spain and Mexico is noted above. In New Mexico, farming in old-fashioned ways continues, either because of local conservatism (as I have often seen) or because of revival. My anthropologist friend Devon Peña comes from an old Colorado Hispanic land grant family, and as he moved toward retirement from the University of Washington he came more and more attached to the old place, where he now lives and works on restoring the system. He put together a wonderful collection of stories by revivalists like himself and local old-timers among his neighbors (Peña et al. 2017). Some of them bake bread and dry corn kernels in the old beehive ovens the Spanish introduced—ovens that go back to the ancient Near East.

Asian-American food also took on a life of its own. The most famous of American Chinese foods, chop suey, has found itself used as the title of more than one book, and the subject of many imaginative, and imaginary, origin myths. It was not invented to get rid of restaurant scraps, or because a restaurant found itself short of food when a visiting dignitary appeared, or to cheat the foreigners. It is, in fact, a venerable and universal Chinese dish. The name—za sui in Mandarin, tsap seui (or “chop suey”) in Cantonese—means “miscellaneous leftovers.” That being a rather general descriptor, the dish ranges from the “odd bits” left over from butchering an animal, in the north, to leftover small vegetables and chicken meat, in the south. The Californian form appeared possibly earlier in New York, but was certainly established soon after the gold rush of 1848. It was a dish of vegetable growers in the Toisan and Seiyap districts of Guangdong province. (Toisan is Mandarin taishan, “terrace mountain,” and Seiyap is “four districts.”) They spoke a slightly different dialect of Cantonese from the familiar one of Canton and Hong Kong. They would sell their vegetables and then cook up for dinner the ones too small or misshapen to sell. Often, these were the tenderest and most flavorful of the lot. They were flavored with ginger, garlic, and soy sauce. These were, of course, the “miscellaneous leftovers” of the dish title In the United States, any available vegetables and meat were used. (See Peters 2013, but most of this paragraph is based on my own research in Hong Kong and California.)

California’s great contribution to Chinese cuisine was the fortune cookie, actually invented in a Japanese tea room in San Francisco, and based on a Japanese cookie (Peters 2013). I suspect also influence from the American sugar cookie. It appeared in the early 20^th century. Who thought of folding it around a “fortune” seems unclear, but for a long time a single white man was responsible for all the fortunes in San Francisco. Some were Confucian taglines, many were folk wisdom. Today, they are bland nonsense, though sometimes someone gets assertive enough to have a quiet joke; one I received said “You will live in interesting times,” with reference to the fake-Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” (which actually surfaced in England in the 1930s).

One of those odd stories of immigrant success in new-land foodways concerns the pink doughnut box. A Cambodian refugee named Ted Ngoy got a start in the new land by setting up a doughnut shop. He and other Cambodians succeeded mightily as franchisers or renters of doughnut shops, and soon the field was dominated by them in much of southern California. Ngoy found pink boxes were cheaper than white ones, and the result was an identification of doughnuts and pink boxes in the south; when it reached Hollywood, their movies and TV shows made the box go worldwide (Sanchez 2023).

California’s fusion cuisine extends to truly exotic blends, such as Punjabi-Mexican food. Many Punjabis, often Sikhs, emigrated to California in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, establishing communities in the far south and the center. Intermarriatge and fusion cooking were natural consequences. Roti quesadillas are a known item, and curries have blended with chile stews (Chopra 2019). Corn bread is a Punjabi staple, and tortillas were an easy borrowing.

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