Fuchsia Dunlop: evaluation

Transcript context

…Lydia’s father is of a generation who, in China, lived through the Great Famine. Indeed, it wasn’t until he went to cooking school as a young man that he was exposed to food in abundance. There were many things he had never tasted before because the farm they came from in the country — it was such deprivation. How has that experience for so many chefs of this generation informed the cooking of China? Well, I suppose everyone of that generation had experience of acute hardship of different degrees, depending on where you were living. One of the great joys of the reform period has been the easy availability of food, and particularly of meat because people who lived through those years told me that they used to dream and fantasize about pork because they never had it. Some people used to, for example, have a small piece of fatty pork and use it to wipe around the wok for stir-frying vegetables and keep it for the next dish because they really didn’t have enough meat to eat. I think that sometimes the excess of Chinese dining out, with tables laden with dishes, which is something the Chinese government is actually trying to curb now — there’s a campaign to make people waste less food and eat what’s on the table — but that’s a reaction to the period of deprivation. One thing that really amazes me is how, despite these very tough years — and not only the famine, but also the Cultural Revolution, which was an assault on bourgeois and elite culture, when fancy food and elegant restaurants were attacked and forced to change their ways and become more proletarian — that it’s extraordinary that the cuisine has recovered and that you can once again get exquisite and refined Chinese food. I was talking to one elderly chef recently about the Cultural Revolution period, and I was asking him about the effect of the movement on the dishes they were allowed to cook. And he said, “Well, actually, that was the least of our problems. The main problem was there just wasn’t enough of everything.” Given that China is a particularly food-focused culture and it’s always been so important, I think, yeah, the memory of deprivation is very strong for the elder generation. But of course, not for the younger generation, right? So you don’t have direct experience of this, do you, Lydia? Lucky me.…

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