Fuchsia Dunlop: evaluation

Transcript context

…Fuchsia, in your book, you quote Ferran Adria as saying. “Who is the most important culinary figure of the last 50 years? Well, surely it is Mao Zedong because the chairman sent all of China’s farmers and all of China’s chefs to work in factories, thus destroying the preeminence of Chinese cuisine.” Is he right? How much do we really understand what culinary culture was before the People’s Republic? And can we recover a lot of those traditions now? One of the reasons that I wrote this book is that it seems to me extraordinary that China has this exceptional cuisine which is so diverse and sophisticated and also which resonates with so many contemporary concerns. There are parallels in China going back to the 10th century of people making imitation meats from plant foods. You have this tremendously creative, transformational cuisine which echoes the avant-garde cooking of modernist chefs in the West. All this stuff, and yet China has been the terra incognita for many people in the food world. I think it’s purely historical reasons. The Chinese food that most people in the West know stems from American Chinese food, which was created by immigrants from one particular region, the Cantonese South, who were working in very difficult circumstances. They were facing racial prejudice. They probably didn’t have access to all the ingredients that they were used to, and they were often cooking for people who have no acquaintance with Chinese food. So, you have this simplified, very appealing, fantastically popular and successful, but not really a good representation of this amazing culinary nation. Then throughout the 20th century, war, revolution, Cultural Revolution, China was just not part of international culinary exchanges. Also, prestige food is often about money. Japan got rich first. Japanese food is very prestigious. People will spend loads of money on Japanese sushi, but not so much on Chinese food. I think that, yes, Ferran Adria is right that Chinese food doesn’t have the recognition, the acknowledgment, that it really should have. Yes. I think now it’s possible, really, [laughs] to have a fresh look. Can we cook a 10th-century meal from Hangzhou today, or is that mostly lost to us?…

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