Food Nostalgia in Contemporary China

Catch up with Jin Feng, professor of Chinese and Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature, in this Asian Ethnology Podcast interview. She talked about her new book, Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways (University of Washington Press, 2019), and the course on Chinese and Russian foodways that she and Todd Armstrong, professor of Russian, team-taught in 2017 (see The Grinnell Magazine story about the course).

About Tasting Paradise on Earth

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng’s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta — or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources — illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium.