Bitter and Sweet: Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China by Ellen Oxfeld (review)

Food provides not only subsistence, but "socially constructed and culturally framed" sets of meanings and values for those who produce, circulate, and consume it. Anthropologist Ellen Oxfeld explores this reality in her ethnography of food ways in Moonshadow Pond, a pseudonym for the rural, ethnically Hakka village in southern China's Guangdong Province to which she has returned for longitudinal studies since the 1990s. Part of the "California Studies in Food and Agriculture" series, the book provides a nuanced and ethnographically rich examination, based in a single community, of how and why "food circulates constantly" (p. 2).

For the residents of Moonshadow Pond, and by extension much of rural China, food provides an enduring item of economic exchange, marker of social relationships, and idiom of cultural meanings. Although Oxfeld develops an argument for the comparative resiliency of embedded food practices in the face of modernization, marketization, and rising individualism, she carefully avoids overly simple or hopeful representations of unchanging "traditions." Indeed, much of the analytic clout of this impressive ethnography comes from its careful investigation of the role food plays in negotiating transformation and dislocation in China. Throughout the book, food serves as a productive lens through which to gain a richer understanding of tensions in Chinese society between, for example, continuity and rupture, rural and urban, subsistence and market, older and younger generations, family and others, local and national/global scales, embedding and disembedding, organic and inorganic, and sociocentrism and individualism. And while food ways in Moonshadow Pond are resolutely local in many ways, the author incorporates spatial variability and historical change into her narrative in order to remind us that food ways, like culture, are in a constant state of change and re-invention. Indeed, a central question of the book—presented in the introduction and returned to in the conclusions—is the extent to which "this food culture" will endure "in the face of continued migration, the declining involvement of young people in agriculture, and the rapid industrialization of China's food system, not to mention the growing threats that come from soil and water pollution and the adulteration of food" (p. 186).

Chapter 1, "The Value of Food in Rural China," introduces the concept of both instrumental and symbolic values of food within "the food universe" of the village, notes the major historical and political shifts which have shaped those values, and provides lively examples of local foods that whet our appetites for the richer banquet of analysis to follow. Food, Oxfeld persuasively argues, embodies multiple kinds of value, and these values form the categories pursued in chapters 2–6: labor, memory, exchange, morality, and conviviality.

Chapter 2 examines the circulation of food through labor. After highlighting the historical transformations of labor in the village (pre-Liberation, collective era, and reform and opening), she contrasts subsistence-versus market-oriented kinds of food labor, paying close ethnographic attention to households, festivals, and banqueting behaviors on the one hand, and marketable products on the other. It is interesting, if perhaps not surprising, to learn that these realms are gendered. Oxfeld writes that "we can delineate between a use-value realm of food production and preparation, in which women's work predominates, and a market realm, in which both men and women participate but which is stratified by gender" (p. 70). It is interesting to note that exchanges of food occur not only among the living, but between the living and ancestors, gods, and ghosts as well. She concludes the chapter with the recurring theme of the comparative resiliency of locally embedded food ways in the face of rapid modernization and dislocation, asserting that "the labor of food production within the village is still mainly incorporated into ongoing relationships based on social obligations, memories, and notions of moral debt" (p. 71).

Chapter 3 uses individual and cultural memory as the lens through which to explore historically changing food...