お久しぶり 。When Professor Brown heard that I was going to make sakura mochi (Sakura Rice Cakes) for Girls’ Day on March 3, she asked me if I’d be up for giving you all an entry on this traditional Japanese spring treat. Mochi, of course, have already made it into the US mainstream in some form, but today I’ll walk you through a couple of options that are more old school than, say, Trader Joe’s mochi ice cream. Mochi, as you already probably know, have a long history in Japan. Historian Eric Rath cites an example of mochi as early as the eighth century (!) and points out their ongoing ritual significance to this day. [1] In fact, on May 1, 2019, ceremonial mochi were made at Ōsaka Tenmangū—one of Japan’s major shrines—and distributed to people who had come to commemorate Emperor Akihito’s abdication and the beginning of a new reign period. These were mochi in no-frills form: steamed and beaten glutinous rice rolled into cakes and dusted with kinako (roasted soybean flour). Although the rice must have been hulled first, what you can see below is that it was steamed prior to being pounded with enormous wooden mallets. You can also see that the receptacle for the rice pounding is hung with a shimenawa to ensure its purity. There were numerous opportunities to pound the dough, since we had a lot of mochi to make. Once the steamed pounded rice was deemed ready, it was quickly transported to a table, where we tore off pieces and rolled them into serving-sized portions. We had to work quickly, because the mochi get hard just sitting around. These mochi were then, as mentioned, dusted with kinako and handed out to shrine visitors to be eaten on the spot. (Photo by Carmen Tamas) The two types I’ll take you through today, however, are both newer versions that have sweet red bean paste, anko , in the middle: ichigo daifuku (Strawberry Good Luck) cakes and the aforementioned sakura mochi. Although the combination of anko and rice cakes is not itself new—Rath says it may go back as far as the seventh century—the very sweet aspect to anko is: Rath credits it to the arrival of sugar brought from China by the Portuguese. [2] If you haven’t decided which mochi you want, you can start with the bean paste, since both versions require it. It’s easy to find online, but if you want to make your own, it’s a little time-consuming, but simple. I used this recipe . I appreciate that the author has both a more traditional version and an easier version. As someone who has eaten a fair amount of anko -based sweets (albeit mostly from convenience stores), I thought this easy version was just fine. A couple of practical notes—the recipe splits into 2 paths like a choose-your-own-adventure about halfway through. You need to follow the first steps, 1-8, and then choose “koshian,” which means ignoring the “Tsuban” steps and scrolling down to the “Koshian” option. If you’re going the home-made route, you should be making your anko the day before you plan to make your mochi. Back to the beginning. The recipe works as is. I didn’t have an otoshibuta , but my beans were fairly sedentary on low-medium heat. This didn’t seem to be an issue. I also found that my beans were definitely not ready after an hour. Even after an hour and 30 minutes I still wasn’t sure. So I simmered them for 10 more minutes while de-icing the patio. Perfect. Now, down to the Koshian option. I recommend keeping all of your liquid after straining the beans. I needed way more than the 1-2 Tbsp. the recipe calls for, probably more like 4-5 (at least). If your beans are too dry for your blender or food processor to handle, add some of the bean water you kept. Regular water also works fine. Add a little at a time until your blender can handle it. If your beans are a really thick paste despite your water (as mine were), simply add a little more water when you put everything back in the pot. After all, you need liquid to dissolve the sugar and salt. It should look like a really thick soup. If you inadvertently go a little overboard with the water, don’t worry. You only need to cook your anko longer. It will turn out fine. I ended up stirring over low heat for about 30 minutes until I could draw a line that didn’t immediately fill back in. Once I hit that magic thickness, I put it in the cookie sheet and let it cool. In the future, I might cook it a bit longer, since this was still pretty soft (but shapeable) even after cooling. At this point, after your paste has cooled, you need to make up your mind. Strawberry mochi will require 6 balls of anko at 25 grams each. Sakura mochi will require 6 balls at 20 grams each. The rest can be frozen in an airtight container for two months or so. PLAN A: 🍓 Strawberry The origins of this variation are unclear. As you’ll see, the recipe site dates the dish to the 1980s. However, Eric Rath mentions a strawberry-filled mochi already in 1733. [3] In any case, whenever they first appeared on the scene, ichigo daifuku are delicious. For today’s posting, I used this recipe . It mostly works as is, but I have some pointers for those of us who don’t have microwaves… I made the anko balls the night before. The day of, I started with the strawberries. The recipe author is not kidding around when she recommends smaller. These were the smallest Kroger strawberries, and they were borderline too big. As you can see, my assistant was distressed (needlessly) about my ability to work with such enormous strawberries. If you’re steaming the rice, be warned: 10-12 minutes is not enough. I ended up steaming for 25 minutes total, mixing the dough every few minutes. If, like I, you’re not sure what “translucent” mochi dough looks like, it should basically look wet and shiny. I tried to get a picture that reflected that a little better. When it’s done, you can just dump it onto a corn flour-dusted surface and get to work. NOTE: if your mochi dough is sticky despite said corn flour, that means it isn’t ready. Just put it back in the steamer for longer. No harm done. The mochi assembly is pretty much as the recipe describes. I tried to stretch my dough as thin as possible to accommodate my gigantic berries. Unlike pie dough, you can be thinner at the edges, since it’s all going to get bunched together at the bottom. Being careful not to tear the dough, gently wrap it around the berry, pinch together the bottom, and you’re done! Perfect for spring or summer. PLAN B: 🌸 Sakura Once again, the origins of this variation are murky. However, several people—including the author of today’s recipe—list a special kind of flour, Dōmyōji-flour, as key to the Kansai-style version of the dish. According to the temple Dōmyōji’s website , this flour is made from the type of rice offered daily by the aunt of the ninth-century courtier and scholar of Chinese learning, Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), after he was exiled to what is now modern-day Kyushu. Believed to have healing powers, demand for the rice grew, and the process for making this flour was born. Michizane himself died in exile and was later deified as Tenjin in order to placate his wrathful spirit. One of the major shrines to Tenjin, in fact, is the shrine where we made mochi for the imperial abdication noted above! For Sakura mochi, I used this recipe . The night before, I rolled my bean balls, rinsed my rice 5-6 times, and put it aside to soak in a place where my assistant couldn’t get to it. As for the rest, you can pretty much follow the recipe as is, but I do have a few additional pointers/clarifications. 1) The day of mochi making, I first put the pickled flowers (available online) in room-temperature water and left them to soak for 30 min. They were still pretty salty even then, so a slightly longer soak would probably not do any harm. Let them dry on a paper towel when done. 2) Then I drained the rice and gave it several (10?) “pulses” in the food processor on the “chop” setting. The rice should be broken, but not a fine powder. Since we are making Kansai-style, the finished cake will be recognizable as made of rice grains. The rice on the left has been "chopped" but not yet steamed. 3) When that’s done, transfer it to a thin towel and steam it for 30 min. While the rice is steaming, make the pink juice and sugar syrup. My pink juice is courtesy of food coloring. As you can see, a little goes a very very long way. 4) When you make the mochi, wet your counter before you put the saran wrap (aka “cling film”) on it. That will make it stay in place. Then put your rice in the center. I recommend flattening it with a plastic paddle—lightly wet the paddle each time between mochi, and it will keep the rice from sticking to it. Transfer your bean paste to the center of your flattened rice circle (I used chopsticks to minimize handling) and gently wrap up the entire thing, twisting the saran wrap together. Pickled cherry leaves are impossible to come by during the pandemic, so we’ll skip that (delicious) step. Instead, you can probably just deposit the mochi on a plate at this point, since they are easier to handle when cool, but I found cupcake wrappers worked well. Then place a flower on top and you’re done! Although these are traditional for Girls’ Day, they are also yummy for blossom viewing parties in the spring. Given how cold out it still is, you’ve got plenty of time to perfect your mochi-making skills before the cherries bloom. Enjoy! ⚠️ All three of the above recipes were first-time attempts for me, so don't be intimidated. In my experience, knowing how things are supposed to look is at least half the battle. Good luck! [1] Eric Rath, “The Magic of Japanese Rice Cakes,” in Routledge History of Food , Carol Helstosky, ed., 3-18 (New York: Routledge Press, 2015), 3. [2] Ibid., 9-10. [3] Ibid., 10.

Guess who made these? About a year ago, I awoke to find the famous dumpling map whirling around on the interwebs. That map, lifted (!#@) from Rachel Laudan’s classic work on food history, Cuisine and Empire , had gone viral the year before. It showed the journeys of the humble dumpling, as it moved out of Asia, crawling through frozen Siberia, before plopping down in balmy Eastern Europe. The map also displayed the dumpling traipsing through the Silk Road, as it trekked across Central Asia and the Middle East. Its final destination? Naturally, the gorgeous beaches of the Mediterranean. Then Carl found it. Probably second- or third-hand (as usual, without attribution). If you don’t know Carl Zha , you should. He is a Cal Tech grad and famous Internet personality, with 58K Twitter followers. By day, he surfs the blue waves of Bali, and by night, he runs a show about Chinese history, politics, and trivia. He is also an avid reader of this blog and a friend of yours truly. What can I say? A man with discerning taste. Carl also has an opinion about the origins of the dumpling. When he discovered Laudan’s map, he leapt on the chance to finish an argument with the Armenians . “Let’s settle this once for all,” he declared via Twitter. “ Mongol conquest spread dumplings from China to the rest of the world .” Carl’s post got attention. “Impressive scholarship,” wrote one. Others, though, were less happy. One woman responded, “ Noodles, macaroni etc. also, so let’s settle this forever: everything came from China when the rest of the world were just a bunch of underdeveloped #####. Am I right ?” The exchange took me aback. I’m used to people reacting strongly to Carl’s posts. He thumbs his nose at American supremacy and has a quirky sense of humor. In true Carl style, he appended a video of monkeys throwing steamed buns . The dumpling vehemence, however, did surprise me. I mean there’s plenty to fight about. War, abortion, taxes. Even kimchi . But dumplings? I shook my head as I read the irate post. “Time for a social media detox,” I thought to myself. “That person needs a trip to the spa. So what if the Chinese invented the dumpling? Anyway, is it productive to fight about origins?” ----- Before answering these questions, I must issue the following disclaimers. The first is that I don’t condone violence, even over food history. The second is that I respectfully disagree with Carl. I don’t think the Chinese invented the dumpling. The search for origins, however, can be productive, even if it makes your head spin. Actually I would say the head spinning is therapeutic. Why? Well, you let go. You let go of those myths of purity. Let go of the idea that originality is the same thing as excellence. Great cooking traditions, in fact, are as much derivative, as they are sui generis. For me, a person proud of her Chinese heritage, the history of the dumpling has forced this reckoning. China may be a dumpling lover’s heaven, but it is not its original homeland. In this, the dumpling finds good company with another fine culinary product, the hotdog. The hotdog is a quintessentially American food with (shudder) European roots. To see this, we must go back in time and better acquaint ourselves with Turkic peoples. By Turkic, I am not just thinking of folks in Turkey. Instead, I am talking about people who call themselves Turks and who live in a wide variety of places: Central Asia, Siberia, the Middle East, China, as well as Turkey. Thousands of years ago, the Turks lived exclusively in Asia. Scholars debate whether they came from Central Asia or further east. One thing’s for sure; they moved around a lot. Early on in their history, they were good at riding horses and harvesting the milk for bubbly beers. And at some point in time, they got the travel bug. They moved into Northwest China, and hooked up with Chinese royals. Then some of them kept going West, laying down roots in Central Asia, while others settled in the Middle East and Turkey. A few more nested in Russia and Ukraine (we have these adventurous Turks to thank for Irina Shayk , better known as Bradley Cooper’s baby mamma). Everywhere Turkic peoples went, they adopted the foodways of the locals. In Western China, the food has Chinese elements . In Central Asia, you’ll spot Iranian touches (next time, we’ll hear about pilaf). But there are a few commonalities that unite people in the Turkic world. Language. Yogurt . Manti (the label in many languages for dumpling). Turkish manti (Sonya Ozbey photograph) Scholars suspect that Turkic tribesmen or traders introduced the Chinese to dumplings just under two thousand years ago. I have to admit that I was initially skeptical. Part of me wanted to scream, “It’s Chinese darn it!” After all, the Chinese are today better known for their dumplings than the Turks. But Chinese sources— “ The Ode to Bing (ca. 265 AD)” — hint of foreign origins. The author, Mr. Shu, puts it plainly. And here, I quote Professor Knechtges’ translation: “[S]ome of these names [for wheat products] originate in the villages and lanes, and some of the methods for making them come from alien lands .” Then our eccentric poet listed a string of foreign-sounding words for stuffed pasta. So we have a Chinese poet fessing up about the foreign origins of the dumpling and other pasta products, but this leaves the question, which alien lands? This is where it is nice to have friends who are linguists. The word here for dumpling is mantou 馒头 (a term, confusingly, that means “steamed buns” in Chinese today). According to linguists, the term is an obvious loan word from a foreign language , probably in the Turkic language family. The ancient Chinese just chose characters that approximated the sound of the foreign word. In ancient China, mantou was pronounced man-teh (just like in Turkish). If you’re straining for a different example of a loan word, consider pudding. People in China say bu-ding 布丁, or, to use an example close to my heart, bulangni 布朗尼 is ‘brownie.’ People only borrow foreign words when they don’t have an existing label. Think sushi, tofu , and seitan: all of these are words adopted from another language into English. In the case of seitan, it makes sense that Americans adopted the term. They weren’t previously in the habit of making meat substitutes from gluten! Loan words, though, can only tell you so much. For example, they will reveal who you borrowed the word from. But they will not necessarily expose the original instigator. If you’re confused, let’s go back to seitan . This was a Chinese invention, but it has a Japanese name in English. Why? Because it was first brought to the United States by Japanese immigrants. With the case of the dumpling, mantou tells us who the Chinese learned their tricks for crimping dough. It does *not* unveil the inventor. Foreign or not, the Chinese took to the dumpling. After a few hours of training, they got the hang of rolling out their dough thin and pinching the pockets into shape. And after a few more centuries, the dumpling had become such a fixture in Chinese cuisine, its origin was irrelevant. New names — for example, jiaoz i 餃子 — also helped people forget the dumpling’s foreign roots. Dumplings are now a traditional food eaten during Lunar New Year, the most important holiday in China. Dumplings (Shaoxing, China, Nov 2018) The Chinese, however, were *not* the only people to take to these foreign pockets. The Koreans also got the manti bug. Their version of dumplings are called mandu , and they are full of things like kimchi. Then folks in India and Nepal wanted some of the action. Their dumplings, which go by momos, serve with chutney. The Japanese were last to the game. They call their pan-fried dumplings gyoza . In case you’re wondering, that’s the Japanese pronunciation of the characters for jiaozi . South Asian momos (Jan 2017) I doubt we will ever figure out the identity of the original inventor of the dumpling. But the dumpling is now everyone’s food. It’s 100% Chinese, Korean, Armenian, as well as Turkish. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t matter who got there first. The exercise isn’t about priority, since no one here will make any money with a patent! If anything, the takeaway is this: when it comes to dough, we’re all better off being a little derivative. Recipe resources I highly recommend making your own dumplings from scratch. You can always buy the skins, but why do that? You just need flour and water to make them. I have set out the recipe here in a blog for my students last year. Fun fact: every person has a unique way of folding dough. Think of it like handwriting. Supposedly, you can read my personality from my crimping strategy. I have also put together instructions for people who prefer the translucent ones, which come in gluten-free varieties. These were staples of my Cantonese childhood. I used to eat them every weekend at dim sum. But they are very easy to make and I managed to find all of the ingredients on Amazon. Since some of you asked, I thought I would post a link to a recipe for Turkish manti ! Shrimp "Dumplings" (xiajiao), Canton, Nov 2017 Rice dumplings made like wheat dumplings (Nov 2018) Sources for this blog: Buell, Paul D., Eugene N. Anderson, Montserrat de Pablo Moya, Moldir Okenbay, Crossroads of Cuisine: The Eurasian Heartland, the Silk Road and Food (E.J. Brill, 2020). Dunlop, Fuchsia. ”Barbarian Heads and Turkish Dumplings: The Chinese Word Mantou.” In Wrapped & Stuffed Foods: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2012 , ed. Mark McWilliams, 128-143. Totnes, Devon, England: Prospect Books, 2013. Google ebook available for free! She does a great job with the various words for dumpling over Chinese history, and synthesizing Buell, Anderson, & others. Knechtges, David R. “ Dietary Habits: Shu Xi’s ‘Rhapsody on Pasta ’” In Wendy Swartz, Robert Ford Campany, Yang Lu and Jessey Choo eds. Early Medieval China : A Sourcebook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Laudan, Rachel. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Lin-Liu,Jen. On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome with Love and Pasta (London: Penguin, 2013): “Central Asia,” 115-80. Further reading: Buell, Paul D, and Anderson, Eugene N. A Soup for the Qan : Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Sihui’s Yinshan Zhengyao - Introduction, Translation, Commentary, and Chinese Text . BRILL, 2010. (U-M ebook).

*Written by Ying-Ying Tiffany Liu One sunny day, I had lunch with two South African-born Chinese (SABC) friends at a northern-style Chinese restaurant in Johannesburg’s New Chinatown. They requested that I come to this restaurant because they were curious about the food, but were unable to communicate with the people who work at this restaurant. English was these two friends’ native language, and they only spoke a little bit of Cantonese with their parents at home. They did not understand Mandarin, the dialect of the majority of Chinese migrants to South Africa, and the migrants spoke little to no English. As a result, many SABCs have found it difficult to communicate with the Chinese newcomers. On the other hand, I am a Taiwan-born-Canadian immigrant, conducting research on the Chinese restaurants in South Africa. As these two friends were excited to explore different versions of Chinese cuisines, they invited me for lunch. Once we settled down at the restaurant, they told me what they like and asked me to order for them. I poured tea into their cups, they tapped their finger twice to express gratitude for who serving the tea. I joked that it was a very Chinese thing to do. Foods were brought to our table, we couldn’t wait to try. When one of the friends bit into a northern-style Chinese noodle, she paused and said, “Wow, this food tastes so foreign to me!” For one second, I found this phase awkward. One minute, three of us – who look Chinese and communicated in English – were just joking about being very Chinese, then the next minute, to hear a common, everyday Chinese noodle being too foreign for her. But I quickly reminded myself that this does not mean that this SABC friend is not Chinese enough or knows nothing about Chinese food. The term, “Chinese food,” is really just an oversimplification. Swallows Inn was opened in Johannesburg's First Chinatown during the 1940s, is considered the oldest Chinese restaurant in South Africa (perhaps the continent of Africa...). Although Chinese people coming to Africa is a relatively new phenomenon, Chinese immigration has a much longer history in South Africa. For instance, from 1904 to 1910, more than 63,000 Chinese labourers were imported to work in gold mines around Johannesburg. Early Chinese immigrants in South Africa were predominantly Cantonese and Hakka from Guangdong Providence. Starting in the 1940s, only a limited number of Chinese were allowed to enter South Africa’s border. Then there were migrants from Taiwan during the 1970s to 90s. Today it is estimated 350,000 Chinese living in South Africa. In it, more than 300,000 are new migrants who arrived in South Africa less than 20 years ago and drew from a variety of regions, including but not limited to: Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong, Sichuan, Liaoning, Henan, Shaanxi, Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Yunnan. Political factors shaped the shifted patterns of Chinese migrants’ geographical backgrounds. In 1948, the South African state implemented a legal system of racial segregation, known as apartheid, for the next forty-six years. South African populations were officially divided into four groups: 1) “White” distinguished those said to be European descendants, 2) “Native” referred to black South Africans, 3) “Coloured” referred to people of mixed racial or ethnic origins, and 4) “Asiatic” or “Asian” referred to immigrants from Asia. In 1971, the Republic of China (Taiwan) lost its seat in the United Nations to the People’s Republic of China (China). Meanwhile, South Africa faced international condemnation of its apartheid policy. Since both the South African and Taiwanese governments found themselves isolated from the international community, they re-established fuller diplomatic ties, which helped pave the way for the Taiwanese to become the largest group of foreign investors in South Africa. By that time, East Asian immigrants (including Taiwanese, Japanese, and South Korean) who invested in factories or had access to capital were classified as “Honorary White” and exempted from apartheid regulations. Meanwhile, Chinese South Africans were still subjected to numerous restrictions in residential, educational, and business opportunities. Several Chinese South Africans joined other students in Johannesburg protested against the Separate University Education Bill in 1957 (Mail & Guardian). In 1998, the South Africa government switched its recognition from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the People’s Republic of China (China) and ended diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Many Taiwanese immigrants left, and their number continues to drop; meanwhile, the population of immigrants from China began to rise in the late 1990s. The term “New Chinatown,” as mentioned in the beginning of this article, indicates that there is an old one. Most restaurants and shops in First Chinatown closed down or relocated to New Chinatown to escape crime and decay; currently there are fewer than ten businesses still operating. New Chinatown is located in Cyrildene, a formerly Jewish suburb on the eastern side of downtown Johannesburg. Most Chinese South Africans tend to support the long-established restaurants in First Chinatown. These restaurants mainly serve old-style Cantonese cuisine that tastes closer to what Chinese South Africans are used to. Recent Chinese migrants prefer to dine in the restaurants in Cyrildene’s New Chinatown. You can find almost every regional cuisine in these restaurants, as they reflect the diverse backgrounds of Chinese newcomers. The two Chinatowns in Johannesburg are not just two different spaces; they also represent regional and generational differences between old and new Chinese diasporas. Johannesburg's New Chinatown is located in Cyrildene, a formerly Jewish suburb. Interestingly, the so called “Canadian or Americanized Chinese food,” such as chop suey, deep-fried batter chicken in sweet and sour sauce, and fortune cookies, can also be found in South Africa’s Chinese take-away restaurants. As in North America, the Chinese food in South Africa, or what South Africans/Canadians thought of as Chinese food for a long time, was predominantly influenced by one regional cuisine in China—Cantonese. As mentioned, the majority of early Chinese immigrants to South Africa and Canada were from Guangdong, which explains why the earlier Chinese cuisine in these two countries was strongly influenced by the Cantonese style. It simply reflected the origins of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the country. Typical Chinese take-away menus in South Africa. When I asked a Chinese chef how he felt about the food he cooked for South African customers, he said to me, “This is, and is not, Chinese. We just don’t eat it.” Food can be easily circulated, imitated, and modified to adapt to South African customers’ tastes, but how about migrants’ identity? Can it be easily modified to become less Chinese and more South African just like the food they cook? Chinese food, after all, is incredibly diverse. So are the people. Back to the lunch I had with the two SABC friends: We might look the same, eat the same food, but what we felt about the food tells us apart. From Taiwan to Canada, from Canada to South Africa, I learned that not only do migrants bring their food to a new place, people are also incredibly adaptive and creative when it comes to food. As a proudly Asian person who used to make fun of “unauthentic” Chinese food, I reminded myself that next time when I taste an unfamiliar Chinese dish, perhaps I should try to find out its origin or the story behind its modification before quickly judging it.

By Benjamin Guan, Alison Li, and Andrea Lin April 26th, 2020 Introduction Like the start of a grisly zombie movie (we recommend Train to Busan), the US has found itself mired in an epidemic of apocalyptic proportions. It’s easy to envision Hollywood producers at each other's throats a few years from now, duking it out to cast Dwayne Johnson as the hotshot American scientist who single handedly brought down COVID-19. Unfortunately, reality is far from the silver screen. As of March 27th, the total number of COVID-19 cases in the US has exceeded those in China, the origin of the deadly disease. It is estimated that over 200,000 people worldwide have been killed (Ansari et al.). While both countries have enacted countermeasures since the outbreak started in December 2019, there’s one big difference: the Chinese government actively incorporated Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) into its treatment plan while the US government has only used biomedicine. Dr. Fauci, you are a widely respected medical expert and a lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. We have no doubt that your training at Cornell Medical School and your position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases make you a capable leader. You, more so than anyone else, should understand the limits of Western medicine. Unfortunately, it is time to admit that our systems have failed. We urge your Task Force to consider implementing TCM alongside existing biomedical therapies to resolve the COVID-19 pandemic. You’re a busy man, so here’s the tldr version; TCM uses an individualized approach for treatment, in contrast to the strictly standardized procedures of biomedicine, resulting in bespoke outcomes for patients. It is cost-effective, holistic, and combines multiple types of treatments to alleviate multiple symptoms/causes. While TCM has been practiced in China for thousands of years, it has evolved just as any body of knowledge has and is adept for this modern crisis (MacPherson, “Introduction”). We acknowledge that you have spent your entire career within the realm of biomedicine. Adopting TCM into the COVID-19 response plan might sound insane at first. Our goal in the coming pages is to convince you that it is not. We’ll start by summarizing the current state of biomedical research into COVID-19 cures, followed by describing TCM remedies used to treat COVID-19 in China. Once this baseline of knowledge is established, we’ll break down potential reasons for why the US has been reluctant to leverage TCM thus far. Specifically, we will address common criticisms that TCM is not “scientifically proven” and that is a “political tool” by the Chinese. Spoiler alert: both are untrue. By debunking the misconceptions surrounding TCM, we will demonstrate to you, Dr. Fauci, the potential of this underutilized body of knowledge to alleviate the suffering of millions of Americans. The (biomedical) search for the cure Image Source: www.biochemistry.blob.core.windows.net/public/2019/08/Research-web.jpg In times of crisis, when diseases threaten to anNIHilate our centuries-old way of living, WHO do we turn to? Re-read that sentence. So far, the two most preeminent health institutions in Western society haven’t done much to inspire confidence. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that “there is no evidence that current medicine can prevent or cure [COVID-19]” (“Q&A on coronaviruses”). This sentiment is reiterated by the National Institute of Health (NIH), which explains, “There are no specific therapeutics approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat people with COVID-19” (“NIH clinical trial”). In the absence of a clear cure, physicians must focus on managing symptoms until the virus (hopefully) passes. Therapies used may include antiviral or retroviral medications, breathing support such as intubation or ventilation, steroids to reduce lung swelling, and blood plasma transfusions (“Everything You Should Know”). Rest assured, biomedical researchers around the world are frantically testing over 100 off-the-shelf and experimental therapies as we speak (Langreth and Griffin). As physician after physician touts clinical trials as the “scientific gold standard for studying drugs,” does this mean a cure is within sight? (Brown and Griffin). Unlikely. In late February, the US began clinical trials for its first potential treatment for COVID-19, remdesivir (“NIH clinical trial”). Remdesivir is an antiviral drug developed by Gilead Sciences and the results of the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study are expected at the end of April (Langreth and Griffin). Sounds suspiciously like your Introductory Psychology professor promising to grade essays by the end of the week, only to “finally get to them” two months later. If the results are positive, have they come too late for remdesivir to be mass-produced and distributed? If the results are inconclusive and the lengthy clinical trial process starts anew, where does that leave the even higher number of COVID-19 patients and their caretakers? How has TCM been used to treat COVID-19 in China? Image Source: www.economist.com/china/2020/04/11/china-backs-unproven-treatments-for-covid-19 President Xi Jinping in February remarked that, “Lots of people like to have Chinese medicine because it has little side effects, it’s effective, and relatively cheap...I myself like Chinese medicine a lot.” (Mai and Lo). It’s no surprise that the Chinese Government has actively used TCM to treat not only the COVID-19 pandemics, but also the H1N1 (swine flu) and H7N9 (bird flu) epidemics. Having survived all 3, perhaps there’s something to be said for China’s millenia-worth of herbal remedies. The US, at the tender age of 244, seems more like the rookie med student eager to prove his mettle. While the US braces for another month of lockdown, China tentatively returns to life as usual. The re-opening can be attributed to basic math: an increasing number of recovered cases plus decreasing number of new cases. Notably, 50,000 recovered COVID-19 patients were prescribed TCM in their treatments (Mai and Lo). In general, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology reports that over 85% of all COVID-19 patients in China (about 60,000 people) were treated with both TCM and antiviral medications (Gan and Xiong). This highlights the integral role that TCM played in enabling China to recover from COVID-19. Skeptics may argue that it’s impossible to figure out whether it was TCM, biomedicine, or a combination of the two that led to recovery, but even they have to acknowledge there certainly aren’t any downsides observed to using TCM (Mai and Lo). In the same way that there is no universally accepted cure to COVID-19 in biomedicine, the TCM remedies used for COVID-19 are varied. One of the treatments is a soup containing a mixture of herbs and ephedra (ma huang), which is commonly used in TCM to treat asthma and bronchitis (Mai and Lo). Another treatment is shuanghuanglian, a concoction of Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicerae Japonicae Flos), Chinese skullcap (Scutellariae Radix), and forsythia (Fructus Forsythiae) (Gao et al.). Approved by the Chinese Food and Drug Administration, it is traditionally used to treat respiratory infections (Gan and Xiong). Perhaps the most controversial TCM remedy is tan re qing, an injection containing bear bile, goat horn powder, and plant extracts (Fobar, “China promotes bear bile”). Why is it controversial? All it takes are biased headlines such as “After Ban on Eating Wild Animals, China Promotes Injections with Bear Bile to Treat COVID-19” (Fobar, “Bear bile explained”). Even if the article itself mentions that ursodeoxycholic acid, a compound found in high concentrations in bear bile, has been proven to help with certain ailments, how many people actually read beyond the headline? After all, if it’s featured in National Geographic, it must be factual and objective. It’s no wonder that outside of China, TCM is commonly viewed as antiquated, superstitious, or just outright disturbing to delicate Western palates. Is TCM Effective? Image Source: www.catalyst.phrma.org/developing-a-new-drug-is-actually-harder-than-rocket-science?utm_campaign=R%26D&utm_content=25644612&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter When they’re not being socially awkward at dinner parties, Western biomedical doctors love sneering that TCM doesn’t work. “It hasn’t gone through enough clinical trials!” they cry, refusing to acknowledge that their system for evaluating efficacy was established by Western scientists, for Western science. After all, if something isn’t good by your own standards, it must not be good at all, right? Let’s take a minute to debunk that. First, TCM has proven its efficacy both as a broader system and in treating COVID-19. The standards of evidence for TCM are clearly different from the standards of evidence created by biomedical scientists. Simply because TCM sometimes fails to perform well in clinical trials, it loses all credibility in the eyes of physicians. But, as you can see from the image above, clinical trials themselves are often unsuccessful as well. Biomedicine has a standardized approach for developing medicine and evaluating how effective it is. Drugs go through multiple phases of research and review, each phase more stringent than the last, before they are approved (“The Drug Development Process”). This lengthy process establishes credibility to physicians, who trust that the final product will ultimately keep patients safe. Or, at the very least, keep patients alive enough to avoid a malpractice lawsuit. As such, clinical trials are indoctrinated in biomedicine as the “gold standard.” Remember in high school when a new kid joined your class and the popular kids scrutinized her with equal parts fascination, equal parts judgment? That’s what’s happening here. TCM was developed in a disparate world, far away from the tightly-knit echelon of Ivy-educated scientists. What happens when an alternative medicine does not meet the gold standards they have been brainwashed into believing? It’s not taken seriously, viewed as a lesser option, and pushed into the shadows. Unlike biomedicine, TCM treats patients as idiosyncratic individuals rather than entries in an Electronic Health Record. A fundamental tenet of TCM is to personalize treatments and prescriptions to not only the patients’ symptoms, but also their lifestyle and family history. In contrast, biomedicine publishes standardized treatment plans for every ailment and injury imaginable. This enables standardized testing in clinical trials, aka credibility. TCM on the other hand provides a more pragmatic approach that actually “answer[s] real-world questions” (MacPherson, “Evidence-Based Acupuncture”). However, due to its personalization, TCM is deemed “untestable.” Patient-specific prescriptions combined with the historic encouragement for TCM practitioners to develop their own individual styles leads to different treatments for patients with similar symptoms (Zhang et al.). It’s challenging to disprove placebo/sham effects with acupuncture and difficult to doubleblind TCM (Ramsay et al.). Lastly, it seems as if the world of Western medicine is unable to understand that complex interactions exist between multiple TCM agents. Isolating the exact biomedical mechanism through which the prescription acts upon the patient is nearly impossible. TCM was not designed with the system of clinical trials in mind as biomedical drugs were. Is this important? To TCM practitioners, not necessarily. After all, TCM has its own system of laws explaining how its prescriptions work. But to Western practitioners, you’d think we just called their baby ugly. Clinical trials serve as the foundation of credibility for the biomedical community, and because there are many complications in testing TCM, doing so for the sake of appeasing them doesn’t necessarily increase TCM’s credibility. Despite TCM’s difficulty in conforming to clinical trials, numerous biomedical studies have shown using TCM results in significant improvements in patient outcomes. Examples include a greater reduction in Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) symptoms when treated with TCM (Bensoussan et al.) as well as increased fetal activity and cephalic presentation after the use of moxibustion (Cardini and Weixin). TCM has even proved effective in solving global health crises where biomedicine could not. Tu Youyou discovered a cure for malaria in a TCM remedy called Artemisinin. Perhaps to the amazement of biomedical scientists, this discovery saved millions of lives and later earned her the Nobel Prize. And she didn’t need an MD to do it (“Tu Youyou”). With clear cases for its efficacy as a broader system, there is no reason beyond xenophobia why TCM should not be incorporated into treatment plans for COVID-19. Even under the West’s process for establishing efficacy, TCM has been shown to improve patient outcomes when incorporated with biomedicine (Ni et al.). In another trial in China, COVID-19 patients were treated with either Western medicine or a combination of Western and TCM remedies. The results concluded that mixed treatment patients had a 33% higher recovery rate, had higher lymphocyte counts, and left the hospital sooner than those treated with only Western medicine (Gan and Xiong). Unless biomedical scientists want to admit that their own system of clinical trials is flawed, the numbers speak for themselves. The United States is in a pandemic. We don’t have time to rely on the slim possibility that biomedicine will find a cure in time. Failure is more common than not in both clinical trials and convincing Western practitioners to give TCM a chance. Even when there is significant evidence in favor of TCM, TCM still faces disproportionate scrutiny compared to Western counterparts. TCM should be treated as an equal to Western pharmaceuticals in the treatment of COVID-19. There is currently no evidence that biomedicine is equipped to tackle COVID-19 on its own. If TCM can lend a helping hand, why not take it? After using hand sanitizer, of course. Is TCM more than a political tool? Image Source: www.respectfulinsolence.com/2019/05/29/mao-triumphant If the 20th century was any indication, unwavering belief in the superiority of capitalism is as American as apple pie. While firmly ignoring any instances of moral questionability in their own government, patriotic Americans are quick to complain that spreading TCM is no more than another cog in China’s grand scheme to rule the world. Let’s take a moment to clarify what spurious journalists will not. TCM has a mixed history with the Chinese government. While once cracked down on by the CCP as antithetical to China’s modernization, it later received immense support as Mao rose to power. Mao saw TCM as an opportunity for China to develop a self-reliant national identity during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (Scheid, “The People’s Republic”). Even today, President Xi Jinping describes TCM “as a ‘treasure’ of Chinese civilization that will help in the ‘rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation’” (Mai and Lo). Despite TCM’s historical ties to the CCP as a form of propaganda, it has its merits as a cheaper alternative to Western medicine (Zimmerman). Especially in recent years, TCM has gained popularity in modern Western countries. Ironically, a significant catalyst to TCM’s acceptance was President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. During this trip, journalist James Reston was fortunate enough to develop a severe case of appendicitis, requiring immediate surgery. In an amazing feat of American bravery, James Reston agreed to be poked with needles under the assurance that yes, these painful-looking spiky things will in fact reduce post-operative pain. To his amazement, it worked. And just like modern day vloggers, Reston absolutely needed to share his brush with death with the public. However, these were the pre-internet days so he had to settle for the New York Times (Reston). Back then, people actually read the paper, so news of TCM spread across the country like an infectious disease. As TCM became more and more widespread, Americans became uneasy with the idea that a foreign invention could work better than their homegrown solutions. They questioned if the 1972 delegation was overly optimistic to improve US sentiment towards China and exaggerated the success of TCM to flatter their new friends. Since then, TCM has never quite lost its reputation as a chess piece in diplomatic relations. Even after TCM gained acceptance by the WHO last year, opponents are still quick to mischaracterize it as Communist hogwash. At this point, it’s basically a competition to see who can come up with the most clickbait-y headline. In third place, “Widespread consumption of Chinese herbals of unknown efficacy and potential toxicity will jeopardize the health of unsuspecting consumers worldwide” by CNN (Hunt). Coming in second, “Madagascar’s president promotes unproven herbal cure [TCM] for COVID-19” by Mongabay (Vyawahare). And taking the trophy is The Economist with “State- sponsored quackery: China is ramping up its promotion of its ancient medical arts.” But no headline can damage TCM’s legitimacy as much as the words of the US Commander-in-Chief. In an incredible display of international diplomacy, Trump has decided to label COVID-19 “the Chinese Virus” (Cillizza). He is seemingly unaware of the fact that the US has quickly overtaken China in confirmed cases. Trump has also been a strong opponent to the wearing of face masks in public, joining hundreds of Americans in abstaining from the practice due to its association with Asia (Smith). What’s wrong with being associated with Asia? The US certainly didn’t have any issues with that when it decided to open a Panda Express in every shopping center as the hallmark of authentic Chinese cuisine. Even before COVID-19, healthy populations in Asia are used to wearing face masks to pre-emptively stifle the spread of disease. However, the West perceives wearing masks as a sign of being sick. Additionally, critics argue there is no scientific proof that face masks are effective, meaning that they are unnecessary (Friedman). Image Source: www.twitter.com/Surgeon_General/status/1233725785283932160 Recently, the US has reversed its negative stance on face masks. Though there has not been sufficient time for new clinical trials to scientifically prove their effectiveness, the government is now encouraging everyone to wear one when in public. Now that public officials and celebrities alike are showing off designer masks on social media, the stigma has been reduced. Finally, the everyday American can wear face masks in public without fear of being judged. At the end of the day, TCM has unfairly suffered from an image of being a political tool by the Chinese government. Whether it’s an inaccurate name by Trump in 2020 or backlash from Tiananmen in 1989, the perception of TCM by Americans has been inextricably linked to the fluctuating relationship between the US and China. But the recent open-mindedness towards wearing face masks demonstrates that lack of “scientific” evidence and association with Asia shouldn’t determine how willing we are to try a solution or judge its efficacy. Let’s learn from the leap of faith we took with face masks and extend TCM the same generosity. Conclusion Image Source: www.activeherb.com/blog/origins-of-tcm.html Dr. Fauci, we implore you to incorporate TCM into the US response to COVID-19. In the midst of a pandemic for which biomedicine has yet to find a cure, it is only right that all options be explored. As the US struggles to supply hospitals with sufficient equipment and medication, it is apparent that a more effective approach is needed. From the perspective of Western scientists, TCM is illegitimate and little more than placebo. Yet, TCM has seen consistently positive results throughout its long lifespan. Volker Scheid addresses this dissonance in his book. During a study on menopause, he found that symptoms have long been treated with TCM, but if TCM is removed from its cultural methods, it becomes less effective (Scheid, “Globalizing Chinese Medical Understandings”). As Chinese medicine comes under increasing pressure to legitimize itself through evidence-based research, he questions if we should disregard TCM-accepted treatments simply because they do not show clinical effectiveness. We have noticed that while TCM’s credibility is constantly questioned, Western scientists never have to ask themselves why their system for evaluating efficacy is more credible than TCM’s. Why are only clinical trials considered scientific? Why do we only believe a drug works if it is developed in a lab and explained by technical jargon? Given the current global pandemic, now is not the time for medicine and politics to clash. Even if TCM was once weaponized by the CCP as political propaganda, it has since proven itself as an effective, affordable, and less harsh form of treatment. And while thousands are dying everyday, who has time to wait for clinical trials when a proven alternative exists? We may not have clinical studies as evidence, but we know adopting face masks has certainly done more good than harm. TCM presents a similar scenario, right down to its early adoption in Asia versus balking protests in the states. At the end of the day, how are they different? If we’re willing to give face masks a try, why not TCM as well? References Ansari Talal, et al. “U.S. Coronavirus Cases Surpass Those of China, Italy.” Wall Street Journal, March 27th, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/governments-clamp-down-as-coronavirus-infections-surge-11585218656 Bensoussan, N. J. Talley et al., "Treatment of Irritable Bowel Syndrome With Chinese Herbal Medicine: A Randomized Controlled Trial." JAMA, November 11th, 1998, www.jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/188145 Brown, Kristen V and Riley Griffin. “Trump Pushes an Unproven Coronavirus Drug, and Patients Stock Up.” Bloomberg, March 21st, 2020, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-21/trump-pushes-malaria-drug-for-covid-19-but-evidence-is-lacking Cardini F, and H. Weixin, Moxibustion for Correction of Breech Presentation: A Randomized Controlled Trial. JAMA, November 11th, 1998, www.jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/188144 Cillizza, Chris. “Yes, of course Donald Trump is calling coronavirus the 'China virus' for political reasons.” CNN, March 20th, 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/03/20/politics/donald-trump-china-virus-coronavirus/index.html “Everything You Should Know About the 2019 Coronavirus and COVID-19.” Healthline, www.healthline.com/health/coronavirus-covid-19 Fobar, Rachel. “Bear bile, explained.” National Geographic, February 25th, 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reference/bear-bile-explained Fobar, Rachel. “China promotes bear bile as coronavirus treatment, alarming wildlife advocates.” National Geographic, March 25th, 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/chinese-government-promotes-bear-bile-as-coronavirus-covid19-treatment Friedman, Uri. “Face Masks Are In.” The Atlantic, April 2nd, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/america-asia-face-mask-coronavirus/609283 Gan, Nectar and Yong Xiong. “Beijing is prompting traditional medicine as a ‘Chinese solution’ to coronavirus. Not everyone is onboard.” CNN, March 16th, 2020, www.cnn.com/2020/03/14/asia/coronavirus-traditional-chinese-medicine-intl-hnk/index.html Gao, et al. “Shuang-Huang-Lian injection induces an immediate hypersensitivity reaction via C5a but not IgE.” Sci Rep 8, 3572 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21843-7 Hunt, Katie. “Chinese medicine gains WHO acceptance but it has many critics.” CNN, May 24th, 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/05/24/health/traditional-chinese-medicine-who-controversy-intl/index.html Langreth, Robert and Riley Griffin. “A Fast-Moving Virus Pits Treating Patients Against Finding a Cure.” Bloomberg, April 5th, 2020, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-05/covid-19-treating-patients-finding-cure-chloroquine-remdesivir MacPherson, Hugh, “Evidence-Based Acupuncture? A Challenge Ahead,” Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity January 1st, 2005, pages 149-161. MacPherson, Hugh. “Introduction.” Acupuncture in practice; case history insights from the West, 1997, pages 1-15. Mai, Jun and Kinling Lo. “Beijing pushes traditional Chinese medicine as coronavirus treatment despite questions over benefits.” South China Morning Post, March 23rd, 2020, www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3076500/beijing-pushes-traditional-chinese-medicine-coronavirus Ni et al. “Combination of western medicine and Chinese traditional patent medicine in treating a family case of COVID-19 in Wuhan.” Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, Springer Nature 2020, February 17th, 2020, www.doi.org/10.1007/s11684-020-0757-x “NIH clinical trial of remdesivir to treat COVID-19 begins.” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, February 25th, 2020, www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-clinical-trial-remdesivir-treat-covid-19-begins “Q&A on coronaviruses (COVID-19).” World Health Organization, April 17th, 2020, www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses Ramsay et al. “Acupuncture. NIH Statement Consensus Statement 1997.” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, November 5th, 1997, 15(5):1-34, www.consensus.nih.gov/1997/1997Acupuncture107html.htm Reston, James. “Now, About My Operation in Peking.” The New York Times, July 26th, 1971, www.nytimes.com/1971/07/26/archives/now-about-my-operation-in-peking-now-let-me-tell-you-about-my.html Scheid, Volker. “Globalizing Chinese Medical Understandings of Menopause.” East Asian Science and Technology, 2008. Scheid, Volker. “The People’s Republic of China.” Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Smith, David. “'I'm not going to do it': Trump rejects his own administration's advice on masks.” The Guardian, April 3rd, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/03/im-not-going-to-do-it-trump-refutes-his-own-administrations-advice-on-masks “The Drug Development Process.” U.S. Food & Drug Administration, January 4th, 2018, www.fda.gov/patients/learn-about-drug-and-device-approvals/drug-development-process “Tu Youyou.” NobelPrize.org, date unknown, www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/tu-youyou Vyawahare, Malavika. “Madagascar’s president promotes unproven herbal cure for COVID-19.” Mongabay, April 20th, 2020, www.news.mongabay.com/2020/04/madagascars-president-promotes-unproven-herbal-cure-for-covid-19 Zhang et al. “Future perspectives of personalized medicine in traditional Chinese medicine: a systems biology approach.” PubMed.gov, National Center for Biotechnology Information, November 30th, 2011, www.doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2011.10.007 Zimmerman, Clark. “Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Low Cost Health Option.” Middleway Medicine, April 12th, 2011, www.middlewaymedicine.com/traditional-chinese-medicine-a-low-cost-health-option

Hello to all my peers in ASIAN 258! I hope you are all safe and healthy during this pandemic. During this pandemic, I like most of you, have reconnected with my roots in the kitchen and have experimented with several home ingredients. I cooked Indian tandoori chicken curry using ingredients available at a local Indian store. Ingredients: For tandoori chicken: 1. 1 kg bone less chicken 2. 1/2 cup thick plain yogurt(curd) 3. 3/4 cup coconut milk 4. 1 lime 5. 1 piece of ginger 6. 1 pod of garlic (4 cloves of garlic) 7. 6 bits cinnamon 8. 6 flakes cloves 9. 2 cardamom sticks 10. green chilis chopped - as per taste 11. 1 bunch of coriander leaves - chopped 12. 1 tsp garam masala powder 13. 1 tb sp vinegar 14. salt to taste 15. 1/2 teaspoon of sugar 16. half medium onion diced For gravy: 1. 1/2 kg tomatoes 2. 3 tb sp. cashew-nuts- powdered 3. chili powder (as per taste) 4. pepper powder (as per taste) 5. 1 tsp. sugar 6. 1/2 cup of water 7. 100 grams butter 8. 100 grams fresh cream 9. green chilis (as per taste) Preparation: Crush ginger, garlic, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Chop coriander and green chilis into that mix. In a bowl mix all the ingredients except chicken and lime. Clean and cut chicken into pieces and rub with salt and lime juice. Mix the chicken with the plain yogurt and marinate it and leave it for 8-10hrs. As discussed by Colleen Sen in "Curry - A Global History" the starting point of any curry is a curry paste, wet or dry. When one prepares a curry paste, they need to balance the four elements in taste - spicy, sweet, sour and salty - with no one flavor overshadowing the other. Here I will be using a wet curry paste with a combination of water, yogurt and coconut milk. The curry paste can be used in a very similar way with vegetarian legumes. Cooking: Heat oil (your choice, preferably coconut oil) skillet over medium heat over medium heat. Once the oil starts simmering add garlic mix from earlier with onion and cook until fragrant. This is called bhunooing, which results in a creamy rich curry. The spices don't have to be grinded before they are fried with the oil and the oil extracts the essential oils of the spices while they simmer. Add the marinated chicken and stir well. Cook the chicken for 5 minutes, or until starting to brown. Cooking the spices before adding the chicken in the skillet enhances the flavors and aroma of these spices. Dry roasting those very same spices results in the compounds of those very spices reacting with another to create different earthy spices which may not work with the chicken. Add the scallions and coconut milk, increase the heat to medium-high, and cook for 15-20 minutes, until the coconut milk is boiling and begins to thicken. Season with pepper according to your taste. Chop and cook tomatoes with water. Then sieve and make a puree of 2 cups. Melt butter and lightly fry cashew powder to golden brown. Continue stirring. Reduce heat and add tomato puree, sugar, chili powder, black pepper and salt. Increase heat till it boils and stir, and cook for five minutes. Before serving, garnish with green chilis and coriander leaves. If you are unable to source the curry ingredients such as bay leaves and turmeric, or find the chili powder too spicy, I'd advice you to use curry powder from an Indian store which is quick and easy. You also don't have to use a skillet and can use a crockpot and leave it in there for 6-8hrs and not worry about it whilst it cooks. I wondered whether the dish would be just as authentic without these tools and ingredients. As we have learned from our lecture series turmeric, cardamom are pungent spices native to India (Brown, Lecture- Pilaf). The religious values and vegetarian diet of India has shaped the cultural matrix of India. However, by adapting the recipe to local tastes and ingredients available such as paprika and chili flakes, the cultural matrix of the Indian curry is not disposed and therefore its authenticity remains intact. As in Achjaya's Indian Food Ethos the use of elements such as oil, and fire to convert the ingredients of the dish reflect the culturally adaptive use of some of those ingredients. The use of fire and the cooking gradations confers the ritualistic purity on the dish and maintain the authenticity of the dish, in my opinion. The dish is eaten with Basmati rice, which is a staple in South East Asia. Basmati rice is long and non-sticky. This makes basmati rice distinctive to other rice based dishes. Pilau is different to steam boiled basmati rice. Pilau is cooked with dry roasted spices - cardamom, and gloves, saffron for the aroma and vegetables. The chicken curry can also be complemented with spiced yogurt to in other words - raita. Raita is a condiment made up of dahi (yogurt) which cools the palate, especially with all the hot spices. The yogurt is diluted and there are many variations which can be included such as sour pomegranates, spices cucumber or even mint. Notable raita vary region to region with the most popular including boondi which are tiny balls of fried chickpeas flour. We have seen that many foods in the Asian world have interconnected past. As we have seen it includes many regional cuisines and cooking practices. This has led to different cultural matrices and cultural adaptations. Some foods have been original to the Asian world and others not so much. I have been trying to find a clever thread which connects these dishes and reflects the underlying culture where they are from, but surely their uniqueness surely lies in the fact that there isn't one. I think that is what makes those dishes authentic.

Whenever I look for recipes online, I try to find at least two to compare and end up going with kind of an average between the two approaches. In this case, I found two recipes that described two different preparations of shrimp mee goreng: Indonesian and Malaysian style. The version I cooked (and will describe here), used aspects of both recipes and was also limited by the ingredients available to me. Sauce ingredients: 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce & 2 tbsp brown sugar combined 1 tbsp fish sauce 1 tsp worcestershire sauce ½ tbsp sesame oil 1 tbsp chili garlic sauce Chili flakes (to taste) ½ tsp white pepper 4 tbsp ketchup A small amount of ginger paste A small amount of mango pickles Other ingredients: 5 cloves garlic 1 cup of carrots, julienned 1 to 2 cups of greens Some mushrooms ¼ cup green onions ¼ cup fennel ~200g shrimp (I used half a bag of Aldi frozen shrimp) 2-3 tbsp canola oil 2-3 eggs Cilantro for garnish Sauce components Double boiler operation to heat 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce & 2 tbsp brown sugar for kecap manis Step 1: Boil your noodles. Cook them for only 1 minute or so. Drain them, rinse in cool water, put a little oil in there so they don’t stick, and set them aside. (They don’t need to be fully cooked at this stage, because you’ll be heating them again later.) Step 2: Heat the 1 ½ tbsp soy sauce & 2 tbsp brown sugar together until it thickens. Then mix all of the sauce components together in a small bowl. Step 3: Chop all veggies. Step 4: In a tablespoon or so of oil, sear your shrimp. Once they’re cooked, take them out of the pan and set them aside. Don’t clean the pan. Step 5: Add a bit of oil to the pan and saute garlic, fennel, and most of the green onion. Save some green onion to put on top of the finished product. Step 6: On medium-high heat, add half the sauce and all non-tomato veggies. Toss until greens are wilted, 1-2 minutes. Step 7: Push veggies to the side of the pan, add a little oil, and put your eggs in the pan. Scramble them a bit and let them cook halfway, then mix together with the veggies. Step 8: On medium-high heat, add shrimp, noodles, and remaining sauce. Stir/heat until the sauce is absorbed and the temperature is even throughout. Step 9: Turn off heat, mix in tomatoes and remaining green onion. Step 10: Top with cilantro garnish (if you want) and serve! Finished product! The end result was a satisfying meal. Though I had not quite nailed the sweet part of the sweet and savory blended flavor I had been aiming for, my parents and I happily ate our fill. There are several ingredients that are intriguing to find in a Southeast Asian dish: particularly ketchup, chili peppers, and tomatoes. The presence of all of these items is a result of the Columbian exchange. As Crosby notes in his book “The Columbian Exchange,” on page 170, both chili peppers and tomatoes were first cultivated in the Americas, and brought back to Asia and Europe via the Columbian Exchange. Neither of these items were seen in any Asian cuisine until after 1600 (Dr Brown lecture 2/10/2020, slide 28). Ketchup presents a more complicated story. In Andrew Smith’s “Pure Ketchup : A History of America's National Condiment with Recipes,” the author suggests that tomato ketchup is a product of local adaptation. The word ketchup is likely a loan word, borrowed from Cantonese qiezhi / keizap, and was originally made as a preserved fish product (Dr Brown lecture 2/12/2020, slide 24). Tomato ketchup’s predecessors— including peach, walnut, fish, and walnut ketchup— were different from the tomato ketchup we know today. As these ketchups grew even more popular in the U.S., more economical and locally available ingredients were used to replace expensive fish and walnuts. Tomatoes, which are cheap and plentiful in the U.S., were a perfect way to locally adapt this recipe. Another mark of modern Heinz tomato ketchup is the addition of sugar to suit the American cultural matrix. Once tomato ketchup was perfected for mass-production, the product spread around the world. Such an “American” kitchen staple like ketchup is the product of centuries of contact between the Americas and the Old World, and became a key ingredient of dishes like mee goreng. This shows the layered influence and piecemeal adoption of Western food items into Southeast Asian food culture. The original recipe of shrimp mee goreng was shaped by locally adapted components like ketchup, and the recipe as I made it was also informed by local adaption. Because of COVID containment measures, I only used ingredients that were already in my parents’ kitchen. Costco salad green mix was used in place of heartier cabbage, fish sauce combined with worcestershire sauce substituted for oyster sauce, and I made my own kecap manis following this recipe I found. Even the noodles were not quite as suggested— I used wide egg noodles (the kind that usually accompany Swedish meatballs, in my house) instead of mee or instant noodles. With so many adaptations to the recipe, I found myself wondering: did I really make authentic shrimp mee goreng? I didn’t even use a wok! What constitutes authentic food, anyway? One reason I like to use more than one recipe as a reference when I am cooking is to get an idea of how different people make the food, so that I can emulate its original style more closely. But if I don’t have the exact same tools or ingredients, is it possible to claim authenticity? Or just good taste? Authenticity is an incredibly challenging concept to define. My intuitive definition of authentic food centers around the idea that the food is made by following the right recipe, using the right ingredients and tools, and probably by people who have been making and eating this kind of food for their whole life, and their ancestors probably made that same type of food for years before they were born. One relevant example to challenge this intuitive definition is pad thai. Although it is now popularly understood as the definition of authentic Thai food, pad thai became the national dish through a government-supported campaign to improve public health by championing and adopting the originally Chinese dish. Does this history affect the authenticity of pad thai as quintessential Thai food? Over the course of this semester, we ASIAN 258 students have learned countless ways in which different food and people interact and change each other. It’s nearly impossible to find a food culture or even a singular dish comprised of components that come from exclusively its own culture. As we struggle to define authentic food, I think it’s equally important to interrogate our fascination with authenticity. What is so important about food being “authentic,” especially when we can’t even put our finger on what defines food as such? Perhaps authenticity of food is not as important as understanding the food’s history and how it came to be.

The Chinese are present in many ways in Buenos Aires (Argentina). But there’s a special type of restaurant that marries elements from the Chinese tradition with those of Peru’s coastal cities. These are Chifa restaurants, which started popping up in Buenos Aires as Peruvian migration grew in importance during the 1990s and early 2000s. Chinese migration to Peru To understand the origins of this cuisine, we should go back to the 19th century. Chinese workers were brought to Peru in 1849 to replace African slaves in the sugar plantations and the guano fields. They also filled numerous jobs as artisans, servants, and cooks for wealthy families in the capital. The coolie trade, which brought more than 100,000 single Chinese men to Peru, lasted until 1874. As most contracts were 8 years long, by the 1860s, some of these indentured labours were already working as butchers, pastry cooks, or in various jobs in little restaurants, or fondas. The first versions of these small, low-status restaurants for the working class offered cocina criolla (creole food, the hegemonic diet in Lima) that many of them had learned to cook when working as servants and domestic cooks. Then, by the first years of the 20th century, some of these restaurants started offering Cantonese cuisine. But it wouldn’t be until the 1930s that the word Chifa replaced the word for restaurant. So, Chifa is first a restaurant and then a cuisine. It then became part of the spoken language before turning up in posters and advertisements. In order to adapt to the tastes of clients, Chinese migrant chefs began to include local products in their plates, such as cuy (guinea pig), chuño (potato starch used to thicken sauces) and pisco. Through these fusions, Chifa began constructing its identity as a culinary tradition. As it happens with other cuisines in different contexts, Chifa travels with people of Peruvian origin. Why and how Chifas did establish in Buenos Aires? The arrival of migrants from neighbouring countries and Peru in Argentina grew in the 1990s, when it increased fivefold. It was in this context that Peruvian restaurants started appearing in Buenos Aires. At first, they were aimed at the Peruvian community. Then, with global awareness of Peruvian cuisine, led by state-sponsored gastro-diplomacy, Peruvian restaurants became relevant in Buenos Aires’ new "ethnic cuisine" scene. Among this diversified offerings of Peruvian restaurants, Chifa restaurants started to pop up in Buenos Aires in the mid-2000s. Over the course of 2019, I conducted ethnographic observations in these restaurants and interviewed chefs and owners. I found that most of their cooks had previous experiences in Chifas’ kitchens in Lima. They were all Peruvian and of non-Chinese descent. They began working in the lower-level positions back in Lima, where they learned from Chinese cooks in charge of these kitchens. The encounters in those kitchens described by Chifa cooks were marked by tension, friction, and conflict. The kitchens represented sites of encounter between people with different knowledge, cultural backgrounds, languages, and positions in workplace hierarchies. In short, they were encounters between individuals unequally positioned in the social world. And, at the same time, they were also transnational and transcultural spaces. The process of learning new tasks and culinary techniques was described by Peruvian cooks as especially conflictive. The first barrier was language. Since most Chinese cooks in Chifas don´t speak Spanish, the learning process they described was mostly observational. Mastering the wok technique was both a key and challenging task. The process of learning is practical and bodily, it involves observation, practice, and grasping how the body was to move through feeling. It involved correction and multiple attempts. The decision to settle in Argentina, in all my interviewed cases, came down to an offer to work in a Chifa in Buenos Aires. Thus, transnational migrant networks – the sets of interpersonal relations that link migrants with relatives, friends or fellow countrymen at home - played a significant role in defining population mobilities - in these cases between Lima and Buenos Aires. Like the food, the decorations in Chifa restaurants in Buenos Aires contain objects that evoke both China and Peru. They locate stereotypical images associated with each of these countries and their cultural landscapes. For example, there are Chinese lanterns next to pictures of Machu Picchu, Chinese traditional paintings next to soccer shirts of Peruvian teams. What does this decoration convey? Is the decoration also a fusion product? No chopsticks are used. Customers eat with knife and fork. There aren’t round tables (typical of traditional Chinese restaurants), but only square ones. All of them have a bottle of soy sauce on top (siyao as it is named in Peru). As for the menus, they are only written in Spanish, which reveals who are the expected customers. But they also recreate images associated with China, mainly by the use of a certain typography and the presence of red color. In many cases, the customers' experience is marked by nostalgia. Nostalgia overtakes not only the food itself, but other cultural consumptions that take place in these spaces. The ambience is reinforced by TVs playing Peruvian soccer matches and loudspeakers playing Peruvian cumbia. Like any cultural product, Chifas aren´t homogeneous. In Lima you can find Chifas that use ingredients more associated with the Cantonese culinary tradition, and others that offer plates related to the Peruvian criollo cuisine. Still others only serve combinations of them, such as “Monstrito”. When Peruvian migrants settled in Buenos Aires in the 1990s and 2000s, they re-created this culinary tradition once more. As cultural practices and identities don´t always overlap, in the migratory context of Buenos Aires, eating in a Chifa increases “Peruvian-ness”. It is a practice performed by Peruvian migrants to create their identity – even though many of them don´t identify as Chinese. Sources · Cerruti, M. (2005). La migración peruana a la Ciudad de Buenos Aires: su evolución y características. Población de Buenos Aires, 2(2), 7–28. · Lausent-Herrera, I. (2011). The Chinatown in Peru and the Changing Peruvian Chinese Communities. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 7, 69–113. · Rodriguez Pastor, H. (1993). Del Kon Hei Fat Choy al Chifa peruano. En Olivas Weston, R. Cultura, Identidad y Cocina en el Perú. Universidad de San Martín de Porres: Lima. · Yuan, Y. (2028). La comida china en el Perú: una nueva identidad multiétnica. Religación. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 3(10), 128-138.

Today, my mom taught me to make jinsi bing (金丝饼) – Chinese fried spiral pancake. Remember that Miranda told us that bing (饼) has long existed in China, though the main ingredient, wheat, was not native to China. One modern variant of the bing is jinsi bing (金丝饼) – literally meaning “golden thread pancake.” It’s also called qiansi wanlü (千丝万缕), meaning “countless threads.” This name refers to its long, numerous spirals, which can be pulled out. It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and innovation. The ingredients are the same as those for the standard bing. We made several different kinds of bing with one big kneaded dough. 600g of wheat flour yielded about 7 pieces of bing (though this will depend on how big you want them to be). This time, 2 of them were jinsi bing (my mom made the first one, and I made the second). The ingredients are below: For the dough: Unbleached wheat flour: 600g Water at around 60 degree Celsius: 240g Salt: 3g For the You Su (油酥), which prevents the layers or threads of dough from sticking together: Unbleached wheat flour: 30g Vegetable oil: 30g First, we made a dough by mixing the ingredients at the top together. We put all of the ingredients into a breadmaker and set it to dough setting. You can also knead the dough by hand, cover it in plastic wrap, and leave it for about 1 hour to rise. Meanwhile, we made the You Su. We heated the vegetable oil in a pan. Once it became hot (at least around 90 degree Celsius), we poured it into a small bowl with wheat flour. We mixed the ingredients well and reserved for later use. Once the dough was ready, we separated it into 7 pieces for the 7 pieces of bing. We prepared a clean surface and a rolling pin. To prevent the dough from sticking to the surface, pin, or hands, we sprinkled additional flour. We rolled one piece of the dough at a time with the rolling pin. Here I’ll describe the specific recipe for jinsi bing. For jinsi bing, the ideal shape would be a rectangle, but it’s okay as long if it’s even, thin, and not too far from a rectangle. Then we poured about 1/7 of the You Su onto the dough and used a spatula (optional) and our hands to spread it evenly on the entire surface of the dough. Then, we folded the rectangle along the long side into a trifold, and cut the middle part into multiple thin threads (WARNING: don’t cut all the way to the two ends! Leave about 3-5 cm at the ends for holding with your hands). Next, we carefully held the two ends and stretched them so that the threads became longer and thinner. Don’t use too much force – my mom has broken the threads! But don’t worry too much if it breaks – you can still make it delicious. The stretching part is similar to stretching noodles, and you can stretch them one half at a time. If you’re afraid it will break, hold the midpoint and one end, carefully stretch, and repeat for the other half. After that, we put the threads on the clean surface again. Starting with one end, we folded the whole thing into a spiral, bit by bit, and we hid the other end at the bottom to make it look good. We pressed the spiral with our hands to flatten. This made it easier for us to roll it one last time. We rolled the flat spiral with the rolling pin evenly again, to make it into a bigger thinner pie. Ensure that your final product is even before it goes into the pan, otherwise the thin part will be burnt before the thick part is cooked. Finally, we heated a pan and greased the bottom with some vegetable oil, and fried the thin spiral dough with high heat. We flipped it when the bottom was spotted with golden brown, and repeated for the other side. We flipped it a few more times to ensure that the surface enlarged through exposure to the air. That was when the bing was ready! You can lift a thread and unravel the spiral. The slightly brown surface is crispy, while the inside is soft and al dente. Don’t leave it too long, otherwise the moisture would ruin the crunchy threads. If you like, you can eat it with some sugar, honey, or anything else! The threads of our product still stuck a little bit to each other, so we suggest that you make more You Su if you want a more perfect spiral. Also, the ideally thin, even threads take a lot of practice -- we’ll practice more and see if we can make some progress!

Best to make & enjoy while listening to Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson. Today I'm sharing with all of you one of my favorite breakfast foods, which I now have plenty of time to make due to recent events. These are super easy to make and once you master the basic recipe you can start adding things in (I like to add blueberries to mine, but chocolate chips would also be delicious). I'm going to put my reflection on making these pancakes here, but if you aren't interested in reading it and just want to see the recipe, you can skip down to the TLDR; at the end of this post. I have always loved to cook, specifically because I've always loved to eat. I find food to be a creative outlet -- it gives me something to do and it gives me a way to experiment and be adventurous and make people happy. In times of crisis, food is a constant calming presence, it offers tradition and faith and love. Usually at school I don't have as much time to cook as I would like, and so I tend to focus on quick meals that require little clean-up afterwards, but recent events have given me more time and so a goal I've created for myself in this time of social distancing is to cook more and try more recipes. I also run a small food blog, so this offers me a good way to get more into this hobby. Today, I wanted to try making banana pancakes -- an excellent example of local adaptation, because I don't have pancake mix and can't find any in the stores, but had the ingredients on hand to make these kinds of pancakes instead. The recipe to make them is very simple: it requires 1 banana (mashed up), 1 egg (the recipe called for 2 but the first time I made them with 2 eggs they felt more like weirdly scrambled banana eggs than pancakes so I decided moving forward 1 would be enough), 1 tablespoon peanut butter, cinnamon, and then I put my own spin on them, adding a dash of turmeric and some blueberries. Once you mix all the ingredients together into your "pancake" batter, you cook them the same way you do regular pancakes: medium-low heat on a pan with some butter, flipping over once you see them start to bubble. After I fixed the recipe to my own liking (re: omitting one of the two eggs), I thought they turned out really well and were a fun way to motivate myself in the mornings to stick to my routine without class and my on-campus job existing as reasons to be awake. Eating pancakes also reminds me of home, because my family tradition is to eat pancakes every Saturday morning. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to return home because the situation with COVID-19 is significantly worse in my home town than it is here in Ann Arbor, and because I do not want to risk potentially having the disease and transmitting it once I get home to my parents and grandparents. The connection of this breakfast to my own home traditions makes it particularly special, and was another reason that I was happy to try to make them. Perhaps now when I do return home, banana pancakes can also be integrated into our traditional Saturday morning meals. I also found it fun to create this new kind of "pancake" because it illustrates how a recipe can change over time due to cultural matrix and other examples of local adaption. As I was writing this, I looked up the history and origin of pancakes, and came across a fascinating National Geographic article, which detailed how pancakes may have actually originated in prehistoric times, and how cultures from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the original settlers of the USA to the French up to modern times have eaten pancakes differently and how many different recipes exist for them (Rupp, 2018). Especially in thinking about how this new recipe came about as people today are very focused on healthy eating and how to make their favorite foods "healthier," it is interesting to think about how this recipe might be categorized and archived for future generations. TLDR; Basic recipe for pancakes: - 1 banana - 1 egg (note: a lot of recipes on the internet say to use 2 eggs but I usually find this makes them way too eggy and you end up eating banana scrambled eggs) - 1 tablespoon peanut butter - dash of cinnamon optional add-ins: - turmeric (a very small dash of this for health benefits) - blueberries Steps: - mash up banana in a bowl - crack egg into the bowl and scramble it until mixed in with the banana - add a tablespoon of peanut butter and your cinnamon - mix together until it resembles pancake batter (pretty smooth) - heat a little butter in a skillet and cook the way you would usually make pancakes, flipping once you see them starting to form little bubbles (if you're adding blueberries, make sure to put them in before you flip) - enjoy!

Chopsticks are ubiquitous in Asia. They are so essential to everyday life that the region -- which encompasses China, Korean Peninsula, the Japanese archipelago, parts of Mongolia, and mainland Southeast Asia – is also known as the “chopsticks cultural sphere.” This is not just the impression left on most visitors to the region. Many Asian chopsticks users think that chopsticks are more important than other eating utensils. Previously, some Japanese food scholars have posited that chopsticks are an “exclusive” tool for the Japanese—when eating their meals, Japanese don’t usually employ other utensils. But chopsticks were not always the primary eating tool in East and Southeast Asia. As both the archaeological and textual evidence reveals, the spoon was actually not only the earliest, but also the most basic eating implement for ancient people. Why? Until the tenth century AD, millet was the staple cereal in North China, Korea, and parts of Japan. Millet was – and remains -- best cooked as a porridge or gruel. This is because its grains are smaller than that of rice. If millet were to be prepared like rice--brought to boil by applying high heat to the right amount of water and then simmered until soft and fluffy—the millet grains on the bottom of the pot would have been burned while those in the middle would remain undercooked. Because millet porridge was the most common grain-based dish in the ancient world, the spoon became the most convenient tool because it helped people eat the food elegantly. As grain has always been the most significant part of an Asian meal, the tool that transports it best becomes the most essential. So what changed? As in the case of millet porridge, boiling was the basic cooking method in Asia, and elsewhere. In ancient times, cooks boiled not only grains but also non-grain food; of the latter, according to the Classic of Rites, a text from Han China (206 BCE - 220 CE) or before, stew (羹geng in Chinese) was most common—“geng (stew) and fan (grain) were eaten by all, from the princes down to the common people, regardless of status.” The same text also enjoins that when one eat geng (stew), one should use chopsticks because they are more efficient in picking up the foodstuff (e.g. vegetables) from a stew or any soupy dish. (This incidentally is the traditional way to savor Japanese miso soup, though many outside Japan use a spoon today.) As grain food was more important than non-grain food in a meal, chopsticks however were a supplementary implement. This role was clearly suggested by the paleographic form “zhu” 筯, or the Chinese word for chopsticks in early days. The growing appeal of wheat in first-century China was a game changer. This was especially the case after the widespread adoption of the millstone for milling wheat into flour, which helped chopsticks make inroads and undermined the primacy of the spoon. By the tenth century, wheat succeeded in dethroning millet as the most consumed grain among the northern Chinese, followed also by the Koreans. Wheat-flour foods, such as noodles and dumplings, combined grain and non-grain ingredients in one form, and to eat noodles, chopsticks evidently was the better tool, because the spoon could not easily transport such foodstuffs. Chinese also customarily used chopsticks to eat dumplings. To this day, noodles and dumplings are arguably the favorite wheat flour foods in the region. Their popularity has turned chopsticks into a popular eating implement than the spoon. Not only do the East Asians use chopsticks to enjoy noodles, but one study suggests that medieval Turks also used chopsticks to eat “macaroni,” possibly due to Mongol influence. In modern days, the most well-known noodle dishes around the world perhaps are Japanese ramen and Vietnamese pho--both are best eaten with chopsticks. The second “push” for the ascent of chopsticks in history was the increased consumption of rice throughout Asia, from Vietnam and South China to North China and then to Korea and Japan, from the eleventh century onward. The introduction of early ripening rice from Vietnam was a factor. Since cooked rice, which is more consistent than millet, can be transported in clumps, one could jettison the spoon. Because non-grain foods—i.e. stew and others—have traditionally been conveyed by the use of chopsticks, so gradually, a pair of chopsticks was all that was required to handle daily meals in the region (something also noticed by Japanese scholars). However, if chopsticks became an “exclusive” eating tool in Japan, then the same could be said about China and Vietnam. Korea is an exception because to this day, spoon and chopsticks are still used together as a set by Koreans to eat. However, this Korean eating etiquette reflects more a cultural decision than a culinary need, since rice’s consistency also allows Koreans to carry it with chopsticks, and many Koreans do just that in informal settings, such as a family meal. Besides milling wheat flour, the millstone is also used by the Asians to grind rapeseeds and other vegetable seeds for cooking oil. Once cooking oil was readily available from the third century, a new cooking method was born: stir-frying. Over time, stir-frying, or sautéing, became a quintessential way of cooking Chinese food and continues to this day. In preparing stir-fried dishes, foodstuffs are precut to bite-size morsels for fast cooking. Due to this, chopsticks also become a convenient utensil to pick the cooked morsels, for they could allow their users to transport the desired amount of food to their mouths more precisely than a spoon would. In pre-modern times, this way of eating was also more hygienic because the small sizes of chopsticks minimized the chance of passing on germs to food in communal eating. In sum, though invented in antiquity about 7,000 years ago, chopsticks were not always as essential as one tends to think. There’s a rich history behind the indispensable utensil that defines the “chopsticks cultural sphere.” That history is reflected and registered the remarkable changes in the culinary traditions and dietary practices. Moreover, the story is still unfolding today—the growing global appeal of Japanese sushi and the ubiquity of Chinese restaurants and takeout around the world have all left their indelible marks on the use, appeal, and appearance of chopsticks. For more information on the history of chopsticks, see Q. Edward Wang, Chopsticks: A Cultural and Culinary History

The interloper chile pepper, arriving in China around 1570, ultimately surpassed the native Sichuan pepper in popularity. Why did the Chinese so enthusiastically embrace this introduced plant, even to the extent of displacing a long-treasured native spice? Our Two Protagonists Sichuan Pepper in the prickly ash family Rutaceae family, Zanthoxylum bungeanum (Chinese, often huajiao花椒or Chuanjiao川椒) Sichuan pepper (also known as fagara) is the seed pod from a short tree indigenous to China. It has a distinctive, pungent flavor. In addition, it has a numbing or anesthetic property. It has been used in Chinese cuisine and medicine since ancient times. Chile Pepper Solanaceae family, Capsicum annuum The chile pepper is native to Central America and northern South America. While there are several species currently cultivated around the world, until the 20th century, varieties grown in China almost certainly came just from the species Capsicum annuum. The capsaicin compound in the chile seed pods gives them their spiciness. The Chinese use both fresh and dried chiles. Initial naming and use of chiles imply a similar culinary use to the native Sichuan pepper as a pungent flavoring. Chinese authors from the 17th century write about the chile as a substitute for Sichuan pepper. Over the course of the 18th century, Chinese increased their use of chiles well beyond merely substituting it for the native spice. They endorsed and capitalized upon the versatility of the chile pepper, developing a taste for its own unique flavors, employing its antiseptic characteristics for food preservation, recognizing health and medicinal impacts of capsaicin, and integrating the chile into cultural symbols. While Sichuan pepper is popular and widely available in China today, it is not as prevalent in most regional cuisines as it was before the arrival of chiles. Important exceptions are Sichuan and Yunnan, where the native flavoring is still used regularly, however, most often in combination with the introduced chile, thus also demonstrating culinary shifts since the arrival of chiles. Popular dishes like mapo doufu and gongbao jiding include both. The overall decline in Sichuan pepper use occurred in a direct relationship with the increase in chile pepper use, from the 18th into the 19th centuries. This shift is reflected in increasing numbers and types of Chinese sources discussing chiles, such as local histories, culinary texts, and medical handbooks. Indeed, Sichuan culinary scholar Lan Yong, building on the expansive collection of recipes from ancient times into the early twentieth century compiled by Liu Daqi, demonstrates this shift quite concretely: Recipes in the collection that include Sichuan pepper as an ingredient Ming (1368-1644) Qing (1644-1911) 29.7% 18.9% This marked decline in the use of Sichuan pepper is paralleled by greater and greater integration of chiles into Chinese culinary practices: In a mid-18th century local history, the authors exclaimed that chiles were: “as indispensable in daily cuisine as onion and garlic.” A mid-19th century gazetteer underscored the chile’s essential role as a domestic crop, emphasizing that: “It is the most important vegetable in the garden. It is used as a daily flavoring, not unlike salt.” In his 1848 work on plants, Wu Qijun observed that chilies are “Grown in Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Sichuan as a vegetable,” not just as a flavoring. medical uses of chiles: + stimulate appetite and digestion + warming the body + treatment for diarrhea + treatment for hemorrhoids + treatment and prophylactic for malaria + treatment for food poisoning + expelling damp, particularly in Hunan, Sichuan and Guizhou Unlike Sichuan pepper, the Chinese have made chiles into cultural symbols. Chiles have become important in some gender tropes, including masculine fighting spirit and feminine independence and passion. In terms of fighting spirit, Mao is often quoted as saying that there would not have been a revolution without chiles. Similarly, Hunanese, as avid consumers of chiles, are often viewed as strong military leaders. The term “la meizi” or “spicy girls,” describes women who eat many chiles and are independent, assertive and passionate. In a further example, strings of real and artificial chiles are now a common Chinese New Year’s decoration. Hanging these strings evokes the phrase “honghong huohuo” literally “red, red, fire, fire,” referring to the color and spiciness of chiles. The symbolic meaning of the strings of chiles can be translated as a wish or prayer for an “exuberant and affluent life.” The impact of chiles on Chinese culture also directly influenced the language. The definitions for la or “spicy” in contemporary dictionaries now include the chile as the first example to explain this flavor. The thoroughness of Chinese integration of the chile sprang from the plant’s versatility. It provides flavor, spice, medicine, nutrition, and stimulation and induces passion. Chinese from different regions, classes, and genders could all find something compelling and edgy in the chile. For more on the history of chiles in China see my The Chile Pepper in China What’s in a Name? There is a parallel in Chinese and English for borrowing names for spicy or pungent plants. In English, “pepper” comes from the Latin piper, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit pippali. The Sanskrit name originally referred to long pepper, a relative of black pepper, but in Europe, it referred primarily to black pepper (Piperaceae family, Piper nigrum). The name pepper was borrowed to refer to the chile once it arrived in Europe from the Americas. Much later, the label of pepper was applied to the native Chinese spice, Sichuan pepper. In China, a similar pattern emerged, but it centered on the name of an indigenous spice. The original name for Sichuan pepper in Chinese is the single character jiao 椒. When black pepper was introduced to China from South Asia around the second century, the Chinese borrowed this character from their native pungent plant to name this new import, hujiao 胡椒or “pepper from Hu.” Hu was an ancient term referring to a broad region of Western and Southern Asia, including India. When chiles arrived in China in the late 16th century, the Chinese again borrowed the character jiao for many of the early names for chiles, including fanjiao 番椒or “foreign pepper” and lajiao 辣椒 or “spicy pepper.” The parallel in naming these plants from three distinct families reflects cultural recognition of similar flavors, physiological effects and convergent uses.

Jin Feng (Grinell College), author of Tasting Paradise on Earth: Jiangnan Foodways What did the emperor of China eat in the 18th century? A contemporary restaurant in Suzhou, China has reproduced the forgotten imperial banquet. By spotlighting the splendor and opulence of gentry living in the city’s storied past, this establishment feeds not only the body, but also cultural nostalgia in a rapidly changing China. No ordinary eatery, the Wumen Renjia (Suzhou Family) restaurant has reconstructed the official banquet that the Suzhou Office of Fabric and Clothes had purportedly prepared for the visiting Qing emperor, Qianlong (1711-1799), during his tours of the south. Officially charged with collecting fabric and making clothes for the Qing court, the Suzhou Office frequently turned into temporary living quarters for the emperor and his entourage, summoning skilled chefs working for local aristocratic families to prepare imperial meals. In 1765, the names of several Suzhou chefs appeared on the official record of the emperor’s daily meals during his travels. Some were later taken into the Forbidden City in Beijing, serving as royal chefs and leaving behind records of “Suzhou-style” dishes once loved by the royal family. Sha Peizhi, the manager of Suzhou Family, has led the effort to recreate the Suzhou Office banquet of the past, with the help of a specialist from the Forbidden City Museum in Beijing. Sha and her colleagues not only searched through the Forbidden City archives, but also consulted contemporary Suzhou chefs and the descendants of Qing-dynasty aristocratic families. One such descendant is I.M. Pei, the late architect, whose family once owned the Lion Grove Garden. After more than a decade of trial and error, Sha and her team came up with more than forty dishes now acknowledged as the “Intangible Cultural Heritages of Jiangsu Province” and won accolades from the government. Many of the recreated dishes not only boast imperial associations but also abound in history and literary significance. Take “Eight Treasures Duck,” which has won the place of honor thanks to Qianlong’s renowned obsession with dishes made from all parts of the duck. Or consider “Jin Shentan Pressed Tofu,” a culinary creation that commemorates the ill-fated Qing scholar and Suzhou native, Jin Shentan (1608-1661). As a show of bravado before his execution, Jin purportedly told his sons that five-spice pressed tofu combined with peanuts could replicate the flavor of smoked ham. Perhaps most revealing is the restaurant’s version of Squirrel-Shaped Mandarin Fish, a signature local dish. Sha corrects what she believes to be misconceptions about this dish perpetuated by her rivals and by locals alike. There is no evidence, she maintains, that Qianlong ever consumed it at the Pine and Crane Tower (Song He Lou) Restaurant, a rival eatery. The dish, in fact, has more ancient origins: It arose when the assassin Zhuan Zhu hid a dagger inside a cooked fish to kill King Liao of Wu in 515 BCE. Sha’s team claims that they have therefore altered the standard recipe of the fish to better represent what they consider “authentic” Suzhou cuisine. The fish now cooks with apricot jam instead of the more common but “inauthentic” tomato paste. Since tomato was not imported to China until the 16th or 17th century, she reasons, it’s best to use apricot jam instead. The Chinese cooked with fruits as early as the 11th century BCE. “Fishy” origin story aside, Sha also claims that their chefs have integrated modern scientific knowledge into their offerings even while emphasizing the restaurant’s time-honored royal ties. For instance, “Cherry Pork,” another signature local dish and a supposed favorite of the Dowager Empress Cixi (1835-1908), uses red fermented rice for coloring. Sha recounts that in 1985, two American scientists, Joseph Goldstein and Michael Brown, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering that monocline-k can regulate cholesterol metabolism. Goldstein and Brown only speculated about possible drug therapies based on this discovery that could lower “bad cholesterol” clotting arteries and leading to a heart attack or a stroke. But Suzhou Family has lost no time advertising the “scientific basis” for not only their Cherry Pork, but also their Red Fermented Rice Wine. The dish, they claim, is good for reducing fat and cholesterol content. It also supposedly prevents cardio-vascular diseases, cerebral apoplexy, myocardial infarction, and high blood pressure, too. Besides offering “authentic” and “scientifically proven” local dishes, Suzhou Family also uses suitable packaging to represent the restaurant as the true heir to Chinese cultural traditions. Sha has had a set of eating utensils custom made for their renovated imperial banquet. These include white and blue porcelain plates produced in Jingdezhen, the famous “Porcelain Capital” of China, silver spoons, and chopsticks with sliver tips, traditionally used for testing poison in food in the imperial palace. They also try to recreate the lifestyle once enjoyed by Suzhou aristocracy, who owned private gardens and kept family chefs. These efforts have paid off with people in China and beyond. The restaurant attracts foreign celebrities to the restaurant like I. M. Pei, and the owners received invitations to reconstruct historical banquets in Japan.[1] They have even signed an agreement with the municipal government of Vancouver in Canada to serve food at a Suzhou-style garden there and to promote traditional “garden-style living.” [2] The restaurant’s business model comprises mixing heritage and invention, art and science in one easily recognizable and consumable package. It also invokes China’s imperial past, adding mystique and flare to target both domestic and global markets. The resulting imperial banquet represents more an invention of traditions than a recovery of historical data. This case thus questions the meaning of authentic Chinese food. For some within China “authentic Suzhou cuisine” signals sophistication and higher social status. For others, however, it ignites hometown pride. And for still others, this cuisine buttresses their sense of uniqueness and individuality. In fact, a successful “local cuisine” restaurant like Suzhou Family Restaurant does not just exactly reproduce the food of traditional society. It must also be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of diverse parties without sacrificing the familiar elements of the Suzhou culinary tradition that make it “identifiable.” Architectural style, interior decoration, utensils, signature dishes, and local lore work together to evoke the symbolic universe of traditional foodways and living. [1] “Suzhou meishijia chenggong fuzhi wutao ‘cefeng cai,’ jilu Liuqiu zhuquan.” [2] “Suzhou meiyao mingcha jiang piaoxiang Wengehua Yi Yuan, ‘Wumen Renjia’ yu Jiaguo qianyue.”