🎙️ Welcome to “Revise and Resubmit” – your weekend stop for thoughtful book talk and fresh ideas. This is the Weekend Book Review, and today we’ve got something truly delicious—not just for the tastebuds, but for the mind.
📖 This week, we’re diving into Modern Chinese Foodways, a brand-new release from The MIT Press, published just this March 4th, 2025. This isn’t your typical food book. It’s a journey—spanning centuries, borders, kitchens, and global markets—that redefines what we think we know about Chinese cuisine.
🍜 From the commodification of dumplings to the rise of soy sauce science, from TikTok cooking tutorials to the geopolitical identity of millet—this collection unpacks how Chinese food became modern. But more than that, it challenges a familiar myth: that Chinese food is solely ancient, unchanging, rooted in tradition. What if it’s also innovative, adaptive, and—dare we say—cutting-edge?
✍️ Behind this sharp, flavor-packed volume are three outstanding editors:
Jia-Chen Fu, a leading voice at Academia Sinica and author of The Other Milk, brings a historian’s care and a scholar’s hunger to each page.
Michelle T. King, professor at UNC Chapel Hill, serves up cultural critique with the same precision she brought to Culinary Nationalism in Asia and her biography of the culinary icon Fu Pei-mei.
And Jakob A. Klein, a social anthropologist from SOAS University of London, layers in deep anthropological insight with experience coediting volumes on ethical eating and Chinese consumption.
Together, these three minds—and thirteen other brilliant contributors—have crafted a book that’s not just about Chinese food, but about how food reflects who we are, where we’re going, and what we value.
🍱 So here’s a question to chew on as we get into this review:
If Chinese food has changed so much over the past two centuries, what does that say about how we consume culture, history, and even identity itself today?
🙏 Huge thanks to Jia-Chen Fu, Michelle T. King, and Jakob A. Klein for bringing this book into the world.
📲 If you love smart takes and deep dives like this one, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and follow us on YouTube at Weekend Researcher. We’re also streaming on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcasts, so you can take us with you wherever you go.
Now, let’s open the book… and dig in. 🍽️
Reference
Fu, J. C., King, M. T., & Klein, J. A. (Eds.). (2025). Modern Chinese Foodways. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15518.001.0001
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