Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. By Judith Farquhar. [Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002. xii+341 pp. £14.50. ISBN 0-8223-2921-2.]

The author is an anthropologist with a heavy list towards Chinese medicine, and it is from a medico-anthropological stance that she views aspects of food and sex in China. The works of neither Chang Kwang-chih nor Robert van Gulik will be made redundant by this book, for it is eating rather than food, and relationships between the sexes rather than the mechanics of sexual practice which are focused on, and a whole battery of lenses, from philosophy to literary criticism and from ethnographic fieldwork to lexicography, is employed.