Memory

This chapter examines the connections between memory and food in Moonshadow Pond. The main focus is on conscious elements of memory that are articulated by individuals (rather than unconscious memories highlighted by the concept of habitus). These conscious memories relate to an historical conciousness, as food events and even specific foodstuffs evoke and remind people of social, cultural and political continuities or changes. Conscious memories evoked by food can also connect people to personal histories and relationships as well as societal ones. In this sense, food memories play a role in ongoing exchanges and moral obligations to both the living and to ancestors and gods.

Morality

This chapter examines the connections between food and moral discourse in Moonshadow Pond. It examines how the exchange of food serves to express, fulfill and create moral obligations between people. Additionally, discourse about food expresses judgments about the rightness or wrongness of peoples’ actions at local and national levels. Finally, food choices themselves convey implicit and explicit moral judgments. These can be judgments about the wider food system (as in decisions to only purchase local meat), or about food intake as a moral index (as in a decision to be vegetarian). The chapter concludes by focusing on how moral dimensions of the meanings and practices surrounding food help to constitute a moral economy; this moral economy retains a strong presence in daily life, and may actually have been strengthened by the simultaneous growth of the market economy and the industrialized food system.

Labor

This chapter examines the work of producing food and preparing meals in Moonshadow Pond. The gendered and generational configurations of agricultural labor changed profoundly from the Old Society through the collective era to the present. With the exodus of youth to non-agricultural employment, the future of agriculture in Moonshadow Pond is unclear. In addition to the production of food through rice cultivation and vegetable gardening, meal preparation is integral to the labor surrounding food in Moonshadow Pond. Thus, both agriculture and cooking are at the center of domestic food production and preparation. These need to be differentiated from production for the market — raising pigs, tending fish ponds, or growing citrus and other fruit trees, all of which are oriented toward earning cash income. Finally, just as cultivating rice (gengtian), is central to peasant identity, so too, cooking rice is at the center of family identity.

Conviviality

This chapter examines the role of food in breaking down social boundaries and creating sociability, fellowship and emotional ties in Moonshadow Pond. The chapter draws from theories of ritual to analyze the mechanisms by which conviviality and “co-feeling” is forged through banqueting and ordinary eating events. It also looks at the role of key food substances – tea, alcohol and meat – in creating social and emotional ties. Finally, it asks how food works to generate emotions in a specifically Chinese context, in which emotion may not always be overtly expressed, but is sometimes expressed through food sharing and exchange.

The Value of Food in Rural China

This chapter introduces the setting of the study and the major themes of the study. The setting of the book is a Hakka village, pseudonymously named Moonshadow Pond in northeast Guangdong Province. The chapter provides relevant historical background to the changing role of food in rural China over the last one hundred years, explaining briefly the political economic upheavals which have ultimately lead to a transformed dietary regime. The chapter also introduces the specific context of Moonshadow Pond, and describes its food universe. It surveys the main currents in the anthropology of food that have helped frame this study, and introduces the key organizing principles through which this study investigates the role of food in the community: labor, memory, exchange, morality, and sociality.

Exchange

This chapter focuses on the exchange and circulation of food in Moonshadow Pond. Food is part of a gift economy. It is also part of a subsistence economy as well (to the extent that people self-provision), and it is part of commodified market economy. It is additionally part of a system of direct payment or barter, where foodstuffs themselves are exchanged for goods, services or property. In gift exchange, food circulates in a wide range of venues, from informal everyday give and take among close family members to more formal exchanges during life-cycle rituals and yearly festivals. Finally, food circulates not only amongst humans, but as offerings in a cosmic exchange with gods, ghosts and ancestors. As such, the exchange and circulation of food structures a myriad of social and even cosmological relations and identities.

Conclusion

The conclusion asks how the ethnographic material in the book can shed new light on contemporary views of China, which often concentrate on the decimation of traditional culture and the headlong embrace of western ways and modernity. By using the lens of food, the book has presented a more complex picture. In rural China, food remains a potent means of fulfilling obligations to family and ancestors, and of forging social and emotional connections beyond the family. Food also connects past and present through reenactment of food practices and rituals. In this way food may diminish some of the sense of disruption felt by people living through rapid change. As such, food is a continuous bridge through both time and space. The chapter concludes by asking whether the findings of this book provide any insight into the potential for creating and maintaining a sustainable and meaningful food system in China.