Eugene Anderson's new book is a very personal compilation, rich in insights assembled during a long and distinguished career in anthropology. The book covers the Chinese food system from prehistorical times to the Ming, also including many references to the present. Anderson urges that premodern China created a highly intensive and sustainable food system. Unlike Mao's and contemporary China, it was well aware of environmental issues, sharing a basic sense of continuity between humans and the rest of the cosmos. Anderson stresses the role of Chinese religion, folk beliefs, and cosmology as well as the central place of agriculture and “village aesthetics” in Chinese culture as contributing to China's sustainability, as well as the use of biological technology and an early development of a balanced crop roster. He argues that the Chinese food system was not developed in isolation but was in constant interaction with foods and foodways from various different regions, highlighting the connections with Central Asia via the Silk Roads, and later on the domestication of New World plants.

After a general introduction, the book is arranged chronologically, though, as Anderson explains, the cover of each period is not equal, and special emphasis is given to pre-imperial China, the formative age of the Chinese food system, and to the Mongol period (the thirteenth through the fourteenth centuries). Anderson draws on an impressive and up-to-date bibliography of Western studies, including many translations of primary sources and numerous archaeological studies. In each chapter, he begins with a general description of the political conditions, briefly refers to environmental issues, and then moves to food, often introducing at length the major food-related compositions of a certain period. The quotes from Chinese philosophers, poets, and various cookbooks add much to the book's charm. Anderson also stresses the relations between food, nutrition, and medicine, giving plenty of space to the medical uses of certain plants. The book ends in an overview and two appendices (“Conversation among China's Neighbors” and “Introduction to Central Asian Food”).

The book's most memorable parts are vivid anecdotes highlighted by Anderson's comments. This reviewer was taken by a Yuan story (referring to Song times), which depicted a meeting between a bizarre-looking dragon and the people of Kaifeng that ended with the Kaifeng people eating the dragon. As Anderson remarks, “Westerners would have fled in terror or collapsed praying. Nobody but the Chinese would have begun their acquaintance with such a creature by eating him” (p. 178). Other colorful details, humorous remarks, and insights from Anderson's work in other parts of the world pepper the book. The part dealing with the Yuan dynasty (pp. 182–243), described in the introduction as the center of the book, gives a highly positive evaluation of the period and then focuses mainly on two important compilations, the Huihui yaofang, a compilation of Western (i.e. Islamic) medical formulas written for the Chinese audience, and the Yinshan zhengyao, the Yuan imperial cookbook. The Huihui yaofang’s description, based on Kong's 1996 translation, demonstrates the movement of plants, medical knowledge, and skills between East and West in the Mongol period and shows that practical borrowings of medical knowledge (as opposed to theoretical ones) were common. The Yinshan zhengyao part mainly summarizes Paul D. Buell's and Anderson's work in the admirable A Soup for the Qan, stressing the impact of Mongol and Central Asian dishes on Yuan cuisine, though not on the ordinary Chinese diet.Footnote ¹ Yet even this detailed chapter fails to give a well-rounded description of food culture in China. This is mainly because the social aspect of food is hardly mentioned, and issues such as eating habits, cooking methods, restaurant culture, or food as identity are treated only en passant if at all. The reference to the environmental aspects is quite superficial, and some of the general assumptions (e.g., Ming imitating Yuan autocracy, p. 241) are rather questionable. This criticism applies even more to the less detailed chapters. In general, while Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China clarifies how the Chinese food system was shaped throughout the ages in terms of the origins of various plants and dishes, it often reads as a “state of the art” paper on Western studies of the Chinese food system, combined with specific issues that interest the author.

The book could have benefited from more meticulous editing; for example, The Journey to the West is a Ming novel, not a Qing one (p. 160); in the Ming’s North China there were more than seven million people (p.179); the number of Western and Southeast Asian plants in the Huihui yaofang is repeated three times with slightly different numbers (pp. 204, 208, 218); and typos and Wade-Giles transcriptions still creep in (e.g., pp. 203, 204). Yet, despite such reservations, this is a wide-ranging book packed with insights and information.