In a small, rural village called Moonshadow Pond (a pseudonym) in southeastern China, food interlinks the past and the present in the memories and practices of villagers. Food can still be seen as part of a gift economy but, at the same time, food has also penetrated into the heart of a highly commodified market economy. A few members of the older generations still vividly remember that they were paid in kind for their work as tenant farmers during the Republican era, while the younger generations prefer locally grown foodstuffs because of their concerns over food safety. Villagers describe what they ate during the collective era with “bitterness.” Yet this memory of “bitterness,” to some villagers, turns comparatively into “sweetness” when contrasted with the paradox of food choice during the current reform era, in which food abundance coexists with the high risk of food adulteration, if not poisoning.
As Ellen Oxfeld convincingly argues in Bitter and Sweet, food is indeed a good window through which we can grasp the multifaceted meanings and values that are both unique to the Hakka village of Moonshadow Pond and similar to those of other cultures in the contemporary world. Inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “habitus,” which denotes internalized dispositions and taken-for-granted practices in a given society, Oxfeld begins her exploration of the various food practices of the village—from production in the field to preparation in the kitchen and eventually to eating at the table—by continuously intersecting gender lines, social hierarchy, and the boundaries of commensality in terms of inclusion and exclusion.
What really makes the book outstanding is Oxfeld's thoughtful utilization of social and cultural theories. In so doing, she argues that the meanings and values glimpsed in the Moonshadow villagers’ everyday life are not by any means static. Rather, they are a consequence of historical changes, both long-term and short-term. While highly valuing Bourdieu's notion of “habitus” and other concepts developed by anthropologists—for example, Mary Douglas's analysis of food as an instrument for “social communication”—Oxfeld maintains a critical distance, since such concepts tend to downplay the dimension of historical transformations. For this, Oxfeld suggests the methodology used by the food anthropologist Sidney Mintz: incorporating history.
In multiple chapters, Oxfeld thoroughly examines the multidimensional characteristics of food. In chapter 2, food is a product of painstaking labor. Oxfeld illustrates that time-honored gender divisions and hierarchies still exist in the village; male members of the family cultivate grains in the field, while female members prepare meals inside the domestic space. And while rapid urbanization and commodification have brought about the demise of this gendered division of labor, they have also introduced a new kind of dichotomy of city versus countryside, one that manifests in a generational division. While the older generation still works in the rural village, the younger generation migrates to the city and abandons food production altogether, both cultivation and preparation.
Chapters 3 and 4 respectively explore memory and exchange, delving more deeply into the historical transformations that the villagers have experienced. Extremely radical and completely top-down policies during the Great Leap Forward period (1958–61) never succeeded in breaking family structures in which the aforementioned gendered hierarchy prevailed. Rather, Oxfeld argues that the collective era strengthened traditional family ties, because family intimacy was the only available social institution through which to ensure one's basic subsistence. Likewise, the reform era that brought about unprecedented material affluence to the village did not completely weaken the family as a basic unit of “trust,” either, because only the family could ensure food safety. Oxfeld goes on to point out that one has to pay attention to food's ambivalent position as a commodity whose exchange-value cannot completely replace its use-value, because food is—unlike other commodities—perishable. Simply stated, however much the technology of transportation and preservation has advanced, the long-distance trade of food cannot ensure freshness as much as local products can. In the highly globalized world of the twenty-first century, people—whether they live in a rural Chinese village or in the biggest cities in the world—still tend not to wholeheartedly trust foodstuffs of unknown provenance.
For this reason, as chapter 5 illuminates, food has always been at the heart of the moral system, because the mode of provisioning has changed alongside grand historical transformations, from a gift economy to a collectivized economy to a market economy. For example, extravagant banquets signify the local party cadre's corruption. Oxfeld's insightful account for this historical change resonates well with the last chapter, which explores the continuity of commensality and conviviality.
These days, food has captured the attention of many scholars across disciplinary boundaries, but this book is one of the finest contributions from the field of anthropology, a discipline that has long explored food as a primary research subject. For this reason, Bitter and Sweet will find a much wider readership across the disciplines as well.
