Abstract

This article explores how Chinese people represent and refashion their identities as their society undergoes vast transformations through a specific lens: how they produce and consume food nostalgia in Hangzhou. “Food nostalgia” refers to the recollection, representation, and reinvention of culinary traditions by both food service professionals and intellectuals. It also involves consumer behaviors with regard to local culinary traditions offered up for consumption through various venues.
Food nostalgia in contemporary China aids the identity formation of the middle class at a time when the “culture” of this new social stratum remains unsettled. Consuming “authentic” local cuisines can produce socio-cultural distinction in multiple ways. It signals historical knowledge and cultural expertise. It marks social status in terms of individual membership within a culturally prominent social group, whether that of the affluent middle class or that of one’s hometown, in cases where the local cuisine can rank among nationally and internationally recognized cultural heritage items. The traditional and artisanal aspects of food can further act as an antidote to the increasingly banal presentations of Western and Chinese cuisines, and distinguish the consumer from the “uneducated” newly rich.
I first discuss the fraught relationship between food consumption and middle-class formation in contemporary China. I then illustrate shifts in Hangzhou culinary traditions from premodern society to twentieth-century China. Next, I describe fieldwork findings collected from several Hangzhou restaurants. I conclude by examining how food nostalgia reveals and shapes identities in the contemporary Jiangnan region.