(LI SHIGONG)

The Chinese understand food. We all need to eat; people share food to become intimate with others, and food represents comfort and nourishes our bodies. Westerners sometimes forget the medicinal value of food but Chinese people understand this well. They gratify themselves by eating but many of my Chinese friends also choose medicinal meals, either through traditional doctors, or via recipes, to focus on maintaining a balanced body.

At the same time, eating is a social activity. Chinese food is famous for being consumed in groups. In the past a lone foreigner sitting in a simple cafe may have found it hard to get a decent meal, as traditional Chinese cuisine was and is culturally designed to be eaten communally. Clearly, regarding food consumption in China, the production and ordering system is based upon serving the group, with banquets at the top of the list.

Chinese eateries come in many forms. The modest range includes small street vendors who have converted iron drums into ovens to bake sweet potatoes, or small stalls where deft cooks pull noodles and boil them in broth before the client's very eyes, or small, home style cafes, open to the street that specialize in a few regional specialties. In the early 1980s, some of these cafes started offering herbal medicine meals (yao shan). Some of these cafes cater to gender, while others resemble healthy vegetarian cafes that became faddish in the United States at the same time.

Chinese classify food and herbal medicines the same ways: sour (suan), bitter (ku), sweet (gan), pungent (xin), salty (xian), and clear (wu wei). Legend states that Shen Nong, the Chinese God of Agriculture, tasted 100 herbs and formulated the pharmaceutical basis for Chinese medicine, which addresses the imbalance in a physical body by considering where the body is deficient and where it is replete. The flavors symbolically express the role of drugs: different flavors have different functions and address different parts of the body.

Patients who eat traditional medicine equate their experiences of their bodies to their present imbalance.

Likewise, the ancient Chinese tradition of banqueting attempts to allow Chinese people to connect with each other in a positive and nourishing fashion. Being together—food as medicine and banqueting to establish social harmony—can create specific types of outcomes for participants. The patient, while eating, is empowering herself or himself; the host and guests, while eating, are collaborating together to create a harmonious memory. Food, like other sensory experiences, is not easily forgotten. We remember our grandmother's cooking, some remember a meal made by a lover; Chinese remember the joy of eating together at a banquet.

Today, official Chinese banquets are not as popular as they were in the past. One reason, as already stated, is that the venues to get food are varied in modern China: street food, cafes, and restaurants of all kinds and sizes are available. Banquets, however, remain time-tested ways for hosts in different official capacities to display their status by hosting a formalized meal. Banquets create occasions to negotiate and strengthen social connections among people who work together, either in the same unit or inside a larger work context. Banquets are, moreover, a space where formal rituals are enacted: the guest list, menu, and seating—are ritually scripted. Hosts always have political acumen, a strong stomach, and good intentions; their intent, like Chinese medicine, is to create balance. By sharing food and alcohol, the guests and the hosts expect to enjoy themselves together: The desired outcome is gan qing: a strong sense of affection among the people eating at a banquet together. By striving for the same harmonious aim, either for the individual body or for the collective body of feasters, banquets and traditional medicine generate positive results.

The author is an American living in Hohhot, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

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