Which Chinese Food Should Make
Unesco’s Heritage List?
Chinese food– or at least some
portion of it – may be soon joining the likes of kimchi and Mediterranean food
on Unesco’s list of intangible cultural heritage items.
The Chinese Cuisine Association,
which tried to get Chinese cuisine on the list in 2011 when it proposed more
than 30 foods and food-preparation techniques, is making another go at getting
Chinese food on the organization’s list. But this time, they’re making a more
targeted recommendation.
“One thing is certain,” says Bian
Jiang, the association’s vice director. “We’re not going to get Chinese cuisine
in general listed.”
The association tried that tactic in
2011, he says. But the attempt didn’t even make it past Beijing’s Ministry of
Culture, which has to approve all Unesco bids.
So this year, the association is
putting together a panel of experts to narrow down the list.
“Chinese cuisine is so complicated
and complex that it’s hard for the Unesco officials to understand it as a
whole,” Mr. Bian says. “In the end, we will probably choose one specific food,
like dumplings, or a kind of cuisine technique,” such as pickling, he says.
The intangible cultural heritage
list is Unesco’s attempt to honor things like rituals and community-based
activities, intended especially for cultures that may not have Machu Piccus or
Parthenons. The intangibility, in turn, sometimes translates into something as
tangible as food and its preparation. In 2013, both Koreas’ kimjang – the
making and sharing of kimchi – and the Mediterranean diet made the list. The
Mediterranean diet, Unesco says, brings about moments “of social exchange and
communication, an affirmation and renewal of family, group, or community
identity,” which might be translated into drinking wine at three-hour lunches.
So which Chinese foods should make
the Unesco list? Opinions are nearly as diverse as Chinese cuisine itself.
Judith Farquhar, author of
“Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China,” says she’d go for
dumplings.
“They have a certain symbolic form,
they have an inside and outside, and include meat and grain, the two
fundamental divisions of food for Chinese cuisine,” she says. “Dumplings have a
social life – they’re made in groups and eaten in groups.”
Qu Hao, a Chinese chef who won the
China Golden Chef Award given by The Chinese Cuisine Association, recommends
braised sea cucumber with leeks because it “enjoys a long history,” he says.
“Many famous Chinese chefs have contributed to the development of this dish,
and it’s now widely known by Chinese people, even though it is a Shandong
specialty. “
Tim Sedo, a history professor at
Concordia University in Montreal who makes a YouTube cooking series with his
wife, has a different idea: Hangzhou food.
To make a long story short, a famous
Song dynasty hero named Yue Fei defended the country from northern invaders and
became a folk hero and a symbol of loyalty. The story goes that he died in a
Hangzhou prison – betrayed by his captors.
Hangzhou, in turn, “has a lot of
food that represents the people’s hatred for these people,” he says, such as
the fried bread, youtiao, which stands for “the frying of the two
characters” who betrayed Yue Fei, says Mr. Sedo.
Mindi Schneider, a professor at the
International Institute of Social Studies at the Hague in the Netherlands, goes
one step further in her idea, recommending indigenous Chinese pig breeding –
and the fatty pork that you get from it.
“China is the actual home of the
pig, which was domesticated there between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. And each
place has a local adapted pig breed. It’s really diverse. You really need to
preserve that indigenous livestock breed,” she says. Ms. Schneider published a
four-page proposal
for her idea.
No surprise that Shi Xiusong, chef
and general manager of Da Dong Roast Duck restaurant, recommends his
restaurant’s specialty dish as a
combination of inheritance and innovation with a storied history. Meanwhile, Shu Qiao, editor of the Chinese Epicure magazine
and an author of several books about food, recommends fermented tofu and
Shaoxing wine.
Unesco, for its part, has nothing to
say about this stage of the process. “We cannot speak about any specific
possible nomination,” writes Frank Proschan, the Paris-based chief of the
Programme Implementation Unit of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Section at
Unesco.
After the Chinese Cuisine
Association picks its top choice, it goes to the Ministry of Culture in March.
In June or July, the Ministry will make its application to Unesco, but the
results won’t appear until the following November, Mr. Bian says.
China has had luck with other
intangibles on the Unesco list: using the abacus for mathematical calculations
(2013), shadow puppetry (2011), acupuncture and moxibustion (2010) and block
printing (2009). Maybe someday dumplings or fatty pork will join the canon.
–Debra Bruno, with contributions
from Xuejian Zhang and Li Jie
