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Katie CarlsonProfessor McKinney Food Geographies 9/24/14 In Ang Lee’s 1994 film “Eat Drink Man Woman,” an eminent but aging Taiwanese chef, Mr. Chu, and his three grown daughters, Jia-Jen, Jia-Chen, and Jia-Ning, navigate their love lives apart, but they always unite back at the dinner table to announce their plans. Over a relatively short period of time, the family of four expands to include at least four generations: two new husbands for the eldest and youngest daughters, a young wife and stepdaughter for Mr. Chu, and a vapid mother in law. By the end of the film, the Chus have all left the family home to expand and reintegrate into new neighborhoods (and possibly even a new country for the middle daughter). This not only makes for a dramatic story, but also mirrors the rapid globalization and urbanization of Taiwan: in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, not only this family, but also the culture as whole, must learn to adapt quickly. The film reveals how food production and consumption, in particular, reflects Taiwan’s challenge of accepting globalization while retaining its cultural identity. The Taiwanese in the film work on home-cooked dinners, elaborate restaurant fare, and fast-food meals, and each setting has its own power structures and methods of labor. These different scales of food preparation are interconnected, and each imparts a different societal meaning to each other in comparison. The first scene of the film gives us detailed insight into how Mr. Chu prepares a home-cooked meal. Using ancient Chinese cooking methods, he produces time and labor-intensive masterpieces, and he appears to acquire nearly all of his raw materials, and certainly all his meat, from his tiny backyard plot in the urban sprawl of Taipei! In another time and place, Mr. Chu’s artful, painstaking labor might have been seen as nothing special, but in this urban, globalized setting, its “inside meaning” has changed—a term coined by Sidney Mintz to mean the immediate and “specific associations” and emotions with a certain activity of daily life. Mr. Chu’s cooking is not just calories; it symbolizes years of stored memories and family history. Jai-Chen, in particular, loves to cook the way her father taught her because it reminds her of the good times that they used to have together. The recipes that she uses even serve as a sort of edible cultural history; as she explains to her friend at dinner, “This dish follows ancient philosophy, balancing energy, nature, and flavor.” This food has particularly powerful inside meaning to Jai-Chen in part because globalization and urbanization have made it so rare. In her meeting with her boss at an airline company, the high-powered business people discuss numbers, efficiency, and speed on a humongous scale, spanning many countries. The power of this institutionalized way of thinking, or as Mintz would call it, “outside meaning,” has permeated food labor as well. Jai-Ning works at a Westernized fast-food restaurant, just one dot on a global scale, where she produces food quickly and efficiently, focusing on numbers served, not artistry. Given this specific time and place, Mr. Chu’s slow and careful way of cooking—and by extension, Jai-Chen’s—signifies shared culture, national pride, and a special sort of love for the people who get to eat it. In contrast, the fast food at the restaurant where Jai-Ning works has a very different inside meaning to the throngs of customers that she serves. Perhaps they enjoy the novel, foreign nature of the food, or perhaps they are scrambling to emulate their “superiors,” the upper-middle class who have traveled to Western countries and adopted this way of eating. In any case, the first fast food scene provides an excellent example and critique of time-space compression all at once. In many ways, the fast-food restaurant is identical to every other one around the globe, making the world seem smaller and more homogenous (hence time-space compression; Jackson 2006). Some sociologists argue that this eliminates distinctive local flavor and creates a “placeless” world (Jackson 2006), but the one white man in the restaurant might disagree: he tries to give his sandwich back because he ordered chicken, yet Jai-Ning insists, “That is chicken.” As Massey might have put it, the larger scale institution, the fast-food chain, does not merely impose its will upon the smaller-scale place; rather, the two are interconnected, and their interaction changes both of their identities (Jackson 2006). This chicken is a slightly different fast food product, and the identity of the chain has changed slightly because of it. Of course, the presence of the restaurant in Taipei has changed the identity of its residents in much more dramatic ways, providing Jai-Ning with work, and its customers with more free time, for example. Distinctive Chinese culture (and by extension, Chinese cuisine) clearly still exists—it persists even in a fast food joint—but one cannot help but think that it might be on the way out. “People today don’t appreciate the exquisite art of cooking!” laments Mr. Chu, “Food from everywhere merges like rivers running into the sea. Everything tastes the same!” In the 1970s, agricultural scholar Wendell Berry had a similar bone to pick with large-scale American farming practices. Like the Kentucky farming of Berry’s youth, Mr. Chu’s home cooking is sustainable, based on local wisdom, high quality, and nearly self-sufficient. But again, this is not the norm, and as the Taiwanese people lose their personal connections to food and food labor, they lose their cultural health (Berry 1977). This is even apparent in the restaurant where Mr. Chu works. The chefs, food laborers themselves, are so unsure of where the food came from that they mistake imitation shark fin for the real thing. After the meal, they drop platters of fresh food into the rubbish, despite Mr. Chu’s request that they bring it home. This jibes with Berry’s theory that large-scale production only leads to more waste. As the old collides with the new, the Taiwanese people have definitely changed the way they make food, but the changes are not necessarily as top-down, large-over-smaller scale, as they might first appear. In the final scene of “Eat Drink Man Woman,” Jai-Chen cooks a meal for her father. She uses traditional Chinese cooking methods, but uses a Westernized kitchen, and tells her dad that he doesn’t need to take his shoes off, as is Chinese custom. Mr. Chu may be, as his worker once called him, a “national symbol” of a time gone by, and some, like Berry, might be tempted to say that Chinese culture is under assault, but the culture is a dynamic force that lives on in Jai-Chen, albeit with slightly Westernized elements. BIBLIOGRAPHY Berry, Wendell. "How We Grow Food Reflects Our Virtues and Vices (1977)." The Ethics of Food: A Reader for the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Gregory E. Pence. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Print.Jackson, Peter. "Thinking Geographically." Geography 91.3 (2006): 199-204. Web.Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. "Food and Its Relationship to Concepts of Power." Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the past. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Print.Yin Shi Nan Nu (Eat Drink Man Woman). Dir. Ang Lee. Zhong Yang Dian Ying Chu Pin Fa Xing, 1994. Amazon Prime.The large-scale power structures that she works with value efficiency and speed, and this mentality has led to fast food, mechanized food, and moving outside of the centralized family and out into disparate work places. Traditional Taiwanese cooking—both at home (either gender) and in the restaurant (just men)—Mr. Chu rules them all, and they say his art has been lost. But the art is not lost. A hopeful symbol at the end of a strong woman who pursues her passion for cooking, and still tells her dad to keep his shoes on when he enters the house. It all mixes. the characters learn to consume food in different places, in different spaces, a repository for culture, mixing the old and the new. This could not be clearer in the film than in the depiction of This could not be clearer than in the depiction of food Because food and food work runs throughout the film, Ang Lee most clearly articulates this concept through the use of food in this film. This could not be clearer than through the use of food and food workers in this film. All this expanding distance and complexity makes for more than just a dramatic story; the Chus provide a medium to show the diverse effects of urbanization and globalization in Taiwan. This in turn is shown by the food. The food retains the culture, morphs it, and reflects it as a mirror, providing endless meaning for the characters. Also how the food is made, the nature of the labor, and who can enter the kitchen shift throughout the movie. A blend of old and new. A critique of the challenges of globalization and urbanization to maintaining a strong, coherent culture, and how cultures are dynamic, ever-shifting forces, mirrored in their cuisine: what they are eating, and who is responsible for making it. The structure of the family is changing. Some elements have died, some have morphed along the way, and the women are working to mix the traditional with the modern. They expand outward from the family unit, but work hard to not leave that base. The outside world has changed the family, but the family is also interacting and helping to shape the outside world. Throughout the film, the style, preparation and cultural meanings around food serve as a useful metaphor for this change, and are a vehicle to express the complex nature of globalization and urbanization. The food, as a reflection of the culture, changes directly in proportion to the cultural changes. One of the most notable changes is not only in the food itself, but in ideas about who can prepare the food, and in what spaces that food preparation can take place. The cultural meaning of the food shifts. ................
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