Food in the Community

Food is important in each respective community that Cate and O’Donnell discuss.  In both cases what is eaten can say a lot about your status and character.  The judgement O’Donnell makes regarding how eating beef means one is slower witted than a fish eater, but also less sneaky and more trustworthy is an interesting observation that makes sense biologically thinking.  In jail, Cate considers how being able to afford spread can mean a variety of things from having or not having a girlfriend on the outside to being involved in drug dealing. Food in jail is used as a way to indicate autonomy from the institution.  Having the freedom to eat what is desired is taken away and instead inmates are served uniform meals out of bags.  

In both cases food is used to group people together.  In jail the spreads become a community affair; many people working together to get the ingredients and finally sharing something special once it is made.  In Shenzhen people are brought together over food by the success of the government. Food is a celebratory event of nothing more that the workings of community.  At the same time food is bringing people together it also adds an element of segregation.  In Shenzhen, old and new Shenzheners have different tastes from different hometowns and therefore will not bond in the same way over a meal.  In jail there were often racially segregated spread events.  As with everything, while it brings people together, all those that are not brought together end up excluded.

Food is a memory stimulator.  Cates’s article speaks of spread as an attempt at ‘real food’ from the outside.  Though the spreads would not live up to standards for most, trying to put special occasions and meals together is an exciting event in an otherwise dull existence.  Nostalgia for socialist meals in O’Donnell’s article depicts the opposite.  Chefs in Tianjin now have much more to work with and make meals with the same basis only better.  “The hometown food at Gathering enabled the classmates to imagine themselves as having grown up in a new and improved Tianjin”.  Food brings people to a better past or future than what is their reality.