Chinese Food Futures with Fuchsia Dunlop, Lucas Sin, and Xiaowei R. Wang
Thursday, 21 April 2022, 7:30pm EDT
To register: https://emory.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KEh02AkuS_WYuD_I1K_pxA
Event website: https://chinesefoodfutures.com/
Tradition looms large when we talk about Chinese food and foodways. It gives us a sense of gravity—a kind of culinary mooring to people, places, and times beyond our immediate grasp. And given how rich and diverse local and regional Chinese food and practices are, tradition often serves to weave both the maker and the eater into a tapestry of past and present, intersecting and looping continuously as warp and weft.
But what of the futures of Chinese food and foodways? How might we re-imagine the culinary, technological, ecological, and inter-communicative possibilities of Chinese food and foodways? Drawing together the experiences of a chef, cookbook author, and artist/activist/coder, this round table conversation will explore how our present shapes Chinese food futures. This event has been sponsored by the NEH, Emory University Department of Russian and East Asian Languages & Cultures, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of History, and SOAS University of London Food Studies Centre.
Speakers
Fuchsia Dunlop is a cook and food writer specializing in Chinese cuisine. She trained as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine in the 1990s, and has been researching Chinese food and culinary culture for more than two decades. Fuchsia is the author of six books about Chinese cuisine, including the critically-acclaimed memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, and, most recently, The Food of Sichuan (which won the Fortnum and Mason Cookbook of the Year award in 2020). Fuchsia makes regular appearances on radio and TV as a Chinese food expert, featuring on shows such as Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, David Chang’s Ugly Delicious and the Chinese documentary series Once Upon a Bite (fengwei renjian). Her work has received numerous awards, including from the James Beard Foundation and the IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals).
Lucas Sin, Chef and Co-Founder of Nice Day and junzi kitchen, opened his first restaurant when he was 16 in an abandoned newspaper factory in his hometown of Hong Kong. Despite spending his Yale undergraduate years in the Cognitive Science and English departments, Lucas spent his weekends running restaurants out of his dorm, known as Y Pop-up. Prior to junzi kitchen and Nice Day, Lucas cooked at Modernist Cuisine in Seattle, Kikunoi Honten in Kyoto, and Michelin-starred kitchens in Hong Kong and New York. Lucas has been named a Star Chef Rising Star, an Eater Young Gun, Forbes 30 under 30, and a Food and Wine Best New Chef.
Beyond junzi and Nice Day’s daily menu, Lucas curates a collaborative tasting menu exploring the narrative of Chinese culinary history in relation to other cultures of the world, which became a project known as Distance Dining during the COVID-19 pandemic. With Eric Sze, chef of Taiwanese restaurant 886, Lucas co-founded SHY*BOYZCLUB, an introverted Asian pop-up collective.
Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer and coder. They are the author of the book Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside and one of the lead facilitators of Logic School, an organizing community for tech workers. Their collaborative project FLOAT Beijing created air quality-sensing kites to challenge censorship and was an Index Design Awards finalist. Other projects have been featured by the New York Times, BBC, CNN, VICE and elsewhere. Their most recent project, The Future of Memory, was a recipient of the Mozilla Creative Media Award.
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