[Jack Goody. *Food and Love. A Cultural History of East and West*.p265-71.Verso.1998]
The advent of Chinese restaurants to Europe came at a time when the canteen culture of the wartime period was disappearing. In a sense this had ,been a highly socialised form of feeding, carried out collectively whether in the army, in the factory or in communal restaurants (called British restaurants) which showed the restrictions of the limited restaurant culture, with its supplies being rationed and its prices being controlled. That system was highly egalitarian and began to disappear, under pressure of economic growth, expanded supplies, consumer choice and - it has to be said - boredom with uniformity, with egalitarianism.
That wartime post-war system broke down to the advantage of the Chinese and other foreign (or exotic) restaurants, and it broke down at the time when such an egalitarian cooking was making its mark in China itself for specifically ideological reasons, although that factor was also present in wartime Britain, as witness the election of a Labour government in I946 the continuation of rationing as a way not only of sharing scarcity but of avoiding inequalities. The same happened with clothing, furniture, schooling and other consumer items.
The globalisation of Chinese food is part of the globalisation of world cultures, the culture of the global village. In capitals of impoverished African countries such as Ghana the smarter restaurants are often Chinese (more often in anglophone than francophone countries, although in these the south-east Asian eating places are of equal importance). But there are two aspects of this process of globalisation that proceed concurrently. The first is homogenisation, whereby bread for example comes to play a dominant role in cultures throughout the world; or McDonaldisation whereby one product (previously Coca-Cola) comes to dominate world markets in fast foods or non-alcoholic drinks. Frequently these items are American because of the very significant contribution of that country to the industrialisation of food in the later nineteenth century, for example in the processes of canning food, invented by the French at the time of the Napoleonic Wars but later developed in England and the US, giving to the world Heinz cans, orange drinks and breakfast cereals. In this context the world is following the trend of industrialisation into monocultural paths where it has no real need to tread.
The parallel process is one of global differentiation rather than global homogenisation, which consists of the adoption (or the spread) of local products, in this case forms of cooking, around the world, leading to multiculturalism. It is not simply Chinese food but Indian, Italian and not least French which have become international, first in the restaurant, later in the supermarket and home. French cuisine became the basis of a homogenised international bourgeois mode of consumption, employed in major hotels throughout the world. The Asian cuisines were part of the later process of multicultural globalisation, though their advent had a marginal effect cornpared to the homogenisation of cultures related to mass production and the mass media. However, that is the story of Chinese cooking and Chinese restaurants, enriching industrial cultures by giving them a global dirnension. This enrichment has happened with cooking, especially restaurant food, since the end of the Second World War. London is now reported to be one of the best centres for restaurants in the world, but the food very rarely has anything to do with local tradition; it is world food. In suburbs of the capital one can cat Pekin cuisine, vegetarian Gujerati cooking, Russian,Persian, Balkan, Turkish and many other dishes within a very limited area.
The process of globalisation has been a gradual one. it's a western conceit or prejudice to view that process, like the establishment of a world system or modernisation or even capitalism in the broad sense (that is, not confined to industrial capitalism as an adjunct of Western domination. These processes began long before and they were given a boost by European activity from the sixteenth century. But at that time Indian and Chinese consumer goods (printed cottons in the first case, coloured silks and porcelain in the second) overwhelmed Western markets, changed the nature of domestic tastes in radical ways, and opened the path to the industrial production of these self-same manufactured items that had been imported from the East and now became among the major exports of the West (at least cottons), resurrecting an earlier pattern of Roman exports of pottery and glass in India and East Asia. All those movements of goods, and with them their ideas and identities, gave rise to a measure of globalisation. But that was not always a homogenising process, like the universalisation of Coca-Cola and the hamburger, of the sandwich and the whisky, of pizza and campari, but onethat also added to difference, to what it is fashionable to call cultural diversity, of cultural enrichment.
While food in general has become globalised, that process has happened selectively. There has been no effective globalisation of African food, even in the form, culturally prestigious in some circles, of 'soul food'. The reasons are not hard to seek. There was little hierarchically differentiated cuisine in Africa for reasons I have elsewhere tried to explain (Goody 1982) and that are connected with the nature of land tenure and the lack of extensive socioeconomic stratification. Consequently there was no haute cuisine, no differentiated food, no higher cooking as distinct from a lower one. And for other cultures it is mostly the higher rather than the lower elements of cooking that got translated into restaurant, or at least into hotel cooking. One does find some lower elements, in America the hamburger and other fast foods, in England fish and chips, in China tofu as a take-away, in other areas services to market traders. But not for 'dining-out'foods. In any case, African food plays little part in either - restaurants serving such food being rare exotica - with of course the exception of Ethiopia, which has provided restaurants worldwide. But from this standpoint Ethiopia is not an African country but a Near Eastern, a Eurasian one, with plough agriculture, similiar forms of stratification and a hierarchical cuisine that with its spicy foods,bread and stew (i ' ra and wat), attracts not only an internal but an international clientele.
Was Italian spaghetti or pasta an earlier example of the globalisation of food? The Romans did not know this dish, and it has been fancifully proposed that it was introduced from China by Marco Polo, much as silk worms were brought back from the East by monks into Byzantium to inaugurate the Western silk industry. But that seems to have been a myth of the same order as the claim that French cuisine owed its origin to the marriage of the Florentine Catherine de' Medici to the future King of France. More acceptable perhaps is the suggestion that both cultures derived such products from the countries of central Asia.
Of course, this kind of cultural differentiation occurs only minimally with the more technological facets of culture; nuclear power stations, automobiles, electronic equipment vary relatively little wherever they are manufactured, and their production follows major industrial trends. On the other hand, the popular music of the world's youth no longer consists only of Western originals or imitations, though there is plenty of this. In addition there is the cult of 'world music', which incorporates wider traditions from other cultures. But food represents the major cultural dimension involved in this process of multicultural globalisation by means of differentiation. Like music it is not affected by language which inhibits communication outside the group. And while it has its particular technological requirements, in the shape of the instruments of cooking (the frying pan and the wok), these differences are relatively small and easily overcome.
The spread of Chinese food affected a wider field than culinary practice alone; it also involved a migration of personnel. The life of these immigrants required a minimal adjustment to the host culture. The hero of Mo's novel, Chen, worked long hours in a Chinese restaurant, spent his leisure in a Chinese cinema, played Chinese games, mixed with his fellow countrymen. His wife patronised emporiums in Chinese Street in Central London, ate frugally and saved to establish their own business, if only she could persuade her husband to break away. She remained attached to Cantonese customs throughout.
Sweet after salty was dangerous for her system, so she had been taught; it could upset the whole balance of the dualistic or female and male principles, yin and yang ... For four years, therefore, Chen had been going to bed tortured with the last extremities of thirst but with his dualistic male and female principles in harmony.
(MO I982:2)
As Watson pointed out in his survey, many immigrants never learn English, except for the waiters who have to communicate with the customers: 'Most of the Mans seldom venture beyond the security of either the restaurants or the recreation centers where Cantonese is spoken' (Watson 1975: I25)- Indeed, most hope to return to Hong Kong when they have accumulated enough money. Until the 1970s that was the case: they remained abroad for some twenty years. During that time they supplied the village from which they came, San Tin, with remittances; this was essential, since 8 5 to 95 per cent of the able-bodied men were employed in Chinese restaurants in Britain and other parts of western Europe, leaving behind only women, children and old men (Watson I975: 2). Even when families went abroad, the children were sent back to receive part of their education in their 'native place' which, rather than finding itself in the forefront of modernisation, was turned into a highly traditional settlement, a kind of thatched cottage village to which the traveller, the sojourner, could return in his later years.
Only Chinese prepared Chinese food professionally; only they ran the restaurants, only they were employed. Such restaurants needed immigrants, but they also encouraged the importation of Chinese furniture andornaments, as well as of Chinese ingredients, for the restaurants. They greatly expanded the spread of Chinese artefacts, personnel and culture generally. In some larger towns both restaurants and the auxiliary services tended to cluster into segregated areas, into China towns which were socio-cultural foci for the Chinese community. As such they encouraged other, more notorious, aspects of Chinese life, brought out by Timothy Mo in Sour Sweet (we have to rely on fiction as it is not a topic into which the social sciences can delve with ease).
The Chinese are inveterate gamblers, in ways that are likely to be controlled or condemned by the host society and its 'official bandits'. In London Chinese gambling dens were unofficial but flourished as they only catered for the Chinese community and were largely overlooked. Some Chinese have also long been users and distributors of drugs, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were encouraged by the British and other merchants (especially by jardine-Matheson and the Sassoons) in the form of opium imported from India, against the wishes of the Chinese government. Now the situation is reversed. Such illegal activities encourage the presence of parasitic elem-ents) of protection rackets operated by gangs such as Triads that have their own tight Organisation, their internal loyalties, their use of the threat and actuality of violence. In New York one sees branch offices of such groups openly indicated, some of whom are involved in illegal migration and illegal imports as well as illegal 'protection'. At the same time they perform less dubious services for the Chinese community, loaning money (at interest) and maintaining relations with kin back home, who, as we have seen, are often in receipt of assistance from funds repatriated by the workers abroad. They may also help to maintain a specific Chinese identity overseas, since that is what their livelihood depends upon. The dependence of Chinese workers on Chinese employers (and vice versa), on Chinese food, on a ghetto environment, on Chinese protectors, on Chinese films, videos and newspapers, makes for a relatively closed community without many integrationist ambitions or prospects
The underworld associated with Chinese restaurant culture abroad is not peculiar to the overseas Chinese. In his account of Suzhou in the lower Yangtze delta in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, McDermott sees the underworld as an intrinsic part of commercial culture. Its members organised the Duanwu festival and its myriad activities, using their toughs to maintain order in what even in ordinary times was not only a centre of high gentry culture but also a violent city. The gangsters (wu-lat) mainly belonged to China's 'bachelor subculture' and were organised in relatively tight-knit groups under the leadership of one man.
They were dependent as ever on running protection rackets as well as
controlling transactions in a variety of spheres, giving rise to full-time secret societies in the eighteenth century. Their role in the Duanwu constituted a public affirmation of their power and influence.
The export of Chinese cooking has added a multicultural element to the process of globalisation which does something to offset the homogenisation of world cultures brought about by the mass production of industrialised foods. Since it has to be carried out by Chinese personnel, that has led to the emigration (largely of males) as well as to the export of Chinese material culture and the gambling, drugs and protection rackets that accompany the establishment of an overseas community of this kind. That community remains very insulated from the host cultures (thinking their own much superior), with the immigrants aiming to return to theirnative place rather than settle abroad. They have little contact with the host cultures but maintain close ties with the home communities, sending remittances for personal and public purposes, making frequent visits and ill many cases eventually returning home to villages which have been rebuilt with repatriated funds in a very traditional manner. Nevertheless the effects on the host communities have been considerable, especially in the culinary sphere, where Chinese dishes play a significant part in consumption not only in restaurants but in take-aways, in prepared dishes fromsupermarkets and increasingly in the repertoire of the foreigners themselves, stimulated by the countless cookbooks that have now made their appearance.