British food writer Fuchsia Dunlop: understanding China and the Chinese through food

She started her first notebook in September 1994. She now has more than 130 of them — the record of her attempt to understand China and the Chinese through food.

On the afternoon of October 14, 2018, at an event in Beijing, the documentary director Chen Xiaoqing played a short clip.

In it, inside a noisy food market, a foreigner with brown hair and blue eyes stares wide-eyed at a stall's bright red chilies. In fluent Sichuanese, she asks: "Zhe shi sazi haijiao? You mei de erjingtiao?" (What kind of chili is this? Do you have any erjingtiao?)

The foreigner is Fuchsia Dunlop, a British food writer who has studied Chinese cooking and food culture for more than 20 years. She has published five books on the subject and writes for the Financial Times, The New Yorker and others. Her work has won her the James Beard Awards — often called the Oscars of the food world — four times.

Chen Xiaoqing said of her: "She has a deep grounding in journalistic writing, and she also knows the essence of Chinese cooking inside out. I've read many books foreigners have written about Chinese food, and this one [Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper] is without doubt the liveliest, the most engaging and the most precise. More important, beneath the surface descriptions of flavor, readers can come to understand China deeply... Her writing is vivid and fun without ever being loose, and it has taught those of us who study food here at home a great deal."

Fuchsia's story with China begins in the 1990s.

In 1992, not long after graduating from Cambridge, she "took a job as an assistant editor covering Asia-Pacific news." After "a few months of reading news and material about China," she "decided to go and see it" for herself.

It was "an eye-opening voyage of discovery." "That country was so full of life and so chaotic, nothing like the drab, rigid 'totalitarian state' I had pictured. I never came across the imagined crowds in identical Mao suits waving little red books. Through the train window I saw one vivid scene after another: paddy fields, fish ponds, farmers working hard, water buffalo plodding steadily through the fields... Almost everything I saw enchanted me. Back in London I signed up for evening classes in Mandarin and began writing a quarterly roundup of Chinese news for China Now magazine. I even started trying out Chinese recipes, working from Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook. This fascination with China would go on to shape the rest of my life; at the time it had only just begun," Fuchsia recalled.

In 1994 she won a British Council scholarship and went to Sichuan University to study, planning to research China's ethnic minorities. Compared with Beijing or Shanghai, "in a city like Chengdu, forget about carrying out a plan — it was impossible even to make one." Like most of her classmates, Fuchsia gave up on academic work and "simply stayed in Sichuan," letting the place "guide her naturally." In Chengdu she set her own nature loose, and it brought her the best stroke of luck of her life.

"I'd loved cooking since I was a child. By eleven I already meant to become a great chef. But then I went through a standard education, and on that conveyor belt I drifted further and further from the world of food. Only in China, thousands of miles from home and cut off almost entirely from my past, was I finally able to do what I really wanted to do. At last I could admit it to myself: I was never going to be a socioeconomic analyst, or even a real journalist. I was a cook. Only in a kitchen, chopping vegetables, kneading dough or seasoning a soup, did I feel like my whole self," Fuchsia wrote in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.

That was the start of a culinary journey in China that has now run more than 20 years. She ate, almost without hesitating, whatever Chinese people set in front of her: fire-exploded kidney flowers, pig's brains, rabbit heads, fish-fragrant eggplant, twice-cooked pork. She also took three months of professional chef training at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, becoming its first foreign student.

In 2001 she published her first book, Sichuan Cookery.

Beyond Sichuan, she has traveled to Hunan, Gansu, Fujian, Jiangsu and elsewhere, chasing the flavors of China's regional cooking and writing down recipes and the stories of the people she met. She started her first notebook in September 1994; she now has more than 130 of them — the record of her attempt to understand China and the Chinese through food.

Four of her five books are essentially cookbooks: Sichuan Cookery, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province, Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking and Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes from the Culinary Heart of China. The fifth, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, is literary — her memoir of Chinese food.

In July 2018, ten years after it came out in Britain, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper was published in Chinese. The slim book quickly became a bestseller; it has been reprinted three times since, for a total print run of 50,000 copies. Reading it, you feel the nerve it takes for a foreigner to eat her way across China — though at times that nerve is worked a little too hard. Brains and offal turn up more often than they need to, when in fact the everyday Chinese table does not revolve around them.

On October 13 we met Fuchsia in the café of a Beijing hotel. On this trip to China, she said, she had brought along a cleaver she has used for maybe ten years. She owns many Chinese knives; this is a smaller one she travels with. "Because if I'm cooking, not having a good knife makes me uncomfortable. I didn't know whether I'd need a knife on this book tour. In Shanghai, for instance, I stayed two nights with an Italian friend. They asked me to cook, and their knife wasn't as good as mine — [so the one I brought came in handy]."

In a single month she had filled another notebook and started the next. "Because I went to Yunnan, and I came across a lot of new, interesting things. I ate some really good cured meat, and some mushrooms. Green-cap mushroom soup, for instance, especially delicious; the best was porcini stir-fried with dried chilies, delicious beyond belief," she said. Worth noting: as she said "especially delicious" and "delicious beyond belief," she leaned forward slightly and dropped her voice, as though letting us in on a secret.

On the day of the interview she also went into the hotel kitchen and wrote down in her notebook a recipe that had caught her interest at lunch. Any dish she is curious about, she never lets slip past. That is professionalism, and it is also instinct.

Q = QDaily

Fuchsia = Fuchsia Dunlop

To understand a place and its people through food, what matters most is talking to locals

Q: The story in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper spans nearly 20 years, and over that time you went from an ordinary student to a well-known food writer. That change in status changed how the people and circles you met treated you, and changed what you demanded of yourself, which in turn changed how you explored food and how you wrote about it. I feel, for instance, that the earlier chapters on Sichuan and Hunan food are better written than the later ones on eating crab around Yangcheng Lake and on Yangzhou. So how do you see the effect of that change on the way you explore and write about food?

Fuchsia: I think a lot of very influential chefs and people in the food world were good to me very early on. I was a foreign student with no standing, and [they] were still willing to talk to me and answer my questions. That has been true the whole way through.

The best period, I think, was my early time in Chengdu. I had a lot of time then, and life moved slowly — for days, weeks, months on end I rode my bicycle every day, getting to know Chengdu slowly, discovering things. The pace was slow. That is how you really come to enjoy a place, and friendships built up over many years are worth a lot.

What the later years gave me is that I already had the basic knowledge and the cooking technique. Because the foundation was there, I can learn a lot very fast when I go somewhere new. But sometimes there is less time. In Yangzhou, for example, I hadn't lived there for six years, I didn't have that kind of relationship with the place, so of course the experience was different. Sichuan is my old home in China; it feels like a second hometown.

Q: So you think the main problem is time?

Fuchsia: Yes. The first time I got to Chengdu everything was new, so I was very excited. I researched Chengdu for six years before I published Sichuan Cookery; I had known Chengdu for more than ten years before Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. The first part of the book is all set in Chengdu; the second part goes to many places and tells China from many different angles — but it doesn't have that same intimate feeling.

Q: Sometimes the shortage of time kept you from knowing a place more deeply, so it feels a bit like skimming the surface.

Fuchsia: Possibly. But by then I already had a general grasp of Chinese food — [it just needed to be] a bit richer. Now, whether I go somewhere new or try a new dish, I look at it comparatively. I have a lot of [reference points] — [for instance] you can work out where it comes from, how it relates to the flavors of other places...

Q: A lot of standards and points of comparison come into it.

Fuchsia: Right.

Q: Many food writers say they aren't only writing about food, they're writing about a country and its people; food is a window. Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper can be read that way too. I'm curious whether you've learned anything about using food to understand an unfamiliar place and its people.

Fuchsia: I think it's like that everywhere. Food is probably the most basic culture in any society; it's everywhere, and we all have to eat. But in China I think it matters more, so the window is more interesting here. Because from its earliest history China has understood food deeply and taken it seriously. China is also unusual: its food culture is bound up with history, religion, politics, literature and more, more closely than in most other places.

[The most important way to understand it is] to talk to local people.

In China I don't only talk to top chefs; I talk regularly to taxi drivers and street-food sellers. My notebooks hold a lot of [material from ordinary people], especially from Sichuan taxi drivers. I often say, let's have a chat. They ask what I'm doing here. I say I research Chinese food. Recently one driver told me he cooks well, that he makes excellent suan cai yu [fish with pickled greens], and he gave me every detail, and I wrote it all down.

Plenty of people I happen to meet give me a lead. They'll say there's something good to eat in such-and-such a place.

I took the train to Langzhong recently. On the train I talked to the woman next to me. She was a master of lu cai [braised and marinated dishes], so she gave me some tips on making it — the ratio of rock sugar to white sugar, for instance. Very interesting.

Q: You meet all kinds of local people. If you're curious about what someone eats, do you always talk to them?

Fuchsia: Yes. The more talk and the more material, the better. Take a single dish: there is never only one way to make it, one opinion. I talk to a lot of people about that dish before I can see its core, the [elements] that matter most. Only then can I decide how I want to master it, how I want to cook it.

I also think it's worth reading books, cooking references.

There's one more thing, and I think it's an important point for a foreigner researching Chinese food in China. A lot of local people object a bit when I order local dishes. At lunch just now I wanted to order cabbage stir-fried with shrimp paste. They said Westerners can't eat that — they genuinely didn't believe I could like it. Many of the dishes locals recommend are the ones they know Westerners like; they resist ordering anything that strikes them as strange to a foreigner. So I have to say: I want to eat this! Don't [treat] me as a foreigner!

That, for a foreigner, is what matters most. I have to make the people I'm with truly understand that I don't want to be treated as a foreigner. I want to eat what they like to eat, without it being softened, without them trying to suit a foreign palate. If you eat spicy, I'll eat spicy. If you eat stinky, I'll eat stinky. It's a challenge. Sometimes I lead groups of foreign food lovers around China, and I run into this all the time — I go to order and they object strongly. Even though I speak reasonably fluent Chinese and can put together a decent menu, they still say no.

Q: Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper mentions your second book, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province. That book sets out to weave recipes together with the story of China's revolution, looking at how the political upheavals of the 20th century shaped Chinese food. I find the subject fascinating. Beyond what's in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, can you tell us more of what's interesting in the Hunan book?

Fuchsia: While I was researching it I kept hearing Chinese people tell me their own histories — what we ate back then, that sort of thing. So I think in every society, every country, food reflects the society of the time. China went through such enormous change in the 20th century: first a dynasty, then a republic, then a revolution, then a lot of restaurants nationalized, then the Cultural Revolution, and finally reform and opening up. Every stretch of that history connects to what people were eating. That's very interesting.

It isn't necessarily the same everywhere, but China changed so much in such a short time that [in some places] it shows more clearly. The book includes some famous dishes of the Republican era; it includes the red-braised pork Chairman Mao loved, which he first came to like in Shaoshan; and it includes old dishes that had to be renamed during the Cultural Revolution — Sichuan's gong bao chicken, for one. Ding Baozhen was an official under the imperial dynasty, and his honorary title was "Gongbao." Because that name belonged to an official of the "old society," during the Cultural Revolution the dish was renamed "scorched-chili chicken cubes" or "chili chicken cubes." Fascinating.

Q: Beyond what's in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, do you have other memorable stories of coming to know a place and its people through food?

Fuchsia: I take notes all the time, and I want to write another book eventually, but I haven't worked out how to write it.

I've been to Shaoxing several times, and I love their stinky fermented foods — mei gan cai [dried preserved mustard greens] and mei qian zhang [fermented bean-curd sheets]. Very stinky, a strange flavor. But I've always thought their stinky ferments have something in common with our stinky cheeses. Once I brought some very pungent cheese from England in a box, took it to Shaoxing's most famous traditional restaurant, the Xianheng, and invited their manager, head chef, cooks and waiters to taste our cheese with me and compare it with their ferments. It was fascinating.

I thought the two had a lot in common; the locals disagreed. They found the cheese cloying — one bite and it affects everything you eat afterward. You have a greasy layer of cream coating your mouth. They said it had a muttony smell, a bitterness, a sourness. The British, Europeans, Westerners have no such concept of a muttony, off or fishy smell, so this is a very particular Chinese view.

It made a deep impression on me. In Western countries you often hear people say, I went traveling in China and the Chinese eat such strange things — photographs from the Wangfujing night market in Beijing of people eating scorpions, dog meat. Westerners have always thought Chinese food was strange, [and it never occurred to them] that Chinese people would find some Western food just as unexpected and just as strange, and say that cheese stinks. A lot of Westerners were shocked. They had never imagined it, and certainly had never heard a Chinese person who had never eaten dairy give an objective verdict on their dairy. So I wrote an article about it, which had quite an impact abroad and won an award in the United States.

You think what you eat is normal. From another angle, what you eat is not normal at all — it's pretty strange too.

If we had to declare a winner, the West would probably take gold only in desserts — every other gold medal goes to Chinese food

Q: Alongside your exploration of the outside world, the other thread in Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper is the exploration of your own inner world, especially your struggle over cultural belonging and identity. It's now ten years since the book first came out. How do you see your cultural belonging and identity today? Or: after all these years of exploring and writing about food, how has your understanding of yourself changed?

Fuchsia: My palate has become more Chinese. I like Chinese food much more than Western food, and Chinese food is still what I'm most comfortable eating. So that's one change — I've grown more and more used to it.

I've also become more and more interested in Chinese medicinal cooking, and it has affected me. I'm older now, and I should pay more attention to eating for health. So I keep learning from China how to adjust my diet to nourish my body.

Q: Medicine is not as good as food for nourishing the body — is that part of why it feels comfortable to you?

Fuchsia: Yes, yes, yes, that's part of it. And I feel more and more that, from a food point of view especially, I'm really not a normal Englishwoman. Because when it comes to food, my thinking is now shaped more by China than by where I came from.

Q: A few days ago, at an event in Chengdu, you said: "If we had to declare a winner, the West would probably take gold only in desserts — every other gold medal goes to Chinese food." In what sense did you mean it?

Fuchsia: Ha ha ha ha ha! Let me start with why Western desserts can [take gold]. To me, Chinese cooking has two weak points. One is that dairy never developed in China; there is very little of it. Yunnan has two cheeses, rushan and rubing, some ethnic minorities have dairy products, and there's Beijing yogurt, but [it isn't] abundant. We Europeans have a rich dairy tradition, which is a great advantage for making desserts, because cream and butter are so fragrant, so savory, so satisfying. We have lard for pastry too, but we also have butter, so it's richer. And we've had chocolate for a long time, while China only discovered chocolate in the last few years. All of that helps with desserts.

As for the rest, I think it's because Chinese people are so particular about eating. You put great weight on "texture," for instance, and that is a whole other dimension. Once you start thinking about texture, your understanding of food is already richer. So Chinese cooks are exacting: to stir-fry a dish of shrimp balls, how you add starch, water and egg to hold the texture, and then keep the oil from getting too hot so the shrimp stay tender and slippery — if the oil is hot you can make them crisp instead. Chinese people are very sensitive to all of this. Westerners' taste for texture is narrow. I've eaten Western food with Chinese people. They analyze it too, very particular, very able to describe a dish's character, its texture, its mouthfeel. I think they understand it far better than Westerners do.

And I think the greatest strength of Chinese cooking is medicinal food. I always want to be fair — I respect you, you respect me, that's the kind of exchange this should be. But I do think Chinese food culture is genuinely superior in one respect, and that is that your cooking and your medicinal cooking can't be separated. From the earliest Chinese history, your diet has been the foundation of health — [as the sayings go], medicine is not as good as food for nourishing the body; medicine and food share the same source.

Westerners have plenty of delicious things to eat. But if you eat nothing but the delicious things in Western food, your body probably won't feel very good. In China you can eat the most refined, the best-tasting food and still pay close attention to your health. That's a real strength of Chinese food culture, its best side. Pleasure and health are joined, not in conflict.

Q: Harmony.

Fuchsia: Yes! Thank you!

Q: On health — people often tell me to eat less oily, spicy Sichuan food and eat healthier food instead. I'm curious how you think about eating healthily. What actually counts as eating healthily?

Fuchsia: When people today say don't eat too much Sichuan food because it's high in oil and chili, that's a beginner's understanding of Sichuan cooking. Sichuan food isn't only numbing spice and oil; Sichuan people eat plenty of leafy greens, stir-fried dishes, boiled dishes, steamed dishes, clear soups. So if you eat Sichuan food in a balanced way [laughs], [that's very healthy]. A mapo tofu, plus a plate of stir-fried lettuce tips, a pickled-greens and vermicelli soup and a bowl of white rice — that's very healthy.

What upsets me most is that a lot of Chinese people now tell me Western nutritional science is very scientific, very advanced. That's rubbish. Traditional Chinese nutritional thinking isn't science in that sense, and science has trouble getting hold of the whole, the holistic picture. Western scientists often say, we ran an analysis and found that if you drink a glass of red wine every day it has this effect on you. Good or bad? They keep changing their minds. There's not much point to it; Westerners don't know how to eat. In China you can't be that specific, eat exactly this every day.

On the whole I think you [Chinese people] understand how to eat nutritiously. That's actually more useful than science. It's harder to get hold of, I think, because it's complicated — it's a whole.

Q: So the key to eating healthily is eating in a balanced way?

Fuchsia: Right. And you should learn from your mothers and grandmothers. Eat more vegetables, more whole grains, more clear soups, don't make everything spicy. Your elders understand all this. It's young people who want shuizhuyu [fish poached in chili oil] and bobo chicken. I really hope young Chinese will learn from the generation above them and carry on this fine tradition of eating for health.

Q: But a lot of young people are heavily shaped by food delivery now, and don't cook — their whole way of eating has changed.

Fuchsia: Right. These days I cook better than many of my Chinese friends.

Q: You once said: "Texture is the last line Westerners hold when they're learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it and you're really in." The other way round, if Chinese people want to understand Western food, is there anything you think matters?

Fuchsia: Not really. For the older generation of Chinese, dairy is certainly an obstacle. But look at younger Chinese, they're much more willing to eat those things. Many young people drink milk and eat simpler cheeses, the cheese on a pizza, say.

[So] for Chinese people eating Western food, all it takes is opening their minds, dropping any prejudice and trying it objectively.

A revolution is under way in the Chinese food market in the West

Q: Your first book was Sichuan Cookery. The original proposal was turned down by six publishers, and only after you rewrote it a year later did you get a contract. I'm curious why those six turned you down, and how you finally persuaded a seventh to publish. What happened?

Fuchsia: OK, this is really quite funny.

Around 1997 I wrote to all six publishers, and they all wrote back. They said, sorry, we think Western readers would find one province of China too specialized a subject. I wrote back and told them Sichuan is about the size of France. But they saw Chinese food as a single cuisine — a rather dismissive view. They thought British readers at the time might be interested in the food of one small Italian region, but for a cuisine as great as China's they thought it was too small, too specialized.

A year later three things went my way. First, I spent two months writing a very good proposal. I made it beautiful: good paper, a cover with Chinese paper-cuts, a Chinese feel; it looked good, felt good in the hand, and the content was good. And then a very lucky coincidence. I knew someone who had a friend at Penguin. That friend published military history books. But my friend said his friend would be willing to read my proposal and give me feedback. He read it, thought it was rather good, and passed it to a friend at Penguin, [but] that friend thought it wasn't a fit. Then he ran into someone from another Penguin department in the lift. He said, I got this, do you want to look at it? And handed it over. That person was a chef. One Penguin division had hired him as a consultant, wanting to build up their cookbook list. He read it, found it interesting and well written, and got them to publish my first book.

After it came out it got very good reviews and won a prize. Then an American publisher bought it the following year and it did very well in the United States too, so I hope all six of those publishers are full of regret [laughs].

Q: Related to that: the English edition of Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper came out in 2008. Compared with ten years ago, how do British people see Chinese food now? Has anything changed? I've seen you say a revolution is under way in the Chinese food market in the West.

Fuchsia: When the book came out in Britain, we basically only had Cantonese restaurants, and most of it was fairly anglicized Cantonese food. The base was Cantonese, altered to suit British tastes. So when British people thought of Chinese food, they thought of sweet and sour pork, egg fried rice, fried spring rolls, that sort of thing.

But then Britain got many more Chinese people, students especially. After China opened up, a lot of Chinese came to Britain. They weren't the earlier wave of immigrants from Hong Kong — a different cultural background, a different geographic background. And Sichuan food was very popular on the mainland at the time, so the Chinese arriving in Britain wanted Sichuan food. At first there were a few small Sichuan places, and gradually, now we have Sichuan restaurants, Hunan restaurants, northeastern restaurants. So British people now, especially in the big cities, can no longer think old-style Cantonese food is Chinese food. They know Chinese food is varied, with distinct regional cuisines.

Also, because there are more Chinese people, our Chinese restaurants taste more authentic. They have to suit Chinese tastes, not only Western ones. Many Westerners get the chance to travel or work in China, not necessarily for long, but everyone who comes finds the food delicious, and when they go home they want more authentic Chinese food. So the exchange is richer.

Another big factor is that China has grown richer and more powerful. I started learning Chinese in 1992 or 1993, and my friends all said, why learn Chinese? China's far away, it's useless. Now they all say, Fuchsia, you were so clever! China's standing has completely changed, and that has certainly raised the status of Chinese food. It's no longer what they used to think — cheap food eaten by poor immigrants. Now it's understood as a culture. And well-off Chinese in Britain now want higher-end Chinese food.

Eating less meat and more vegetables is the road ahead for all of us

Q: As an expert on Chinese food, what do you make of the Michelin guides for Shanghai, Taipei and Guangzhou?

Fuchsia: I criticize them often. I don't think they know Chinese food well enough. Look at their Shanghai rankings: they really lack Shanghai's own benbang cai, and they overweight Western food and Cantonese food.

The biggest problem is Michelin's method. They send one person to eat one meal, maybe two or three times, but it's one person. At many Chinese restaurants one person can't order the good dishes; you need a full table to see what the kitchen can really do. Their Shanghai [guide], for instance, has no Fu 1088 or Fu 1015. Their Chef Lu is one of the best benbang cai cooks in Shanghai, a truly remarkable man. Neither restaurant does set menus, [so] one diner can't [eat properly there]. Fu He Hui is their vegetarian place. It has a set menu, so [it got in]. I don't think that makes sense.

I think Chinese people shouldn't mind too much; they should understand that Michelin doesn't understand. With that method there is no way they can reflect China's best food. I once interviewed a Michelin director and put these questions to him. An average Western food critic can't appreciate the textures Chinese food cares about — so how can he judge it?

Q: How did Michelin answer?

Fuchsia: He said our inspectors are professional, they've been trained, they can judge any cuisine fairly. That's not right; there are cultural differences. I was once in that position myself, a Westerner who didn't understand Chinese food. [Even though I was] someone who loved food, who was keen to eat, if you had handed me a sea cucumber there is no way I could have liked it. Now [it's different]. But it's a process.

Q: Which food writers do you admire? Have they influenced you?

Fuchsia: Yuan Mei, from ancient China. I like his attitude, the way he puts things — very interesting, very much his own man, and he really understood food.

M. F. K. Fisher, the American writer, who died twenty or thirty years ago. She was the best food writer there was, a literary food writer. Her recipes weren't the best recipes, but nobody could match her writing.

For recipes, Claudia Roden. I know her. She's an Egyptian Jew who emigrated to Britain. In the 1980s she published Middle Eastern Cooking (1986). She's very well known and has written a great deal. Her work takes in culture, history, anthropology and recipes. Remarkable.

And Marcella Hazan, who wrote Italian cookbooks. Her culture and her writing weren't as rich, but her recipes [are excellent]. Cook her dishes and they will come out right.

So: Marcella Hazan is recipes, Fisher is literature, Claudia Roden is both together.

My own work is a mix too — Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper leans literary, the others lean toward recipes.

I think there are a lot of remarkable women in this field. In the past very few women became chefs. But in cookbook writing abroad, the best are mostly women. Not all, but a large majority. That's a good thing; there are a lot of good models to follow.

Q: Why do you think that is? Have you thought about it?

Fuchsia: Because in the past a lot of people probably thought writing cookbooks was a small thing, something women did at home [laughs]. Chefs were men, famous, well liked. That may be part of it.

Q: Do you have worries about how people eat now, or trends you think are worth watching?

Fuchsia: All of humanity shares one problem: the environment. We've damaged our planet, so we should all eat in a way that's better for it. We all have to eat less meat, less fish and more vegetables. Food pollution, eating protected species — and not only eating protected species, but our fishing methods too, which really aren't sustainable. That's what worries me most.

Westerners and Chinese are in the same position here. But on this question Chinese people have an advantage, because Chinese food has so many ways [to put into practice] eating less meat and more vegetables. You have soy products — soy sauce, fermented black beans, doubanjiang — savory, umami plant-based seasonings. I've always told Westerners we should learn from China: in China you can eat less meat and get the same pleasure. Vegetable-led Chinese dishes are extremely good. [Eating less meat and more vegetables] is the road ahead for all of us.

Cover image: Fuchsia studying cooking at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Source: Shanghai Translation Publishing House