Eating is never just eating. It is habit, inheritance, access, geography, and, more often than we would like to admit, power. Taste, if anything, is trained. In Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (in the original mandarin chinese and translated by Lin King) food is not a backdrop but a structure. The narrative unfolds through meals, through textures, through encounters at tables. It becomes a way of mapping identity without stating it directly. What is eaten, how it is prepared, who prepares it, and who is allowed to consume it—these are the quiet coordinates of history. What is missing from the plate is just as instructive. If food maps identity, then it also maps erasure. Recipes that survive only in fragments, remembered imprecisely. Memory, in this sense, is not archival but sensory. It does not preserve recipes so much as impressions: a smell that cannot be named, a texture that resists replication. What is passed down is often incomplete, but it persists anyway. Not as instruction, but as longing.

“ There are perspectives to which only ghosts are privy.”
 from Introduction to Taiwan Travelogue, New Mandarin Chinese Edition, 2020 A Truncated Dream, a Foreign Splendorland by Hiyoshi Sagako

The term wānshēng emerges from this context. It refers to Japanese people born in Taiwan during Japanese colonial rule. The word itself is deceptively descriptive, almost administrative. And yet, as the introduction suggests, it produces something stranger: a kind of social ghost. Not entirely of one place, not entirely of another. Belonging, but conditionally. This condition is not stable. It shifts depending on who is looking, and from where. Identity, in this sense, is not possessed but assigned. One can be native in one context and foreign in another, sometimes within the same conversation. The ghost, then, is not only someone displaced, but someone rendered legible only through contradiction. Food operates within the same logic. It, too, becomes legible through contradiction. A dish can be claimed, adapted, diluted, defended, all at once. Authenticity, like identity, is less a fixed quality than a negotiation staged in public.

Owning food

We tend to assign ownership to food with surprising confidence. Pasta is Italian. Tea is English. These associations feel so obvious they rarely invite questioning. And yet both have origins in Asia. Tea, in particular, is so thoroughly embedded in British identity that its displacement becomes almost invisible. What is framed as tradition is often just successful transplantation. Success, here, depends not on origin but on repetition. The more something is performed, the less it is questioned. Over time, familiarity hardens into fact. The story of how it arrived becomes optional, then irrelevant, then forgotten.

“There is nothing more political than food. The things that we eat are the direct reflection of our histories.”  — Anthony Bourdain

Histories, of course, are not always gentle. Immigrant cuisines often arrive softened, translated, made legible to the dominant palate. They are adjusted, sweetened, simplified, or deep-fried into familiarity. Living in Dublin, one of the more enthusiastic local recommendations is the spice bag; marketed, loosely, as Chinese food. It is, in practice, fried chicken and chips tossed with seasoning. Its novelty lies in the presence of spice, which says more about the expectations of its audience than the origins of the dish. Compare this to Taiwanese 盐酥鸡 fried chicken (salt-and-pepper chicken) , often rebranded elsewhere as popcorn chicken. It exists within a completely different culinary logic: street markets, late nights, layered seasoning, textures that are intentional rather than incidental. One is adaptation; the other is origin. Both exist, but in my opinion only one is worth recommending. And yet dismissal is perhaps too easy. Dishes like the spice bag persist because they satisfy something specific: affordability, familiarity, immediacy. They are less about authenticity than about context. To reject them entirely is to ignore the conditions that made them necessary.Value, then, is not only a matter of taste but of circumstance. 

Sometimes these adaptations become traditions in their own right. The bánh mì, for example, emerges from the collision of French colonial influence and Vietnamese ingredients. Bread meets pickled vegetables, pâté meets coriander. It is not a diluted dish but a hybrid one. Something new, produced under unequal conditions. Colonialism does not only impose; it also produces unexpected forms of creativity. In Hong Kong, during British rule, local populations were often excluded from Western dining spaces. The response was not abstinence but invention. Cha chaan teng cafés emerged, serving local interpretations of Western food—milk tea, macaroni soups, dishes that mimic and transform simultaneously. Access denied becomes cuisine reimagined. But reimagination is not freedom. It occurs within limits, shaped by what is available, what is permitted, what is economically viable. Innovation, in this sense, is often a negotiation rather than a choice. To innovate under constraint is not the same as to innovate freely. The distinction matters, even when the outcome is celebrated without context. The resulting dishes carry both ingenuity and constraint, even when only one is visible.

Food, like architecture, leaves behind traces of occupation.

 But unlike buildings, these traces are easier to overlook. A façade announces itself; a flavour does not. The most enduring colonial landmarks are sometimes the least visible. Control over food has always been a method of control over people. Colonisation often involved the replacement of indigenous crops with cash crops, restructuring entire ecosystems to serve distant markets. Diets changed not by preference but by necessity. The psychological impact of losing one’s traditional foodways is harder to quantify, but no less real. To lose a cuisine is, in some sense, to lose a language. And like language, it is not only vocabulary that disappears, but grammar. The logic of how ingredients combine, the rhythm of preparation, the sequencing of meals. These are structures learned over time, and once interrupted, they are difficult to recover in full.

And yet the politics of eating are not confined to the past.

In the present, questions of consumption have become entangled with the climate crisis. What we eat is now also a question of sustainability, of emissions, of environmental cost. Meat, in particular, becomes a site of ethical negotiation. But even here, the conversation is uneven. Responsibility is distributed unevenly, but so is the ability to choose. What is framed as individual ethical consumption often obscures structural limitation. Not everyone is equally positioned to decide what they eat, or why. Diets framed as ethical in one context may rely on global supply chains that obscure their own forms of extraction.

Labour, too, sits quietly beneath every meal.

 Ingredients are grown, harvested, transported, sold. Kitchens operate through effort that is rarely visible at the moment of consumption. The language of “eating the rich” gestures at imbalance, but in practice it is often the opposite: wealth accumulates by consuming the labour of others. Payment does not necessarily equal fairness, especially when production involves harmful conditions or exploitative systems. Closer to home, the labour of cooking remains unevenly distributed. In many households, it is still predominantly performed by women: routine, expected, undervalued. And yet in the professional culinary world, prestige tends to gather around male chefs, often in environments that replicate hierarchies rather than challenge them. Much of this labour remains deliberately out of sight. The ideal meal arrives without evidence of effort, as if it assembled itself. The people behind it become infrastructural, necessary but unnoticed; built into the act of service.

Eating, for all its intimacy, is not innocent. It is also sensory. Taste is the most obvious element, but not the only one. Smell precedes it. Sight frames it. Texture complicates it. Eating is one of the few activities that reliably engages the entire body. It is immediate, immersive, difficult to abstract. Perhaps this is why it lends itself so easily to observation. There is something undeniably voyeuristic about looking into someone else’s fridge.

Anthony Bourdain’s refrigerator, documented in his cookbook Appetites, reads almost like a self-portrait: practical, eclectic, unpretentious. Each item hints at a story, a preference, a memory. Similarly, projects like Show Me Your Fridge by Sandra Junker turn domestic spaces into quiet biographies. What people store is often more revealing than what they say. It is a form of reading, albeit an imprecise one. Patterns emerge: repetition, restraint, excess. But interpretation always risks projection. What we think we see often reflects our own assumptions as much as someone else’s habits.

Social media has amplified this tendency. We are now constantly exposed to curated images of what other people eat, particularly people who are already considered desirable. Food becomes aestheticised, aspirational. A means to get to a well packaged goal. This is not without consequence. Diet culture, long embedded in social expectations, finds new forms of expression through these platforms. It remains, as ever, disproportionately directed at women. Eating becomes something to manage, to optimise, to control. Pleasure becomes suspect.

And yet eating has always also been communal.To break bread with someone is not simply to share food but to establish a kind of temporary alliance. Meals create boundaries as much as they dissolve them. Who is invited to the table matters. Who is excluded matters just as much. Even now, calls for boycotts remind us that where we choose to eat is not apolitical. It is, in its own way, a statement of alignment.

So the question becomes not only what we eat, but whose table we sit at.

Because if you are what you eat, you are also shaped by the systems that made that meal possible. The histories embedded in ingredients, the labour behind preparation, the routes by which flavours travel; all of it.

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