Dr Jakob Klein

Since the late 1990s, I have sought to document and understand cultural transformations in contemporary China through the lens of food. I have simultaneously sought to shed light on Chinese perspectives on the global challenges of our contemporary food systems, including food safety, the future of regional foodways, environmental degradation, and the politics of meat-eating. To these ends, I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in marketplaces, restaurants, kitchens, farms, and factories, primarily in and around the cities of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province and Kunming, Yunnan Province.

One strand of my research is concerned with regional cuisines and local foods. I have investigated reinventions of Cantonese teahouses and restaurant cuisine in Guangzhou under radical state socialism and market reforms, the heritagization of a local goat-milk cheese (rubing) in Yunnan, and how a national, party-state project to promote the potato as a Chinese staple food has been taken up by local officials, agribusinesses, food writers, and other actors in economically marginal, traditional potato-producing regions. I am also interested in the role of transregional and transnational migration in the transformation of Chinese cuisines.

Another research strand investigates food safety and food ethics. For example, I have studied how urban residents in Kunming have discussed their concerns about food safety, quality, and taste and addressed them in everyday practices of sourcing and cooking food. I have also written about more organized attempts, by environmental NGOs and businesses, to transform urban eating habits and food ethics and to establish direct links with rural smallholders.

Throughout my research, I have paid close attention the role of changing food cultures in the dynamics of social relations and inequalities, along lines such as class, gender, ethnicity, state power, regional differentiation, and urban-rural divides.