This month's museum pick...

The Edible Journey Through China
An online history (and more) of Chinese cuisine

We went looking this month for a food museum to profile and realized when we ran across this site on the Internet that maybe we’d been too narrow in our definition of a museum.

Certainly if you think of a museum as a caretaker of history, whether in the form of artifacts or knowledge, web sites like this could slip in under the definition.

Such a concept isn’t out of the blue: Museums have been migrating to the Internet for several years now, taking advantage of the global medium to place their collections online and let people from thousands of miles away take virtual tours.

The Edible Journey Through China is an immensely rich web site. After you spend a few minutes browsing it, you’ll probably want to put it on your Favorites list as a soup-to-nuts source of information on Chinese cooking. Its topics range from a history of Chinese cuisine (the timeline starts at 500,000 B.C.) to discussions of Chinese cereal grains, festivals and holidays, beverages, regional cuisines, recipes and even the medicinal aspects of Chinese food.

Besides its range, another reason for mentioning this site is that you simply can’t discuss food and not mention a tradition of preparation and presentation that affects 1/5 of humanity directly and hundreds of millions of others indirectly. Chinese concepts of what is appropriate to eat (almost everything), balances of tastes and heat (sweet and sour, hot and cold in the same dish), proportion of meat to vegetables, etc., are often in stark contrast to other cultures’ practices. Yet the sheer range and tastiness of Chinese food has made it ubiquitous overseas – there is virtually no country you can visit that doesn’t have some sort of Chinese food available.

Many of the discussions on The Edible Journey Through China are illustrated with color photos, and the copy is in large, easy-to-read type. The copy reads as though people for whom English is a second language wrote it – there are little turns of phrase that make sense but don’t quite sound the way a native speaker would put them. It only adds to the site’s charm – it’s easy to detect the exuberance of its creators and their exuberance in spreading the good word on Chinese cuisine.

When it sticks to what it knows best – food – the site has a lot of interesting things to say. Sometimes, though, when it ventures off into other topics, it skids off the road a bit. For example, it claims that the first Chinese census, conducted in 2 A.D., showed that there were 600 million people in China. The real number would have been 1/6^th of that – 100 million – since historians agree that the human race probably numbered about 250 million worldwide in that era. It’s a minor quibble with a site that tries hard to impart (and mostly succeeds in doing so) a love for Chinese cuisine.

Web Site

By Patrick Totty