TY - BOOK ID - 78359016 TI - Bitter and Sweet : Food, Meaning, and Modernity in Rural China PY - 2017 SN - 9780520293526 9780520293519 9780520966741 0520966740 PB - Berkeley, CA University of California Press, DB - UniCat KW - Food supply KW - Food consumption KW - Rural families KW - Urbanization KW - Agriculture KW - S11/0484 KW - S21/0600 KW - Farming KW - Husbandry KW - Industrial arts KW - Life sciences KW - Land use, Rural KW - Farm families KW - Families KW - Consumption of food KW - Cost and standard of living KW - Economic aspects KW - History KW - China: Social sciences--Rural life, rural studies: since 1976 KW - China: Medicine, public health and food--Chinese food and cookery, (incl. tea) KW - academic. KW - china. KW - chinese country. KW - chinese history. KW - chinese. KW - country. KW - countryside. KW - eastern world. KW - elderly. KW - ethnographic. KW - ethnography. KW - famine. KW - food scarcity. KW - food shortage. KW - growing old. KW - history of china. KW - hunger. KW - identity. KW - individualism. KW - industrial. KW - industrialization. KW - migration. KW - morals. KW - place. KW - relationship to food. KW - relationship with food. KW - rural china. KW - rural. KW - scholarly. KW - scholarship. KW - world history. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:78359016 AB - Less than a half century ago, China experienced a cataclysmic famine, which was particularly devastating in the countryside. As a result, older people in rural areas have experienced in their lifetimes both extreme deprivation and relative abundance of food. Young people, on the other hand, have a different relationship to food. Many young rural Chinese are migrating to rapidly industrializing cities for work, leaving behind backbreaking labor but also a connection to food through agriculture.Bitter and Sweet examines the role of food in one rural Chinese community as it has shaped everyday lives over the course of several tumultuous decades. In her superb ethnographic accounts, Ellen Oxfeld compels us to reexamine some of the dominant frameworks that have permeated recent scholarship on contemporary China and that describe increasing dislocation and individualism and a lack of moral centeredness. By using food as a lens, she shows a more complex picture, where connectedness and sense of place continue to play an important role, even in the context of rapid change. ER -