The beauty of respect for food

The documentary ‘A Bite of China’ was recommended to me by a Chinese friend and ‘A Bite of Canton’ was a happy find on YouTube. I ended up sitting there, just watching people cook. And I mean properly watching. Not for tricks or recipes, but for the way they cared.

What stayed with me wasn’t the scale or the beauty of it all, although it was beautiful. It was how seriously people took their food. Not in a pretentious way but more in a this matters way.

You could see it in how someone handled a knife, or talked about a dish they’d been making their whole life. No irony. No fuss. Just pride.

There’s a moment in 'A Bite of Canton’ where a cook talks about balance, about not forcing flavour, about letting ingredients be what they are. It made me think of home. Of my own grandmother standing over a pot, tasting, saying nothing, just knowing when it was right. That quiet confidence. You don’t learn that from a book.

As a food writer, I’m always thinking about where passion actually lives. It’s rarely loud. It’s usually repetitive. It’s in the doing. Watching these programmes, I kept noticing hands, older hands, especially. Hands that have done the same job thousands of times.

There’s love in that kind of repetition. Love that doesn’t need to explain itself. What I really admire is how openly people claim their food as their own. This is our way, they seem to say. This is how we do it here.

The dishes are tied to place, to family, to memory. Food isn’t just something to eat but it’s proof you belong somewhere. But when you watch people in China speak about rice, soup or preserved vegetables with such certainty, it reminds you that pride doesn’t mean being stuck in the past. It just means knowing who you are.

We are now on a similar level when it comes to Irish food, the pride shown by chefs in displaying the producer on menus. There’s nothing flashy about the love shown in ‘A Bite of China’. It’s patient. It waits for fermentation. It respects the seasons. It feeds people without making a show of it.

Different places, different flavours but the same quiet devotion. That’s the kind of food I believe in. The kind made with care, pride, and a deep, steady love that doesn’t need applause.

I found myself sticking with the Chinese audio rather than the English translation (it was subtitled). Even though I don’t understand the language properly, the feeling carried as you could hear the warmth in the presenter’s voice, the affection for what they were talking about.

The English version did its job, but something was missing. When you’re talking about food, the voice matters. If it doesn’t carry the passion, it starts to sound like a report, and food deserves better than that.

I’m very aware of how much I still don’t know. I’ve been lucky, though. Jing lent me her CD collection without hesitation and patiently answered all my slightly daft questions along the way.

One of the first writers who really opened a door for me was Fuchsia Dunlop. As far as I know, she was the first foreigner to train formally as a Sichuan chef. She moved to China in the early ‘90s, and over time became someone people genuinely trust to talk about Chinese food.

Her memoir, ‘Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper’, is a beautiful, thoughtful book. It gave me a real sense of how food is lived with in China, not just cooked and eaten, but respected, discussed, argued over and loved. It’s the kind of writing that makes you want to keep learning, slowly and properly.