Illustration:Chen Xia/GT
Food has always been the most direct link between people and culture. It bypasses all layers of consciousness, directly impacting the body, sparking one's love for a certain long-standing civilization in just a few seconds. So, when traveling, we are always persistent in searching for local delicacies. The logic behind this behavior is that we hope to experience a unique culture by tasting a local specialty.
In today's world, with the development of transportation, logistics, and information, food has become the most widely shared and quickly disseminated medium for cultural exchange. A chef can appear anywhere in the world with his recipes, ingredients, and kitchen setup. Food enthusiasts, even more fervently, spread their taste experiences as widely as possible through the internet.
An obvious fact is that building the uniqueness of a culture based on the exclusivity of its cuisine is a thing of the past.
In the morning, Dawa Yuzhen was in a hurry, so she only had an egg sandwich from a fast-food restaurant. But around 11 am, feeling a bit hungry, she placed an order online for vacuum-packed butter tea. This butter tea came from a long-established sweet tea house in Lhasa, a place where Dawa Yuzhen's ancestors were regular customers in their youth. For lunch, she enjoyed a serving of buttered tsampa. Along with that she enjoyed tomato-braised beef stew, prepared by her husband from Shaanxi, and sweet duck sent by her classmate from Sichuan. During work in the afternoon, she brought some air-dried yak meat made at home, sharing it with her office colleagues and performing a ritual for herself. For dinner, she planned to visit a newly opened Japanese restaurant with her colleagues and since the following day was the weekend, she thought she might also have a small gathering with her family in the evening.
Tsampa is a characteristic snack of the Xizang Autonomous Region and one of the traditional staple foods of Tibetan pastoralists. "Tsampa" means "fried dough" in Tibetan. When visiting Tibetan compatriots, the host will definitely serve fragrant butter tea and tsampa. The table is filled with golden butter, milk curds, and sugar. Tsampa is made by washing, drying, and frying highland barley into flour. When eating, it is stirred with a small amount of butter tea, milk residue, and sugar, and kneaded into a ball with the hands. It is not only easy to eat, rich in nutrition, and high in calories, making it suitable for satisfying the stomach and keeping the cold at bay, but also convenient to carry and store.
When eating tsampa, Tibetan people put an appropriate amount of curds and sugar into the butter tea tsampa bowl, kneading them together with their hands.
Dried yak meat is a favorite raw meat product among Tibetans, made every autumn. Fresh meat is cut into strips, threaded onto strings, sprinkled with salt, pepper powder, chili powder, and ginger powder, hung in a cool and ventilated place, and is ready to eat after drying. In the cold and high-altitude areas of Xizang, where food is not prone to spoilage and deterioration, the tradition of eating dried yak meat is still prevalent today. There is also a saying that raw meat is more nourishing than cooked meat. Therefore, every time a yak is done, young people will eat a few bites of fresh raw meat.
Tibetan people have excellent dining traditions. When serving tea, toasting, and eating, guests and elders are given priority. Eating proceeds in order of seniority and age. During meals, do not clink bowls, chopsticks, or spoons, do not move around casually, and do not make loud noises or laugh. The emphasis is on calmness and courtesy, mutual respect, and mutual concessions. When a distinguished guest arrives, they are treated with the best food, and even pigs and sheep may be slaughtered without hesitation. This generous hospitality extends to strangers as well, who will receive warm treatment and encouragement to eat when visiting for the first time, even if they are unfamiliar with each other.
It is worth mentioning that Tibetan drinking customs are very rich. When brewing new wine, it must first be offered to the gods with the phrase "new wine." Following the ancient tradition of "orderly respect for elders," the elder of the family is the first to be offered wine, after which family members can drink freely. During festive weddings or gatherings with many people, wine is generally offered first to the venerable elders and then to others in a clockwise direction. The person offering the wine generally holds the cup with both hands over the head and offers it to the recipient.
The recipient first receives the wine cup with both hands, then holds it with the left hand and lightly dips the right ring finger into the wine, flicking it three times into the air. After that, they drink. In their tradition, flicking the wine three times is a tribute to the gods of Heaven, Earth, and the spirits.
The taste preferences passed down through generations by the Tibetans have not changed due to changes in the types of food.
This sincere and simple taste preference mutually shapes with the open contemporary Tibetan culture.
The author is a lecturer at Hunan University and holds a PhD at Renmin University of China.
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