Chapter One  Differences in Chinese and western dietetic ideas

1.1 Chinese dietetic ideas

  In Chinese traditional history, people considered food as the first necessity. It not only depicts that people can’t live without food, but also means its main place in Chinese history. Seven necessities of people’s daily life are listed into firewood, rice, edible oil, salt, sauce, vinegar and tea. Which is related with eating? (易中天, 1999.) The reason why Chinese catering has its enchanting charming is that it has specific tastes. The existence of delicious food lies in combining the original taste of food with cooked taste after heating, and then mix the taste of burdening and seasoning, which blends and coordinates with each other. All of them supplement and penetrate together(赵荣光, 2003). In the Shang and Zhou dynasties, there were many vocabularies to reflect people’s catering customs and habits, such as Six Crops (polished round-grained rice, coarse rice, sorghum, millet, wheat, melons), Six Drinks (water, rice water, sweet wine, weak faints, arak, pulp), Six Meals (horse, cow, sheep, pig, dog, chicken) from the book named Zhouli. In the late period of Warring States, it was recorded in Lushi Chunqiu that the origin of taste was water and the duration of heating was the most essential factor in five flavors (sweet, sour, bitter, pungent and salty). If people could control the level of heating proficiently, food would get rid of the smell of fish or mutton. During Qin and Han dynasty, China had become a united country and it always pursued the knack of living longer. So they paid more attention to the development of catering and dietary therapy. For example, they thought food was the origin of nutrition and had many functions respectively. Then they laid emphasis on doing the research on eliminating the disease by cooking combined food. On the basis of these ideas, works about dietary therapy had occurred such as Mountain and Sea Classics, Huangdi Neijing, Sheng Nong’s Herbal Classics. They wanted to live longer by changing catering ways and concepts. During Sui and Tang dynasties, Chinese ancient feudal society reached the peak, so they activated their communications with others. It is apparently seen from the history that people in this dynasty raised awareness of attaining the greatness of food taste or flavor when exchanging their local catering with outsiders in order to show their social harmonious and grades. Even in latter flourishing Tang dynasty, Song dynasty, Ming and Qing dynasty, ancient Chinese also kept in good health by improving catering concepts.文献综述

  The Chinese traditional ways of thinking reflects their earlier subject consciousness and strong emotional factors. They are good at intuitive thinking and internal experiences, but inferior to abstract thinking. Chinese attach importance to achieve mastery through a comprehensive study of visual thinking and abstract thinking. Chinese acquaintances of objective items put the emotionality and artistry in the first place. They tend to choose their personal values rather than judging what is right or wrong, which can be apparently seen that the main way of Chinese cooking is coalescing. Trying best to blend into an enjoyable taste and feeling eventually and strive for the integral harmony is absolutely identical to dialectics thoughts of philosophy in China.

1.2 Western dietetic ideas

  Chinese prefer the taste of food, while western people pay more attention to the element of nutrition. Compared with taste-oriented China, western countries has a rational ideas about eating. Each factor will be considered scientifically and explicitly, such as the amount of calories, vitamins, protein, carbohydrate and conducive microelements they should take every day. From hundreds of historical ideas, food should be matched together after completely heated rather than stirring to match in the cooking pan. We take “French beef” as an example. The idea of western people is accustomed to setting potatoes in the left and putting the main part of the dish on the other side——beef. Or they sometimes place tomatoes for the sake of color matching, however, tomatoes are usually raw, which is contrary to Chinese traditional cooking ideas——braise or roast. The whole dish looks vividly by the matching and contrast colors. Meanwhile, the tastes of food are separated respectively without mixing flavor. All of them exert their own flavors and functions in the integral dish.来*自-优=尔,论:文+网www.chuibin.com