“This is a highly successful book. In it, we find new insights from a remarkable range of international specialists on the significance of food in religion, political theory, social order, medicine, and human physiology, and how people in pre-modern China made their choices on what to eat and what not to eat.”
--Robert Chard, Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford

“If television has been described as the ‘poor man's nirvana’, then the medieval Chinese description of food as ‘the Heaven of ordinary people’ seems even more apt, in the light of this fascinating collection of essays. Here, for the first time, it is possible to see the multifarious links between food and religion in Chinese civilization, so that the scholarship brought together here will surely provide a rich feast not only for historians and anthropologists of China but also for anyone who has ever wondered about the deeper cultural meanings of Chinese food.”
--T. H. Barrett, Professor of East Asian History, SOAS, London