There are a great diversity of foodstuffs, styles and modalities involved in the occasions of having a meal together. At the buffet that I often visited when I lived in Melbourne, all the dishes were made available for diners to take their pick. Later, I moved to the Australian National University in Canberra to commence my doctoral fieldwork, which now focuses on pandemic relations in China. During the lunch break of one of my first-year PhD courses, when novices and teachers sat together around a table enjoying our own individual food, I learned, as a non-native eater and speaker in these and other contexts, that this could be called ‘having lunch together’. Eating together here refers to everyone having a meal at the same time and at the same table, but what we had was food from our own individual plates. I can understand why people call this ‘eating together’, but it is not what I intuitively mean when I say, ‘eating together’. This is very, very different from my experience of having lunch together with others in my native China.
On the occasion of Chinese New Year's Eve dinner, all dishes are placed together on a table that is surrounded by consumers. Each dish is supposed to be shared so that there is no need to apportion food individually. Every consumer is given an individual set of utensils (usually one pair of chopsticks, one spoon, one bowl and/or one plate) to use. Generally, people take food from the dishes on the table with chopsticks/spoons, put it into their mouths, and then go in for another helping with the same utensils that they used to convey the food to their mouths – and so it goes on until the meal is finished. Eating together in this way doesn't just mean being together to eat in one another's company, it involves instead a kind of ‘cross’-eating. By this, I mean to indicate that no one has their own personal dish that they ordered for themselves, no one observes any rule that safeguards the individual integrity of a single, personal meal. Chopsticks and spoons are dipped into dishes and passed into mouths, and this shapes a circle from the shared dishes to consumers’ mouths and, via saliva, the transmission of one another's substance into co-present bodies. The integrity of individual bodies is lost in the constancy of eating together, across the bounds of each person's own body. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government has, among other recommendations, advised the addition of gong shao and gong kuai – shared spoons and chopsticks — to the gong can mode of eating together. These ‘extra’ implements are distinguished from consumers’ personal spoons and chopsticks, and they are added specifically for the purpose of taking food from common dishes (instead of using personal implements to do both serving and eating).
My experiences of ‘eating together’ in Australia and in China are of distinctly different registers. The examples of the PhD retreat and the buffet involve eating proximately; the example of Chinese New Year is an embodied commensality. Both kinds of ‘eating together’ occur in China, and there are specific terms for them. The former is called fen can, and the latter is gong can (can means dining, fen means separate or individual, and gong means shared). Gong can is by far the commoner of the two. As my informant Jay described the difference to me:
Sharing a meal in the form of fen can and adopting gong shao and gong kuai while having a meal with others is mostly common in business occasions and in fancy restaurants. … I only particularly pay attention to take food with gong shao or gong kuai in the context of sharing a meal with unfamiliar but important persons, such as my potential customer and prospective cooperative partner, but it is less about being hygienically distant from others. To be honest, it is mainly for showing my politeness to win favour. By contrast, when I share a meal with my familiar bodies such as families, friends and co-workers, undoubtedly, dining in a way of gong can without adopting gong shao and gong kuai is the only choice.
I will tease out Jay's remarks on ‘hygiene’ later on; for now, I want to underscore the idea that gong can – without gong shao and gong kuai – is just the usual way of going about eating together in China. Until I arrived in Australia and experienced something quite different, I certainly regarded gong can in taken-for-granted terms. One particularly memorable irruption into this position came from my Australian friend Amy, who, on hearing about the differences I was registering, criticised it as an unhygienic, intolerable behaviour. Amy lent the weight of familial opinion to her own view; her father, she said, considered it wholly unacceptable for people to take food from a dish, put it into their mouths, and then take food again with the same utensil. If they did, she explained to me, they would be depositing their own saliva into the food, which others would then ingest, just as they would ingest the saliva of those who had done the same. This would be the height of unhygienic practice; it was sick-making, to the extent that no one in Amy's family would ever consider doing such a thing. Amy was disgusted.
Amy's reaction is very likely the one with which most western readers of my article would instinctively agree. Replete with the potential to bring outside substances into consumers’ bodies, eating is ‘an incorporative act’ (Miller et al. 1998: 434) and food is always and already a risk substance, always potentially contaminated by the substance of other people before entering the consumer's own body (see Alley 2012; Miller et al. 1998). This always-already potential for ‘biological contamination’ (Alley 2012) references Mary Douglas’ seminal work Purity and Danger (1966) in respect of both the hidden contaminant particles that might be present in food that are matter out of place or ‘dirt’, and the danger that arises when bodily boundaries are breached and become open and vulnerable to contamination. The body here is conceived as ‘a site of transgression’ (Williams 1998: 59); ‘to be transgressive, in turn, implies the breaking or crossing of corporeal boundaries within the prevailing “order”’ (1998: 60). As Amy's remarks make plain, the world order she knows is corrupted by the traversing properties of the saliva of others, itself a foul polluter of food that ought not to contain it in the first place.
Amy's sense of the danger presented by contaminating saliva was certainly realised by Chinese authorities at the onset of the pandemic. Various recommendations have been made as to the cessation of this kind of eating, yet Chinese eaters in my ethnographic experience, which has been running since the onset of the pandemic, continue to eat gong can style. How can this be understood? I argue in what follows that the communal body created and maintained by eating gong can style does not present a threat to safety; the threat is rather from the individual bodies that corrupt the practice.
Salivary Dangers, Western Hygiene and the Endurance of Gong Can
Because eating gong can style has been shown to accelerate the spread of SARS-CoV-2 viruses, authorities encouraged the adoption of fen can at the beginning of the pandemic, in which fellow eaters maintain the integrity of individual meals and utensils and thus their own individual bodies (see Chowdhry et al. 2021; Hanege et al. 2021; Li et al. 2020; Santosh et al. 2020). This was not the first time that China had recognised and responded to the potential of saliva to threaten lives. As Zhaolu Ding and colleagues (2015) found, gong shao and gong kuai have previously been promoted at a national level to limit the transmission routes of Helicobacter pylori via salivary means. Ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, people in China have been advised to incorporate gong shao and gong kuai whenever they dine in typical gong can style, but the state preference is that people go further than that and switch their eating practice to fen can instead.
The promotion of fen can, gong shao and gong kuai is now everywhere and all the time in China. I'll describe parts of a day I spent in Wuhan on one of my many field trips there, as an example. At breakfast time, I made an order on a food-delivery app and received a reminder that ‘due to the influence of COVID-19 pandemic, if you choose contact-free delivery, please pick up your order in time; if you dine together with others, it is recommended to be done in the way of fen can and use gong shao and gong kuai’ (see Figure 1).
A screenshot of a food-delivery app with the reminder of adopting fen can, gong shao and gong kuai, 2022. Photo by author.
Citation: Anthropology in Action 29, 3; 10.3167/aia.2022.290303
After finishing my meal, I travelled to a tourist attraction, Lihuangpi Road, by underground rail and saw many advertisements promoting the adoption of gong shao and gong kuai, both in subway stations and inside the train itself (see Figure 2). When I arrived at my destination, I saw a poster taped on the door of a building advising that ‘Adopting gong shao and gong kuai is for preventing COVID-infection’ (see Figure 3).
Advertisement in subway stations and inside subways in Wuhan recommending using gong shao and gong kuai, 2022. Photo by author.
Citation: Anthropology in Action 29, 3; 10.3167/aia.2022.290303
Advertisement in a tourist attraction in Wuhan saying ‘using gong shao and gong kuai is a method to prevent from being infected by COVID’, 2022. Photo by author.
Citation: Anthropology in Action 29, 3; 10.3167/aia.2022.290303
These public health recommendations occasion and entail new relationships between food, the body and other bodies and are so best regarded as very substantial attempts at reworking some of the most important and most taken for granted social, material and structural relationships in the world. The reader will certainly have noticed that fen can eating requires consumers to create and maintain a series of material and social integrities that bound and protect individual bodies and discrete materials, like personal chopsticks/spoons. Rather than a stylistic change to consumption, fen can constitutes a fundamental change, because of the way it attempts to disrupt and rearrange everyday consumptive social and material relations. My informant Jay found this proposition ‘ridiculous’:
As for the adoption of fen can, no way! It is so ridiculous to share a meal in a way of fen can at home! It is impossible at least at my home! Why do I set up a barrier between my family and myself? Let us imagine an occasion: when my parents and I have a dinner together, a dish is divided into three parts and each of us is given a part on the plate; we sit together and merely have what is on the dish in front of us. See? There is no more intimate communication in this situation. Is this a family meal? Seriously?! Come on! We are family! We are together! We should be connected without distance or separation. It is also the same for having a meal with friends. I am pretty sure that you will be unwelcome if you insist on adopting fen can. Why do you think people like to share food together? For me, it is because of atmosphere. I really enjoy being together with my intimates and it is sharing that creates fun. Fen can, however, as what is indicated literally in fen, it stresses to be independent and separated. Obviously, it is against my intention of being together so that it is not what I look forward to.
I made a note earlier of teasing out Jay's remarks about hygiene. He had remarked that eating fen can style was not so much about assuring hygienic distance as it was about creating formal, professional distance between dining bodies, for the purposes of impressing them. Jay's distinction is an important one, because it appears to indicate that hygiene isn't instinctively related to the act of protecting bodily integrity. This idea is borne out in previous state attempts to bring fen can into everyday eating practice in China.
When the SARS epidemic hit China in 2003, small droplets of saliva were proved to be vectors of illness with high potential to accelerate its spread (WHO 2022). Fen can was widely recommended by Chinese state authorities at this time because it permitted people to continue eating together while concurrently protecting against salivary contamination. On 27 May 2003, China Hospitality Association (CHA) published Specifications for Facilities and Services of Separate Meal System in Catering Industry to create hygienic dining environments for customers in restaurants. These specifications provided more than three million catering enterprises with a detailed guide of how to put fen can into practice. However, after the SARS epidemic had passed, excepting dishes that are usually served in individual portions such as teppanyaki and steak, gong can swiftly returned as the taken-for-granted way for most Chinese people to eat together. On 21 June 2020, the Guidance on Individual Dining System in Catering Service was jointly issued by the State Administration and Market Regulation and Standardization Administration in China, with the aim of disrupting gong can co-eating in favour of fen can. The sternly issued official advice constituted a kind of culinary distancing, requiring bodies to extricate themselves from perilous entwinement.
In both cases, in order to even suggest that fen can was a more hygienic consumption practice than gong can, authorities had to rely on some definitions of hygiene borrowed from beyond China. As Haicong Lin (2015) pointed out, it was not until the 1930s that gong can attracted any question of unsanitary practice; this is because food hygiene in its enduring traditional Chinese conception principally concerns food freshness and utensils’ cleanliness. The deposition of body fluids into food and their subsequent redistribution around co-eaters fits very uneasily into such a definition. But after Chinese intellectuals acquired western knowledge about pathogens during the 1930s, fen can was occasionally recommended as the ‘civilised’ consumption modality (see Lin 2015). It did not catch on, though. As Lin (2015) noted, fen can was and remains regarded as an other's style imported from the western world, and one that exercised a hierarchical western judgement over a polluted and polluting China.
If anything, this sense of importation of a foreign, western hygienic practice has been even stronger during the COVID-19 pandemic, indubitably helped along by Trump's assignation of the virus’ genesis to China, and in particular to Wuhan. It certainly was not lost on any of my informants that fen can could be thought of as a kind of western force, cleaning up the unsanitary condition of Chineseness, that sense of pollutive dirtiness so present in Amy's remarks about the gong can modality of eating together. It came as no surprise to me to learn ethnographically that despite state advisements to the contrary, gong can remains the primary modality by which people eat together. But it is more a rejection than an othered imperial conceptualisation and practice of hygiene that results in a very low uptake of fen can during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Communal Safety
My ethnographic explorations have revealed another explanatory element for the continuation of gong can during the pandemic, one pivoting on communal notions of hygiene, made between bodies known to one another. Once bodies are together, they're safe. On first impression, Jay's remarks might indicate that gong can is operated strictly between familial members with lifetime bonds – intimately known and knowing bodies – but this is not a necessary or perhaps even common precursor to eating gong can style, because gong can is not only reflective of group membership, it is generative of it. This is indicated in gong can's emergence as an eating modality, which occurred historically after fen can, however more ‘civilised’ fen can might appear to be to the outside western observer, or indeed to the risk-averse Chinese state during a pandemic. Lin (2015) describes how fen can occurred in the pre-historic period: individuals ate separately after food was equally distributed among group members (Lin 2015: 113; see also Shi 1979). The practice of binding group members together through common consumption gradually took shape, emerging from the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) in both ritual and everyday eating forms (Lin 2015; see also Peng 2013). The conception of integrity, unity and belonging shifts from abstract to embodied in the act of eating just as surely for the mutual recognition of early dynastic bodies as it does for the entwining of contemporary Chinese bodies. The social bonds between present bodies are built, maintained and consolidated through gong can that bears long history – generation after generation – into its present manifestation as an everyday habituated way of eating together. Before COVID-19, bodies were thus informed by this history, of ‘what they do, the relations of which they are a part and the formations in which they act’ (Slocum 2008: 853). During the pandemic, individual bodies slipped out of belonging with other bodies, becoming not only physical dangers to others, but moral dangers to filial relations. This was expressed principally in the ways in which dangerous people were made to eat – alone.
In Australia, an advertising campaign ran featuring a family at home preparing a meal together. Unbeknownst to anyone, the son in the family, who was preparing a hamburger supper, was contaminating everything he touched – lettuce, tomato, burger bun – something expressed visually by red highlighting on all those items he had contaminated, usually by licking his fingers and then touching something else that would eventually wind up inside another body. The body in question was the mother's; in the final frame of the ad, she lies in a hospital bed supported by a ventilator. The message intended is that people gird and guard their bodies, strictly closing them off to others in the family by not touching, not preparing meals together – by, according to the ad, presuming they already had COVID-19 and acting in such a way as to prevent transmission to other familial bodies. Where in Australia the individual body makes moral decisions about care and protection before the fact of the familial body, the Chinese individual body appears after the fact as an immoral abruption, the ejected result of an affront to filial relations. That is, individual bodies tended to appear in my fieldwork in China as threats to collectives; in Australia, collectives appeared as threats to individuals, and individuals had to pull out of them to protect every other individual – including pulling out of the familial collective, by behaving as careful, co-present individuals. My informant Bella's case illustrates the point.
Unfortunately, Bella appeared to have brought COVID-19 home with her – she certainly had symptoms that alarmed her immediate family members, who live in Wuhan. In 2020, Bella was running a high fever and had a terrible cough. The first thing that happened to Bella was that she was confined to her room and was not permitted to eat with her family. Meals were brought to her, and she had to eat them alone. When I interviewed her about her experience, Bella said, ‘I was separated. I felt abandoned. I was not allowed to eat with them. They put meals in front of my room and went away.’ Bella paused, smiled bitterly and continued, ‘ironically, they are my intimate family’. Food featured so heavily in Bella's lamentations of her treatment because it is a principal way of corporeally and intuitively knowing, creating and maintaining one's embodied place in the social structure. Certainly, Bella felt herself thrust out of her familial structure, and felt it most acutely through the way she was forced to eat during her illness. Yet, Bella's family continued to eat gong can style – just without Bella. Gong can wasn't risky – Bella was.
Bella's family had a way to expel Bella from the table that left the integrity of gong can as a safe consumptive practice fully intact. The state's definition of those who bring COVID-19 home to infect parents provides the justification for thrusting Bella away from the table, and out of the salivary bonds that conjoin her family members. Bella had, in the language of the state, been unfilial and immoral (see figure 4); she had brought COVID-19 into the home of her family – she was thrust out from the collective, which continued its conjoined, salivary practice without her.
A banner saying ‘those who bring COVID home are unfilial and those who make your parents COVID infected are immoral’. An online photo shared by my informant Lucy1 in interview.
Citation: Anthropology in Action 29, 3; 10.3167/aia.2022.290303
I noted before that gong can makes and maintains groups beyond the intimate group of the family. This is well-illustrated by recourse to my experience in a Hongcun hostel.
Providing guests with three meals a day is a feature of the hostel in which I stayed in Hongcun, a famous Chinese tourist attraction. Guests can share meals with the host and other co-habitants in a way that is quite similar to having a meal at home with family – all members sit surrounding the table and share all dishes in a form of gong can. Guests can enjoy a meal full featuring local specialities by paying 10 yuan (AU$2) per person for breakfast, and 40 yuan (AU$8) per person for lunch or dinner. This price is cheaper than per capita consumption of having the same meal in Hongcun, which makes it popular among guests. It is also valued for the chance it creates for guests to meet new people and make friends. When I was there, all guests chose to share meals with hitherto unknown bodies dwelling in the hostel, rather than eating beyond its confines.
On my first day at the hostel, I had a dinner with the host and another two lodgers who had already been there for two days. They were Jessica, a Chinese woman in her 30s, and her boyfriend Mike, a Danish male who had been working in Beijing for more than six years. Mike chatted with us in Chinese for most of the time, but sometimes he needed Jessica to be his translator. At 6:00pm, the chef came to inform us the dinner was ready, and we were told to first get chopsticks, spoons and bowls from the disinfection cabinet in the kitchen by ourselves. After filling the bowls with rice one by one, we moved to the dining room. There was a round table on which all dishes had already been arranged. All dishes were famous local cuisines, including braised fish, tomato soup, fried bean curd and fried bamboo shoots with pork. We sat surrounding the table, close to each other. Extra spoons – that is, gong shao – were placed beside each dish for taking food to the individual's bowl. However, their presence there (in accordance with government advice) did not prevent diners from taking food with their own chopsticks or spoons. Indeed, no one used these spoons from the beginning to the end of the dinner.
This pattern kept repeating; in the following days, I shared meals with different people who I had not known before. We shared dishes in a manner of gong can, an intimate action including saliva contact and exchange. Bob, another guest at the hostel, stood out to me. It was dinnertime on my third day at the hostel when Bob arrived. He was invited to have dinner with us by the host. There was one seat available next to me and Bob sat there with chopsticks and a bowl full of rice. At first, he took food from the shared plates to his individual bowl with the extra spoon next to the dish, but he soon found there was no one taking food with this spoon except for him. ‘Excuse me, is it necessary to get food with gong shao?’ Bob asked when everyone was busy taking food from the shared dishes. No one was interrupted by his words, and the host gave him a short but powerful answer ‘absolutely no’ as he took a piece of fish with his own chopsticks. Bob immediately abandoned his deliberate action of taking food with gong shao. It seemed to me, being allowed to get food with his chopsticks liberated him – he returned to a familiar situation. I noticed that he sat more casually, and he more frequently took food from the shared dishes than he had done before. When most consumers finished the dinner and started to chat, there was still food left on the table. The remaining food was scattered over the dish. Bob, the only one who was still eating, gathered the remaining scattered food together with his chopsticks, poured it into his bowl and ate it up.
On cursory analysis, the continuation of gong can in the hostel context might seem just that – a continuation of preferred practice in the face of grave danger. A closer analysis reveals something different; namely, all of the surrounding conditions that had to change to permit gong can to continue, and all of them were articulations of communal practice. Analysis of these conditions reveals that safety and danger are conceived of in ways that do not ultimately depend on the western presumption of the erasure of strict bodily integrity. Indeed, in alignment with political and economic preferences and understandings, embodied safety persists in collectivity. The hostel owner described known neighbourhoods of bodies, animals and land to express the importance of collectivity and interconnectedness as a defence from the pandemic:
All ingredients are locally produced. There is a small-scale garden behind the hostel in which we plant vegetables, and most vegetables we have are from this garden. Meat is from domestically fed animals in the neighbouring villages. As for fermented tofu, sometimes we make it on our own, sometimes we buy it from local vendors. We always buy food from those who we know well. Thus, there is no need to worry that ingredients are contaminated in the cold-chain transportation.
The preservation of collectives of local, known bodies and practices is one kind of thing, but Hongcun is a tourist town, filled by definition with bodies no one knows. The COVID-19 protocols themselves delivered that knowledge to the hostel owner, permitting him to continue to operate gong can; they effectively permitted local collectives to continue, rather than threatening their continuance. Measures to control the spread of COVID-19 focused heavily in China, as elsewhere, on the movements of people, their avoidance of COVID-19 hotspots, and the evidence their own bodies could provide about their health status – chiefly their basal temperatures and their most recent test clearance. The combination of these factors produces a QR code and accompanying health status, ideally ‘green’. The host of the hostel stressed that the application of the health QR code nationwide allowed them to ensure bodies entering the hostel were COVID-19 safe:
Everyone has been checked many times. We can ensure our guests are COVID-safe because of timely updated records of their body movement and negative outcomes of COVID-PCR test within 48 hours. Although I do not know my guests personally, the whole COVID tracing system knows them – all is under regulation. Thus, we feel safe to be open, and even close to them.
Conclusion
While gong can appears to persist against all advice, it persists during the COVID-19 pandemic because the measures to guard against transmission produce the knowledge of bodies necessary to permit its occurrence and continuation. As Lin (2015) notes of the history of gong can, the practice arose to articulate, create and secure identity among and between different groups of eaters. The practice itself is about the creation and endurance of bodies that belong together – even in duress. In fact, duress affords gong can the very conditions it needs to continue unabated, permitting bodies to be known, to be, precisely, local. Notions of hygiene might not be strictly hitched to the individual body and its practice; they might well cling to the preserve of the collective. Indeed, as Bella's bitter experience shows, individuals might be read in the Chinese context as the result of communal operations of hygiene and safety that are taken on as many moral and filial dimensions as they do physical and biological.
Acknowledgement
I would like to give my sincere thanks to all participants for their generous sharing. Also, I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Simone Dennis for her constructive comments.
Note
A photo Lucy found online: https://m.weibo.cn/5337012665/4466402415542182 (accessed 15 October 2022).
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