Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION THROUGH EATING EXPERIENCE DESIGN A FOOD JOURNEY FROM TAIWAN TO GERMANY

YEN JU CHEN

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION THROUGH EATING EXPERIENCE DESIGN A FOOD JOURNEY FROM TAIWAN TO GERMANY Yen Ju Chen MA Integrated Design Kรถln International School of Design Technische Hochschule Kรถln Supervised by Prof. Wolfgang Laubersheimer Prof. Jenz Groร hans

Declaration I hereby declare that this master thesis has been carried out independently by myself and used no other means or unauthorised tools than those sources stated. I have marked these sources respectively.

I further declare that the images used in this thesis were developed by myself or derived from authorised sources. Those which are not are explicitly stated.

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

CONTENT

ONE

What food communicate?

1.0 We are what we eat 1.1 The invention of cookery 1.2 Food and culture 1.3 Food and identity

6 8 14 20

TWO

How food communicate?

2.0 Definition of ethnic food 2.1 Food migration: Pizza non Pizza 2.2 Ethnic food in communication theories 2.3 Between Taiwan and Germany 2.4 Food experience, meanings and understanding 2.5 STIR UP!

24 28 52 58 62 70

THREE

FOUR FIVE SIX

4

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans 3.0 Taiwan to Germans 3.1 Pre-interview analysis 3.2 Eating events and observation 3.3 Interview of feedback and reflection analysis 3.4 Summary

90 94 100 196 204

Research Phase Two: Germany to Taiwanese 4.0 Germany to Taiwanese 4.1 Interviews 4.2 Summary

206 210 232

A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany 5.0 Eating experience design 5.1 A food journey from Taiwan to Germany 5.2 Observation and feedback 5.3 Summary

236 238 278 290

Conclusion 6.0 Conclusion

294

Afterword

298

Bibliography Appendix

300 303

Content

RECIPES

Pizza non Pizza Pizza Romania Pizza Hungary Pizza Ukraine Pizza Germany Pizza Lebanon Pizza China Pizza Taiwan Pizza Hong Kong Pizza Nepal Pizza Bolivia A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany Xiaolongbao Braised pork belly with preserved mustard greens Cucumber salad Stir-fried sausages with scallions Stir-fried asparagus with champignon Mapo tofu Runbing Citrus soda

Eating 1: Hot Fry Classic fried rice Hakka stir-fry Stir-fried beef with scallions Egg pancake with dried radish Stir-fried seasonal leafy greens Eating 2: Vegetarianism Spicy cauliflower Ants climbing a tree Stewed tofu with aubergine Stir-fried dried tofu with green paprika Stir-fried cabbage Cucumber salad Rice with sweet potato Eating 3: Fish and Seafood Steamed tilapia Squid balls Stir-fried peas and mushrooms with oyster sauce Mussels with five-flavoured sauce Drunk shrimps Fried rice with shrimp paste Eating 4: Breakfast Omelette with tuna and corn Taiwan-style onigiri Eating 5: Noodles Tofu salad Spinach salad Eggplant salad Seaweed soup with eggs Braised pork Noodles with braised pork Noodles with peanut and sesame sauce Eating 6: Hot Pot Spicy hot pot Vegetarian hot pot Peanut and sesame dipping sauce Radish dipping sauce Shacha dipping sauce

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

1.0 WE ARE WHAT WE EAT

Pollan, M. (2006).The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York, NY: The Penguin Press, p.10.

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“...the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.”

What Food Communicate?

Food is the embodiment of knowledge of the past and of the present, of nature and of humans. Since languages vanish or transform to new meanings over time, food retaining the oldest memories allows individual and groups to see paths of their ancestors, know where they come from, and situate themselves. As a signifier, classifier and identity builder claimed by Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, food contributing to identity formation forges norms and values to give a sense to existence, to give eaters a given place in the world. Eating, as a trivial but pivotal act in our daily routine, is a constant practice of self-identification, as stated by Kittler, Sucher and Nelms: ‘Eating is a daily reaffirmation of (one’s) cultural identity.’ One ’s food preference indicates how one perceives his belonging groups and his distance to others. Humans as omnivorous creatures, based on their food choice, further interpret these collective preferences into cultures, establish norms and hierarchy upon the given meanings. What and how to eat reflect on a person’s perception of self, like the French epicure Brillat-Savarin’s famous saying: ‘Tell me what you eat, I will tell you who you are’.

One’s choice of food transmits a statement of one’s self-identification more than words alone. One of the most evident cases can be observed from vegetarians, by eating no meat to declare their beliefs and values of life.

Vegetarianism defined by different groups can be further categorized into Buddhist vegetarians (‘no killing’ as core concept and vegetables from the allium family are forbidden), ovo-lacto vegetarians (eggs and dairy products are allowed), fruitarians (consume only fallen fruits), Jain vegetarians (‘no violence’ as core concept. Eggs, honey and root vegetables are forbidden), vegans (consume no animal products, including eggs, dairy and honey) and so on, suggesting one’s identity can be proclaimed by the food he or she chooses to eat. Many aspects of eating behaviour such as what, how, where, when, and with whom to eat deliver messages of one’s cultural context. Eating transforms food from a voiceless object into action, transforming nutrients of food into an acknowledging process of meanings. Surely, the meaning of food is extremely complex to analyse. Hence there are many different perspectives to approach it. Scholliers argued that ‘sentiments of belonging via food do not only include the act of classification and consumption, but also the preparation, the organisation, the taboos, the company, the location, the pleasure, the time, the language, the symbols, the representation, the form, the meaning and the art of eating and drinking’. Food’s meanings can be acquired through forage, preparation, cookery, service, consumption and locations.

This research sought to learn how food transmitted cultural messages through eating experience between the Taiwanese and German groups in Germany. The result provides a design solution for effective cross-cultural communication which catalyses empathy and understanding of other ethnicities.

Scholliers, P. (2001). Meals, Food Narratives, and Sentiments of Belonging in Past and Present.

In: P. Scholliers, ed., Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages, 1st ed. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp.3-22.

Kittler, P., Sucher, K. and Nahikian-Nelms, M. (2011). Food and Culture. 6th ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, p. 4.

Hauck-Lawson, A. (2004).

Introduction to Special Issue on the Food Voice. Food, Culture & Society, 7(1), pp.24-25.

Scholliers, P. (2001). Meals, Food Narratives, and Sentiments of Belonging in Past and Present.

In: P. Scholliers, ed., Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages, 1st ed. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp.7.

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1.1 THE INVENTION OF COOKERY

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What Food Communicate?

Fire is the mother of human intelligence.

The discovery of using fire is a turning point driving the human history from depending on nature to the formation of collective society. Fire delivered warmth, lit up the night, and scared away beasts. It provided stability for human ancestors to control their dwelling environments. Naturally, fire was linked to the notion of ‘God provides’ or the majestic power of the mother nature in archaic beliefs. The traces of fire worship have existed in many of the oldest religious and animist traditions until today, for instance, the practice of cremation in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism; fire sacrifice, or Homa, in the Vedic religions; and the lasting flame during the Olympic games. Nevertheless, its most prominent contribution to human species is the catalysis of the invention of cookery. When forests were burned down after wildfire, the forefathers of Homo sapiens who relied on forage for their food supply paced through ashes and harvested animal remains, exposed tubers, and cracked nuts. The natural catastrophes unveiled the potential sources of food, turning a scorched land into a prosperous field for food gathering. In a modern aspect, wildfire hosted a grill feast for our ancestry. Not merely that, it taught us how to cook.

The forest experience demonstrated how fire altered the texture of meat, tubers and grains, making the inedible into eatable, enabling humans to ingest foods which were hard to be digested in their natural forms. Human species had soon acquired the skill of managing fire and transforming rice, wheat, potatoes and corns into the staple food of daily meals. Moreover, scientists suggested that the domestication of fire had accelerated the evolutionary changes of physical traits of humankind. Since fire changed the way of consumption, humankind had evolved with distinct features from other genera in the same taxonomic family. While chimpanzees spent 5 hours a day only on chewing raw food, the eating of cooked food allowed humankind to spare time and strength on chewing and digesting, leading to the development of smaller jaws and teeth compared to chimpanzees (figure 1.1.1). The ease of digestion caused the shortened intestines and shrunken stomachs. These bodily changes gave room for a bigger brain. Considering long intestinal tracks and large brains both used up a massive amount of the energy produced by the body, the decrease of abdominal organs allowed the expansion of brains. Nowadays, an adult brain accounting for 2 percent of the body weight consumes nearly 20 percents of the energy gained. It is a highly-active and greedy organ, eating energy even during our sleep. Energy obtained in the form of glucose through blood vessels can be found in most of our modern food supplement, from fruits, nuts, grains, beans to vegetables.

Through cooking, ancient humans were able to include foods in various categories into diet. Heat not only softened fibre but killed harmful bacteria as well as destroyed toxin in raw food. Diverse and safe nutrients were absorbed to feed the brain, completing the functionality of what it has today.

In his publication Catching Fire, Richard Wrangham argues that cooked food is the key to the physiological evolution of human intelligence. The reduction of time on eating also devoted the freedom to engage a broader range of activities.

Harari, Y. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Vintage, pp.13-14.

Harari, Y. (2011). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Vintage, pp.13-14.

Jabr, F. (2012). Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?.

Scientific American. [online] Available at: https://www. scientificamerican.com/article/ thinking-hard-calories/ [Accessed 12 Mar. 2018].

Wrangham, R. (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. 1st ed. London: Profile Books.

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Figure 1.1.1 Comparison of Human (top) and Chimpanzee (down) Skull and Brain Gervais, P. (1854). Histoire naturelle des mammifères: avec l’indication de leurs moeurs et de leurs rapports avec les arts, le commerce et l’agriculture. 2nd ed. Paris: L. Curmer.

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What Food Communicate?

The advent of manipulating fire opened up a gate to a new era. Humans changed the way and the types of food they consumed, suffered less from diseases caused by rotten food, detected as well as defeated prying eyes in the dark with torch fire, and kept themselves sustained through the long winter. In spite of their physical disadvantage, humans’ tasks were not limited by their physical design anymore. With the control of flare in hand, they were able to transcend time restriction, to explore the neighbourhood with the vision provided by flame, to build a stronger community, and to form a collective belief through the rites of fire.

Water is the father of cultural diversity.

If so to say, fire introduced cooking and shaped social structures changing humans’ style of living; water promoted cuisines and guided tribes on the variable paths of culture. Cooking with water extracts the essence out of meat and plants. The experiments on combining ingredients in water unfold the exploration of tastes which is incapable of achieving by the sole use of fire. A pot of stew is a celebration of flavours, fusing the local ecosystem into its complex flavour system. By adjusting the amount of water, the temperature, the timing of tossing, the duration of simmering and so one, food preparers play magic on flavours and share this odour experience with their close ones. The tastes in the mouth root in one’s memory, associating to one’s belongingness and affection with his or her caretakers. The odour experience varies from family to family, from indigenous tribe to indigenous tribe, and from one region to another. The variants of flavours represent the division of cultures.

“Water.” Cooked, season 1, episode 2, (2016). [TV programme] Netflix.

Such division is obvious to observe on the condiments used today. Soy sauce, as an important sauce used in the east part of Asia, has mutated into multiple forms in different regions. Generally speaking, salty soy sauce is primarily adopted to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, whereas in Indonesia, sweet soy sauce consisting of palm sugar is more common. The variants of components, methods of production, consistency and colours among salty soy sauce showcase the characters of regional cuisines. In China, soy sauce is often categorised into dark and light.

While the dark one glazes the food, the light one containing a larger degree of salinity is used for adjusting the saltiness. Cooking is like a process of revising the hues on a painting in order to reach the harmony of flavours and visual aesthetics. Whereas in Japan, soy sauce is carefully elaborated to pair with specific dishes. Lighter in salinity and colour, Japanese soy sauce gently supports the initial flavours of the fresh ingredients.

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“Water.” Cooked, season 1, episode 2, (2016). [TV programme] Netflix.

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“Water is the medium of flavour as well as heat, allowing spices and other seasonings to make their presence felt. Given enough time, water will break down the toughest fibre in both plants and animals into a tasty, nutritious liquid. The aroma instantly tells us where in the world we are, culinarily speaking.”

What Food Communicate?

As Michael Pollan said, ‘Water is the medium of flavour as well as heat, allowing spices and other seasonings to make their presence felt. Given enough time, water will break down the toughest fibre in both plants and animals into a tasty, nutritious liquid. The aroma instantly tells us where in the world we are, culinarily speaking’. By the use of fire and water, our ancestry transformed nature into culture. The invention of cookery has driven us to a separate avenue from basic instinct to intelligence. Upon the cooking skill acquired, we build orders, norms, rituals, myths, values and beliefs around our food, and gradually infuse the food with the metaphors we live by.

Food has since become a vehicle telling stories of our identification of selves and our place of existence, the perceived context of our standing point that we named ‘culture’.

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1.2 FOOD AND CULTURE

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What Food Communicate?

We decide every day on what to eat, but rarely our food choice is based on the empirical evidence of what is edible and inedible. Our food choice is in most of the situations determined by the social rules we were taught, educating us what is food and what is not. What we consider food, when put into a dissimilar cultural context, may provoke disgust, dangerous, or, when it is opposed to religious laws, foul feel among others. For instance, offering blue cheese to a Taiwanese may inflict unpleasant emotions as stinky tofu to a French. Or asking a Muslim to taste pork cutlets may deliver a hostile message. This distinction declares the boundary between the culturally identified conceptualisations of raw, cooked and rotten food, as the result Lévi-Strauss gained from his study of an indigenous tribe in South America.

In his book, The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss analyses the relations between nature and culture on the culinary level. Cooking is seen as a civilisation process transforming food from the instinct nature to the intellectual culture. By Lévi-Strauss’s observation, the perception of food in every culture can be categorised into raw, cooked and rotten. Cooked and rotten mark the 2 statuses of food under cultural and natural transformation where the raw comes in between as a pole. Cooked food which has involved in a series of human interventions is a product of reconstruction on a cultural basis. Whereas the rotten, representing food in its natural decay process, is the closest form of nature. These 3 constitute the culinary triangle that explains the viewpoint existing in the world cuisine (figure 1.2.1).

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1996). The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The definitions of raw, cooked and rotten food are highly subject to interpretations which vary from one group to another as well as from one period to another. For instance, stir-fry as one of the primary methods in Taiwanese cookery creates a fresher mouthfeel than boil or stew. Perceived by people who are not familiar with the style may see the crunchy vegetables as undercooked, the product of the raw. Vice versa, a medium steak with rosy colour in the centre, seen as a piece of delicacy for a westerner, may receive opposite opinions in the east. The conceptualisation may shift, widen or narrow not only according to places but through time. Especially when globalisation has gradually become a universal phenomenon, our worldviews repeatedly undergo phases of conflict, collapse, interweave, merge and reform. A slice of soft-ripened cheese is evaluated differently in the east from it was 20 years ago.

Lévi-Strauss believed that the notions of raw, cooked and rotten could explain the binary categorisation of nature and culture, and each category was filled with oppositional concepts that came as pairs. Take techniques derived from cooking, namely from culture, as examples, boiled and roasted state the rotten and the raw, corresponding to the opposition of elaborated and unelaborated. Boiled meat consisting of human-made procedures requires water and a receptacle, an artificial object, which prolongs the distance of the meat and the fire. The extended length to nature implies its shortened distance to culture. Roasted meat, on the other hand, is exposed directly on fire and requires no external mediator like water or oil, indicating the tendency towards the side of nature (figure 1.2.2).

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unchanged

raw

temperature

changed

microbiology

cooked

rotten

culture

nature

Figure 1.2.1 The Culinary Triangle

grilled/roasted raw

(+)

air

(-)

LĂŠvi-Strauss, C. (2012). The Culinary Triangle. In: C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik, ed., Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed.

London: Routledge, pp.46.

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(+)

water

(-)

cooked

rotten

smoked

boiled

Figure 1.2.2 Oppositional Concepts in Cooking Techniques

What Food Communicate?

Approached from the aspect of social prestige, boiling as a more elaborated cooking technique was perceived in the archaic period superior to roasting, due to its elimination of rawness. However, this association has reversed through time since boiled food in modern European societies is usually served domestically by female characters to the family, while roasted food often prepared by men who indulge in controlling open fire is offered to guests. The boiled is connected to the internal circle where the food is shared with intimate groups, whereas the roasted connected to the outer circle is exhibited to the public.

From another point of view, the degree of cultural modification decides the hierarchical position of the food. The less human intervention involves, the higher quality the food is. This symbolic meaning appears in the cases of sushi, cheese and wine. The rotten is even more valued than the raw. When food has gone through the intrinsic procedures of ripening, fermenting or decaying, in spite of the controlled environments, it carries a higher quality that serves as a match for higher social status.

Of course, as mentioned before that the concept shifts, widens, or narrows hinging on the situations. The ancient Chinese empires had a long history of modifying food ingredients into fine edible art pieces. The more the food was transformed, the more prestigious and sophisticated the eater was. The use of knife/fork and chopsticks implies the cognitive difference between the west and the east, which knife and fork are designed for undivided, chunks of food, suggesting the more primitive eating style close to nature, chopsticks, on the other hand, are designed for picking bite-sized food, indicating an eating style close to culture. Furthermore, the same food in a different context may jump out from its conventional category. When new food is invented, or when traditional food is introduced to another place, it generates a whole new meaning according to the cultural groups in touch.

“… the cooking of a society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure - or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions.”

Lévi-Strauss, C. (2012). The Culinary Triangle. In: C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik, ed., Food and Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed.

London: Routledge, pp.47.

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S. Deshpande, M. (2010). History of the Indian Caste System and its Impact on India Today.

Undergraduate. College of Liberal Arts, California Polytechnic State University.

Dhillon, A. (2014). In India, caste system ensures you are what you eat. Post Magazine. [online] Available at: http://www.scmp. com/magazines/post-magazine/ article/1558061/you-are-whatyou-eat [Accessed 16 Mar. 2018].

Cooking is a language unconsciously revealing its social structure. By adopting Lévi-Strauss’s proposition into practise fields, food and eating illustrate a picture of a culture that is untold by words. Take the dietary codes in India as an instance, the food habits have been far influenced by the caste system which specifies the social hierarchy of the Indian citizens. The caste system classifies people into 4 ranks: Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra. Brahmans occupy the highest position consisting of religious leaders, such as priests and scholars. Kshatriyas at the second place comprising politicians and soldiers are the governing authority. Followed by Vaishyas, the merchants. Shudras at last, are those who work as peasants, artisans, labours and servants. A group falls out from the system are the outcastes, or the untouchables, whose occupations are considered impure related to blood and death. They serve at the bottom of the hierarchy and do not obtain a place in ranks. Butchers, midwives and undertakers belong to this group. The caste system clarifies the restrictions covering every aspect of living, including occupation, marriage, social contact and diet. Each rank of people who bear these inherited statuses since birth has their obligations to fulfil and taboos to avoid.

Focusing on the dietary rules, the notions of purity and pollution in Hinduism profoundly affect what and how a caste eats. The degree of purity in food is decided by whether food is retrieved from violence. Therefore, meat and root vegetables, associating with slaughters of living creatures, are excluded from Brahman’s diet. Onion and garlic are also forbidden, due to their impact on stimulating the despicable emotions like anger and lust. Brahmans as the spiritual practitioners practice strict vegetarian rituals. Not only that he eats just pure food, before eating, he needs to cleanse his body and soul by taking a bath, changing to new clothing, and incorporating specific rites on the dining table in order to reach the peaceful state of mind. The food preparers must undergo the cleansing ceremony before entering the kitchens as well.

Women in their monthly menstrual period are considered polluted and hence prohibited from food preparation. The food must be prepared and served by the same or an upper rank. If a lower caste touches the cooked food, it’s considered contaminated and must be rejected by Brahmans. The dining codes restrain a Brahman to eat with pleasure. It is rather a penance.

On the contrary to Brahmans, the outcastes were born inherently polluted.

They provide services in contact with filth, blood and violence for higher castes to maintain their purity, at the same time, giving themselves no chance to get away from the polluting materials. Some diets from lower castes include beef. However, their recipes would never be recorded in the cookbooks of the upper ranks.

The dietary rules in the caste system are extremely complex, rigorously limiting the intake of food ingredients, the material used for the receptacles, the eating etiquettes, the cooking process as well as the social interactions occurred during the food transmission. By deciphering the modern Indian cuisine, a local meal reveals its dining codes of a particular caste hierarchy.

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What Food Communicate?

In his 2014 article, Amrit Dhillon endorsed the motto ‘you are what you eat’.

He stressed: ‘If the Hindu caste system has been rigid throughout history, the dietary habits of each caste have been equally immutable. You are what you eat is a simple dictum except in India, where it means much more.’ Dhillon further added: ‘What you eat dictates who you marry, where you live, your job, your social status, whether you are “dirty” or “clean”, whether you are entitled or deprived, and whether you can hold your head high or let it hang in shame, because the food you eat is a function of your caste’.

Dhillon, A. (2014). In India, caste system ensures you are what you eat. Post Magazine. [online] Available at: http://www.scmp. com/magazines/post-magazine/ article/1558061/you-are-whatyou-eat [Accessed 16 Mar. 2018].

Although the caste system is considered outdated and abandoned by the neoteric Indians, the way they eat discloses where they come from. The imprints of the past have been cooked in the food of the present. Reversely saying, from the food today, we are detecting the face of the past.

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1.3 FOOD AND IDENTITY

Fischler, C. (1988). Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information, 27, pp.281.

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“Clearly, the eater’s life and health are at stake whenever the decision if taken to incorporate; but so too are his place in the universe, his essence, his nature, in short, his identity.”

What Food Communicate?

Food is not merely an outward announcement of one’s culture, but it’s also an inward affirmation of one’s identity. By the food we choose to eat, we proclaim the value that we see in ourselves.

The Omnivore’s Paradox The Omnivore’s Paradox is a concept first introduced by psychologist Paul Rozin to explain the two contradictory characteristics of humankind in their choice of food. Human, as an omnivorous creature, has the possibility to intake numerous food sorts owing to their advanced techniques of cooking which transforms the inedible into edible. However, we do not choose our food in the light of the various options given. On one side, humans have the nature of being curious about new food. The flexibility of adapting to changes in environments increased their chance of survival and accustomed them to the exploration of food. On the other side, they are afraid of the harmful effects of consuming unfamiliar food. This ambivalence described by the French sociologist Claude Fischler is ‘the oscillation between the two poles of neophobia and neophilia’. Worry, thus, takes in the form of disgust has prevented us from dangerous substances when encountering new food.

Individuals’ aversion to particular foodstuffs is not fully decided by their natural instinct, by research, the causes often lay on the base of sociocultural transmission. A human infant responds positively to sweet tastes while intuitively rejecting to bitter, sour and strong tastes. Children between the age of zero to one, the oral stage of psychosexual development in Freud’s theory, show strong inclination to put any object into mouths. Everything is potentially edible. In addition to few innate abominations to specific tastes, a child’s distinguishment of likes and dislikes is further shaped by the learning of his or her caretakers’ reaction to food, especially from their frowning faces to the things they find disgusting. Since then, the binary judgement of likes and dislikes by the taste buds of tongues has evolved into a complex system of preferences and attitudes towards food.

In the 1986 article The Acquisition of Likes and Dislikes for Foods, Rozin and Fallon categorised the reasons of Americans’ acceptance of and rejection to food into sensory properties, anticipated consequences and ideational factors, in correspondence to the coupling perceptions of distaste versus danger, good taste versus beneficial, and disgust versus inappropriate.

Sensory properties as the grounding criteria based on one’s most subjective senses to measure the liking, in Rozin and Fallon’s observation, were still inevitably influenced by the sociocultural context one had lived in. The foods liked by individuals were those widely accepted by their cultures. Negative emotions or bodily reactions after consumption could lead to distasteful and dangerous feel. If nausea or vomit occurred after taking the food, eaters tended to dislike its taste. In other cases of negative bodily reactions such as allergic symptoms, eaters would avoid the food, yet not dislike its taste.

Fischler, C. (1988). Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information, 27, pp.278.

Rozin, P. and Fallon, A. (1986).

The Acquisition of Likes and Dislikes for Foods. In: What Is America Eating? Proceedings of a Symposium. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press (US), pp.58-71.

Rozin, P. and Vollmecke, T. A. (1986). Food Likes and Dislikes.

Annual Review of Nutrition, 6, pp.433-456.

Rozin, P. and Fallon, A. (1986).

The Acquisition of Likes and Dislikes for Foods. In: What Is America Eating? Proceedings of a Symposium. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press (US), pp.58-71.

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Several causes of increasing likes for food, identified by Pozin and Fallon, were the adequate exposure of the food to the eaters, the satisfaction gained after consumption and the association to the known good tastes. These factors could not be separated from the social and cultural elements eaters in touch with during their growth to adulthood. If so to say, culture is a gate decides what food is allowed to enter and to expose to its people, social forces serve as its guards ensuring the cultural messages and values are delivered to the eaters. In addition to the intrinsic favour/aversion of tastes, our food preferences and attitudes towards food are culturally and socially shaped. In other words, every food choice we make is a constant reminder of the place we stand. The food we eat represents the way we identify ourselves.

Fischler, C. (1988). Food, Self and Identity. Social Science Information, 27, pp.275-293.

Incorporation Humans are the conscious creatures continuously seeking for meanings. This characteristic embodying in their omnivorous consumption has transformed into the process of incorporation. As Fischler defined in his paper Food, Self and Identity, internalising food substances into the body of meanings had become the principle to resolve the ‘omnivorous anxiety’, meaning the uncertain feel generated from the confrontation of what food should and should not be eaten. Meanings in exercise were embedded into culinary systems which consisted of rules and norms regulating what and how to eat, as well as worldviews providing cultural references to the orders of the universe. Eating conveyed the properties around food from the outside world to the inside of the body. It signified the transmutation of values and beliefs food carried into self-being, thereby forming his or her identity. When humans shared food, they also shared its practices, representations, rules, norms and worldviews. By Fischler’s words, food was the fundamental bond that linked the self to the world, the individual to the collective, the micro to the macro.

Incorporation is taken as a tool to measure the distance between groups, and for individuals to define belongingness and otherness. Humans mark the territories by comparing the similarity of their eatings and cuisines. They divide the familiar into ours and the unfamiliar into theirs. The commonness owned by a group of people, hence, builds the collective identity among its members. This collective identity is absorbed as a part of self regardless of the shifting of the environment. An immigrant would have home food on his or her dining table in spite of how well he or she integrated into the new culture. Food retains the memories that are irreversible by external forces.

Incorporation is also used for distinguishing the difference of others. The food others eat outline their characters, which projects our perception, interpretation, imagination and classification of the food characters on a person or an ethnic group. Russians are tough due to the amount of vodka drunken. The French are relaxed owing to their everlasting dinner. The British are sophisticated because of their appreciation for the tea break. The Chinese are strange because they eat everything. Koreans are spicy as a result of their spicy food. Ethnic food serves as an introduction to its culture, and further an explanation of its people.

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What Food Communicate?

In other cases, incorporation functions as a statement of similarity in the conflicts of identity. Descendants of the first immigrants may refuse foods from their parents while accepting foods of the new culture to seek for peer recognition and to avoid stereotypes. The American chef Eddie Huang once held a speech about his identity crisis as an Asian-American growing up in a white neighbourhood. After bullied by classmates because of the different food he had in the lunchbox, Eddie asked his mom to prepare ‘white people food’ for him. White people food seen by young Eddie would shorten the distance between him and the group he wished to belong to.

Huang, E. (2013). TED fellow.

Immersed in the globalised structure, the youth generations have a wider selection not only from their roots but from beyond the national borders.

Their food choices are interculturally influenced and therefore, giving the freedom to exhibit their perceived selves and belongingness with the food they carefully select. Vegetarianism, for instance, is an arising movement that utters the newly-shaped collective identity crossing ethnic cultures. Apart from the traditional vegetarianism stemming from religious systems, modern vegetarians reject meat diet as a means of protests (against manufactured meat, against unjust policy, for animal rights, for health, or for environmental friendliness) and as an embodiment of their central beliefs (no killing, no violence, no pain, no unnatural). It establishes a new religion accepting new members whoever agree to practice its dietary codes, but rather willingly than compulsorily. These members measure the interpersonal distance by verifying the similarity of their consumptions, such as whether fish is included in the diet, are eggs, dairy products and honey allowed, processed food or not, is the fruit naturally fallen etc. The modern vegetarianism branches into multiple subgroups that each advocates a philosophy and the benefits out of their doings. They name themselves as political vegetarians, pescetarians, fruitarians, flexitarians, vegans and so forth. Food is served as an intragroup language to identify their alliance.

Modern consumers intake food to retrieve identity and recognition. A recent paper has pointed out that customers tended to purchase food products based on their perceived selves or the images they want to be seen by the public, for instance, masculine, feminine, student, wealthy, healthy, eco-friendly, fair. Most of the time, they inevitably fell into the marketing manipulation of social stereotypes and biases on food packagings. One of the most effective strategies is to associate healthfulness of food with congruent gender schema, which suggests ‘women eat healthier than men’. Healthy food in feminine packagings and unhealthy food in masculine packagings attract more buyers and convince them that the food taste better. ‘Food, in short, will lose in substance and gain in functions’, as the philosopher Roland Barthes claimed in his 1961 article. This aphorism has gradually been proven true. Food is no longer a constitution of substances. It is also the nutrition, the medicines, furthermore, the meanings, a language, a culture, a belonging group, a statement, an identity.

Zhu, L., Brescoll, V., Newman, G. and Uhlmann, E. (2015). Macho Nachos: The Implicit Effects of Gendered Food Packaging on Preferences for Healthy and Unhealthy Foods. Social Psychology, 46, pp.182-196.

Barthes, R. (1997). Vers une psycho-sociologie de l’alimentation moderne. In: C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik, ed., Food and Culture: A Reader.

Psychology Press, pp.26.

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2.0 DEFINITION OF ETHNIC FOOD

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How Food Communicate?

Ethnic food is the perceived representing food of a nation or a culture. As Möhring expounded in her research of ethnic food in West Germany, ‘certain dishes, formerly typical only for one region or another, are stylised in such a way that they become the embodiment of national cuisines’. ‘Ethnic’ as an adjective defined by the Cambridge Dictionary means ‘relating to a particular race of people’. However, jointed food, its relation with a nation’s or a culture’s images in the contemporary era is often sculpted by marketing strategies and rarely by its people. Such ethnic or cultural images can be identified by outsiders who are not members of the group and vary from place to place. For instance, Schweinshaxe is seen as ‘the German food’ by the major Taiwanese, despite the fact that it originated from the state of Bavaria, representing its regional significance, yet not German cuisine as a whole. As the cultural context shifts, Bratwurst substituted beef for pork is seen as a significant German food in Indonesia due to its religious influence by Islam.

As stated by Möhring, ‘ethnic food is intrinsically involved in contemporary discourses on ethnic identities and serves undoubtedly as a “powerful metonym for national cultures” as well as a “source of racial stereotyping”’.

Möhring, M. (2008).

Transnational Food Migration and the Internalization of Food Consumption: Ethnic Cuisine in West Germany. In: A. Nützenadel and F. Trentmann, ed., Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, 1st ed. Oxford: Berg Publisher, pp.129-150.

Ethnic food serves as a channel for communicating ethnic cultures, whether or not it presents only the superficials. One reason is that it helps to catalyse the interest of inquiring and knowing what composites the taste, smells, appearance and texture, and further this composition is identified by the eaters as a representative of a culture. Take sushi as an example, when one first tastes sushi without any background knowledge of Japanese culture, he or she may question the vinegary rice, the raw fish and the dipping sauce comprising pungent green paste and soy sauce. He or she thus has this composition imprinted in mind as Japanese food and further identifies other similar compositions as with Japanese traits. Therefore, whenever he or she is served with raw fish on top of vinegary rice or Wasabi sauce, he or she may interpret it as Japanese food. Vice versa, one who has experienced sushi may expect the food served in a Japanese restaurant possessing the similar features. Moreover, one who holds curiosity about the use of raw fish and Wasabi in Japanese cuisine may trace back to its geographical, historical, social, or political influences on the modern Japanese culture. Ethnic food visualises the ethnic culture and turns the process of eating into a cultural experience.

However, imprints of food could cause stereotypes and biases against a nation, an ethnicity, or a culture. One may see a particular food ingredient or composition as an entirety of the national cuisine and claim that he or she does not like Japanese food because he or she does not favour raw fish. The generalisation could further grow into discrimination against an entire ethnic group. One famed example is the association of the sushi culture with the whaling activities, which arouses the anger against Japanese based on the bias of ‘Japanese are all whale killers’.

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

Möhring, M. (2008).

Transnational Food Migration and the Internalization of Food Consumption: Ethnic Cuisine in West Germany. In: A. Nützenadel and F. Trentmann, ed., Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, 1st ed. Oxford: Berg Publisher, pp.129-150.

Another feature of ethnic food is its transnational framework. As an example of döner kebab in Germany, it was a style of sandwich invented by Turkish immigrants in Germany. By combining grilled meat with salad and dressing in flatbread, döner kebab represents 2 distinct cultural traits merging into one new creation. It suggests the compromise of the original identity to accommodate a different social context. Ethnic food inevitably faces challenges to adopt local ingredients to its preparation and presentation, which on the other hand, gives a chance to integrate its traits to a novel environment and introduce a rather familiar eating language to its new eaters. Ethnic eating environment thus becomes an interface that tells eaters to its ethnic story. By learning the foods, the tastes, the ingredients, the eating tools, the presentation, the etiquette and the settings, eaters acquire information of the ethnic culture delivered by details on the dining table.

On the other hand, ethnic food could lead to misinterpretations or biases in commercial environments, for instance, attracting customers by remaining the expectable characteristics of food while leaving out features that are alien to its new eaters. The consideration of commercial interests has formed a strange phenomenon that numerous ethnic restaurants serve more or less the same food as if they were chain stores. It is especially peculiar when rice with soy sauce-based stir-fried meat or vegetable can be found in most of the Asian restaurants in Germany. These ethnic restaurants provide no more than a single and monotonous aspect to its ethnic culture. Furthermore, it offers elements for stereotypes and biases. When one does not enjoy the sole style of food restaurants serve, he or she may claim the dislike to the entire ethnic cuisine since the diversity was never introduced to him or her.

26

How Food Communicate?

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

2.1 FOOD MIGRATION :PIZZA NON PIZZA

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How Food Communicate?

In the interviews with the Germans which will be described in chapter three, one thing caught the researcher’s attention. A criterion many interviewees depend on to judge the food quality is the authenticity of the food. Many believe that as long as the food is cooked as close as with the original recipe and ingredients, it tastes better. The charm of ethnic food is not only lying on its tastes, but it also provides scope for eaters to look into the ethnic culture.

The cases collected are not limited to Germany. Throughout the interviews, many interviewees when recalling their ethnic eating experience outside Germany had mentioned pizza. Pizza occupies a unique position in the modern German diet. Many Germans in their 20s grew up eating pizzas as their daily meal choice. Therefore, many do not exclude this Italian delicacy out from their home food. Pizza has rooted in their memories accompanying the young Germans‘ childhood. As they leave home for study, pizza becomes a convenient option credited to the modern refrigeration technology and delivery service. It is not hard to imagine that pizza possesses a function of consoling the lonely souls far away from home. When young Germans travel, after experiencing cultural shocks and cultural exchanges, they look for something familiar that brings the feeling of home, something they have at home, such as a pizza. Nevertheless, pizzas in a foreign environment may carry distinct characteristics from pizzas in Germany, which may cause a greater disappointment, or amusement, than having a lousy pizza back home to these German travellers. These stories were shared with the researcher in their interviews, which gave her inspirations to investigate further about food migration from this point.

What makes food authentic? This question emerges inevitably coming across discussions about authentic food. Authenticity is a shield established to prevent the savage behaviour foreigners treat ‘our’ food. So people frown, grumble, tease, contempt and overly criticise while noticing their food is forged with features not belong to them. They are disappointed thinking their food is not handled in a right way. This judgement is extended to interpret the group identity and reflects their fear of ‘we are not treated in a right way’.

Another question raises when people are busy to protect their food legacy from being ruined by outsiders, which at the same time questions themselves: Are we the creators of our food? When tracing back the food origin, people often find what they are reluctant to admit, is that every food is created from somewhere else, or mutated from features of the local and foreign cultures. Take pizza as an example, even how proud an Italian is of their pizzas, pizza is not a 100% Italian invention. Records of ingredients on flatbread are found throughout the ancient history in Greece, Egypt and the Roman Empire­1. Similar variations have been discovered all over the world, such as Lebanese manakish, Greek pita, German flammkuchen, French quiche, Chinese bing and Indian naan. Pizza is considered as a type of bread topped with tomatoes and cheese. However, not until the late 19th century have all the elements come together. Before, pizzas were sweet and without tomato sauce2. Pizza had developed in its present form after tomato was brought from America to Europe in the 16th century. Napoli chefs started to add tomatoes on their yeast bread in the late 18th. Since then, pizza has gained massive popularity from the poor to the nobles3.

Helstosky, C. (2008). Pizza: A Global History. Islington, London: Reaktion Books.

1

2

3

Grigorieva, A. (2006). Naming Authenticity and Regional Italian Cuisine. In: R. Hosking, ed., Authenticity in the Kitchen: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2005. Barnes, London: Prospect Books, pp.211-216.

Rugnetta, M. (2016). A History of Pizza in 8 Slices!. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ZxUaTQ2_CsM [Accessed 9 Apr. 2018].

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As a global food as pizza, it has integrated into the regional diets and become one of the popular daily food options for billions of population all over the world. Pizzas in different places have evolved their characteristics illustrating the intercultural influences. The imagination of the pizzas motivates people to do plentiful experiments and recreate this exotic delicacy with their local ingredients. It is, however, not thrilling news for Italians who prefer to maintain their tradition.

Food in different places of the world links with one another through certain kinds of connections. Naples would not be able to claim the invention of today‘s pizza if tomatoes were not introduced from America in the first place. The food network is a complex system. It never stops absorbing the new influences and changing its structure. To visualise these connections, pizza styles in different ethnic cultures are collected from an international group in Germany. The questions about what pizzas they have at home and their experience with pizzas during travels were answered. The pizzas were recreated based on these descriptions to seek for patterns of the food network.

In the project Pizza non Pizza, the researcher recreated 10 pizzas representing different regions: Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Germany, Lebanon, Nepal, Bolivia, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong. The styles are based on people’s descriptions of their home pizzas and the pizzas they have experienced during travelling. These pizzas are documented with photos. The pizzas which follow the Italian recipes and the similar variants from the local cuisines are excluded from this experiment.

30

PIZZA ROMANIA

Mihăilă, S. (2017). Pizza in Romania.

Toppings More tomato sauce, more salami more cheese.

“In Romania, we have similar pizzas as in Italy. However, we put more things on the pizza. More tomato sauce, more cheese, more of everything.”

PIZZA HUNGARY

Tóth, L. (2017). Pizza in Hungary.

Toppings Tomato sauce, ham, pineapple, cheap cheese.

“Our pizza has thick dough following the style of American pizza.

Sometimes instead of tomato sauce, we use ketchup as the base. The common ingredients for pizza are sausage, onion, ham, pineapple, bacon and cheap cheese.”

PIZZA UKRAINE

Nahorniak, L. (2017). Pizza in Ukraine.

Toppings Tomato sauce, yellow and red paprikas, aubergine, sweet corn, cheese.

“Our pizza is similar to Italian pizza.

We use ingredients like paprika, corn and aubergine on the vegetarian pizza.�

PIZZA GERMANY

Hezinger, D. (2017). Pizza in Germany.

Toppings Tomato sauce, schnitzel (cutlet), cheese.

“When my family visited a pizzeria in Italy, my little brother ordered a ‘Schnitzel Pizza’ which was his favourite back home, that terrified the waiter.”

PIZZA LEBANON

Bou Assi, Z. (2017). Pizza in Lebanon.

Toppings Tomato sauce, green and yellow bell peppers, olives, mushrooms, thyme, cheese.

“We don’t have special Lebanese pizzas. We have a pastry ‘manakish’ that foreigners think is Lebanese pizza, but it’s not. I guess the ‘Lebanese version’ of a pizza is tomato sauce, bell peppers, olives, mushrooms and cheese. Most common is putting thyme instead of oregano on top.”

PIZZA CHINA

Wang, X. (2017). Pizza in China.

Toppings Beef steak, green and red bell peppers, sweet corn, mushrooms, cheese.

“I used to eat pizzas from a chain pizzeria ‘Babeila’ in Shanghai. It’s cheaper than Pizza Hut. But it’s only fast food, you cannot compare with real pizzas.”

PIZZA TAIWAN

Chen, Y. (2017). Pizza in Taiwan.

Toppings Black pepper sauce, julienned beef steak, green bell pepper, onion, mushrooms, cheese.

“I think Taiwanese people embrace new food. Food is just so important in their daily life that they celebrate with food, comfort themselves with food, honour their gods with food, and even mourn with food. Taiwan is also an immigrant land that you can see different cultures meet and integrate here. Like the pizza, we combine our traditional dish with it. Creating new food is in our nature.�

PIZZA HONG KONG

Yau, L. (2017). Pizza in Hong Kong.

Toppings Tomato sauce, Vienna sausage, yellow paprika, peach, olives, chicken breast, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese.

“There are basically 2 types of pizza. When I grow older, I am more willing to pay for authentic Italian or American pizzas. These pizzas are usually topped with common and simple ingredients such as Parma ham and Rucola. If I meet with friends or ask for home delivery, Pizza Hut is the first choice. They offer flavours that have been adjusted to fit the taste of Hong Kong people, things like seafood with thousand island dressing, Hawaiian, or stuffed crust.

New flavours are introduced by season.�

PIZZA NEPAL

Bonas, J. (2017). Pizza in Nepal.

Bread and Toppings Naan bread, ketchup, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, sweet corn, baby spinach, green bell pepper, mozzarella cheese.

“I remember the situation when we were in the mountain area in Nepal.

There were places offering pizzas to the hikers. I said to myself: ‘I will give it a try to see how it tastes’. I think they didn’t really know how a proper pizza should be made, out of which ingredients. They had this Nepalese bread and put tomato ketchup, cheese and some vegetables on it.

Ketchup is a no-go for a pizza. From things like that, you see the cultural mix. It’s really fun.”

PIZZA BOLIVIA

Niederfeilner, H. (2017). Pizza in Bolivia.

Bread and Toppings Yeast bread, feta cheese.

“You can find pizza everywhere, even in Bolivia. In Bolivia, they just don’t know how to make the bread, it’s super thick. And they put a lot of cheese on it, not yellow cheese but fresh cheese, it’s feta they put on the pizza. It’s something else, it’s salty.

And they don’t put tomato sauce on pizza, so basically bread with fresh cheese. Nothing else.”

How Food Communicate?

What’s learned?

A few things have been unveiled during the remaking of the pizzas, which indicate an interesting aspect to look into ethnic food in transnational or transcultural frameworks: 1. Pizzas from the regions which are geographically closer to Italy display similar features as Italian pizzas, such as Romania, Hungary and Ukraine. Nevertheless, the making of pizzas is adjusted to fit the preference of the locals.

2. More distinct features are shown following the physical distance. The pizzas from East Asia have developed into different looks and tastes, suggesting that the room for recreation is bigger in these regions.

3. Some styles of pizzas are based on the imagination of pizzas which consist of flatbread and cheese. Pizzas from regions like Germany, Taiwan, Nepal and Bolivia have adopted local ingredients to a great extent and combined the features of the regional cuisines.

4. The use of ingredients conveys information about the regional culture.

For instance, Lebanese pizza suggests the rich source of vegetables in Lebanon. Furthermore, the diet may obey the local religious rules of eating no meat.

5. Creativity is accepted and expected by the locals in the recreation of ethnic food. The most obvious case is the pizza from Hong Kong.

6. The correlation of naming and ingredients of the pizzas in East Asia (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) shows the locals’ imagination and perception of foreign cultures. For instance, ‘Pizza America’ consists of big chunks of beef steak, ‘Pizza Japan’ combines takoyaki (a classic Japanese dish) with flatbread and a massive amount of cheese, ‘Pizza Mexico’ featuring the spiciness implies the locals‘ impression of the spicy Mexican cuisine, and ‘Pizza Germany‘ is topped with Vienna sausages. Pizza is an integrated product of multiple cultural aspects.

7. Even most of the traditional Italian features are replaced, pizza is still considered as pizza by the locals as long as certain features (cheese on bread) of the original remain. From an outsider’s viewpoint, the alteration appears to be strange. For example, Pizza Nepal and Pizza Bolivia were stated by 2 German describers as ‘not pizza‘ due to their familiar features were replaced (bread, tomato sauce, yellow cheese).

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2.2 ETHNIC FOOD IN COMMUNICATION THEORIES

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How Food Communicate?

Ethnic food, as mentioned, serves as a vehicle introducing its eaters to the stories of ethnicity, which in other words, indicates the silent communication flow between the eating environment and its eaters. ‘Communication’ as a term defined by James Gibson and his colleagues in their book Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Process as ‘transmitting information and understanding, using verbal or nonverbal symbols’ seeks for a ‘commonness’ between information givers and takers. Communication may be in words, or in colour, music, images, performances, eye contacts and so forth.

Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication Shannon and Weaver first illustrated the communication process as a chain of message transformation and delivery from the information source to the destination (Figure 2.2.1), covering a broad definition of communication including all forms of human behaviour. The information source conveys the selected message. The message is transformed into the signal by the transmitter and delivered through the channel to the receiver. The receiver as the inverse transmitter changes back the received signal into a message and delivers it to the destination. Take oral speech as an example, the information source stands for the speaker’s brain. The message is transformed by the voice system into the signal, in general, the speech. The channel is the air. The listener’s ear as the receiver transforms the speech back into a message and hands it to the destination, the listener’s brain. In the process of communication, unintended or unwanted additions added up to the signal are called ‘noise’. In the example of oral speech, the noise may be the distortion of sound or the uncorrelated contexts of the information source and the destination. Noise causes the incomplete receiving of the signal.

The establishment of the Shannon-Weaver model has pushed discussions further on what forms an effective communication process that catalyses understanding.

information source

transmitter

message

receiver signal

received signal

noise source Figure 2.2.1 Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication

Gibson, J., Ivancevich, J., Donnelly, Jr., J. and Konopaske, R. (2012). Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Process. 14th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.432.

Shannon, C. and Weaver, W. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. 1st ed.

Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, pp.3-28.

destination message

Shannon, C. and Weaver, W. (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communication. 1st ed.

Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, pp.7.

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Schramm, W. (1971). The Nature of Communication between Humans. In: W. Schramm and D. Roberts, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp.6.

Schramm, W. (1954). How communication works. In: W. Schramm, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 1st ed. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, pp.3-26.

Schramm, W. (1971). The Nature of Communication between Humans. In: W. Schramm and D. Roberts, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp.3-53.

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“Every discipline concerned with human society and human behaviour must necessarily be concerned with communication.”

Schramm’s Model of Communication Schramm theorised the communication process as a circular system in his 1952 article How Communication Works? (Figure 2.2.2). Communication argued by Schramm is an act of sharing information, thereby the message receivers are active, instead of being the passive targets. Information serves in a broad sense consisting of not merely facts, but also the latent intends and the emotions. Information may take in the form of meanings as a silent language. It requires the sender to encode his or her intends, emotions and meanings at best into a message and the receiver to decode the received message by his or her use and interpretation. The content of information in the sender and the receiver is not precisely the same.

Therefore, communication is established on a relationship between two or multiple persons. This relationship proclaims the correlation of the sender and the receiver, forming an overlap of their fields of experience, which is fundamental to effective information transmission and to reach an understanding on a consensus ground (Figure 2.2.3). Communication fulfils the wish of understanding when feedback from the receiver has delivered to the sender.

How Food Communicate?

encoder

m

interpreter

decoder interpreter

decoder

m

encoder

Figure 2.2.2 Schramm’s Model of Communication

field of experience

source

encoder

Schramm, W. (1971). The Nature of Communication between Humans. In: W. Schramm and D. Roberts, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp.24.

field of experience

signal

Figure 2.2.3 Schramm’s Model of Communication

decoder destination

Schramm, W. (1954). How communication works. In: W. Schramm, ed., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 1st ed. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, pp.3-26.

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Gibson, J., Ivancevich, J., Donnelly, Jr., J. and Konopaske, R. (2012). Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Process. 14th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.430-461.

Based on Shannon/Weaver and Schramm’s theories, Gibson and his colleagues extracted 5 fundamental elements involving in communication process as the communicator (who), the message (say what), the medium (in which way), the receiver (to whom) and feedback (with what effect). The model of communication describes the process of the sender encoding ideas, intentions, information and purposes into a message transmitted through a selected medium to the receiver who makes relevance to the message by decoding. To analyse whether the message is received, feedback is required to be given by the receiver to the sender. In the process of communication, noise distorting the intended message occurs at each phase due to various factors (Figure 2.2.4).

communicator

encoding

message/ medium

decoding

receiver

feedback Gibson, J., Ivancevich, J., Donnelly, Jr., J. and Konopaske, R. (2012). Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Process. 14th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.434.

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noise Figure 2.2.4 The Model of Communication

How Food Communicate?

Applying the communication models to the case of ethnic food, the communicator stands for an ethnic group which encodes its ethnic culture into a message transmitting through an eating environment to the eaters.

Here, it is necessary to decipher the dimension of medium owing to the fact that an eating environment is rather a composition of multiple elements than a single object. It can be categorised into the physicals and the behavioural.

The physical elements address to the tangible items and the people eaters encounter in an eating environment, including the food, the eating tools, the furniture settings, the interior space, the companions they eat with and the servers. The behavioural elements address the potential actions and interactions eaters are requested or encouraged to follow in an eating environment, such as the eating etiquette, norms and customs. Indeed, the unintended behaviours of and the interaction between eaters, servers, eaters and servers, in general, any individual or group in the same eating environment are also included. The arts of medium employ both non-verbal communication through objects, body language, signs and perceptions and verbal communication through words. All of these elements form an eating environment that serves as a communication channel. Feedback in such case stands for the reactions and responses from eaters, either positive or negative.

However, to measure whether or not the communication is effective is still ambiguous and needed to be analysed according to the situations. As stated by Gibson and his colleagues, a complete clarity of meanings and understanding does not occur when noise intervenes at every phase of communication. Understanding is not transmittable through communication.

Information is delivered in the form of verbal and non-verbal signs. To decipher the message and to acquire the precise information depends on the receiver. Claimed by Gibson, ‘the understanding is in the receiver, not in the words’.

Gibson, J., Ivancevich, J., Donnelly, Jr., J. and Konopaske, R. (2012). Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Process. 14th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.449.

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2.3 BETWEEN TAIWAN AND GERMANY

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How Food Communicate?

Ethnic eating environment as a communication channel faces a major challenge of transmitting messages between 2 or multiple cultural groups.

Culture is a slow message, as Edward and Mildred Hall stated, that comprises diverse styles of languages. A foreigner who steps in a novel land will need years to decipher. The explanations of cultural difference are provided by Halls with 3 categories: words, space and time.

Words Hall has divided cultures into high and low context. In a high-context communication culture, messages are more in the person and less in explicit languages. People are expected to have similar experience and expectations in groups due to the maintenance of their networks. Many words are left unsaid in conversations. A few words can describe much of the unspoken and are expected to be understood by the counterpart. High-context communication tends to happen more frequently in Asian and Latin American cultures. Low-context communication addresses the opposite. Detailed exchange of information and explicit indication of meanings are required in interaction. German, northern European and northern American cultures are included in this category. Low-context languages are adopted in fields where fewer interpretations are tolerated, such as commercials, legislations, medicines, computers and so on. Indeed, interpersonal difference and intrapersonal changes shift the context of communication one uses as well.

One could express his or her wish in a high-context way and turn into lowcontext while noticing the message is not received precisely. In another case, one could apply low-context methods to communicate with a stranger. When the distance between them shortens, they switch to high-context interaction due to the familiarity of backgrounds and habits.

Hall, E. and Hall, M. (1990). Key Concepts: Underlying Structures of Culture. In: E. Hall and M. Hall, ed., Understanding Cultural Differences. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, Inc., pp.3-31.

When high- and low-context people try to communicate to each other, misinterpretation of manners, attitudes and meanings often occurs. Highcontext people apt to be irritated or offended by redundant information lowcontext people feed them, whereas low-context people are often in confusion by the lack of information high-context people provide.

Space Every individual has an invisible boundary separating oneself from the outside world. This boundary is drawn by the sensory perceptions of heat, noise, movement and smell. Within the territory one claims, he or she feels safe and comfortable. Sometimes, the line is extended to personal belongings such as a working table, a bed, a kitchen, or a car. One feels intruded or threatened when others stand too close or touch his or her items.

The marking of personal space differs from one culture to another. In Japanese society, keeping silent in public places is perceived as a latent rule to avoid penetration of individuals’ territories. Bowing, shaking hands and waving goodbye are the Japanese customs to greet friends, whereas in France, Italy and Latin America, hugging and touching faces side by side are the more common ways, showing the shorter conventional distance and the smaller personal space in these cultures.

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Lakoff, G. and Johnsen, M. (2003).

Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp.11-12.

Time Time perceived by different cultural groups can be categorised into monochronic and polychronic. Individuals in monochronic cultures view time as linear and tangible. In English language, verbs like ‘save’, ‘spare’, ‘spend’, ‘invest’, ‘waste’, ‘lose’, ‘borrow’ are paired with time, indicating that time is conceptualised as money. Time is a limited source which people use it carefully, thereby only one thing is focused at a time. Monochronic thinking predominates cultures in U.S., Germany and northern European countries.

In contrary, polychronic cultures picture time with spans instead of points.

Multiple tasks assemble the construction of time as opposed to performing in a sequence. Polychronic thinkers are subject to human relationships and tolerant of interruption. They take appointments less seriously, which leads to changing plan easily. Arab and Latin American cultures fall into this group.

The different expectations of monochronic and polychronic thinkers in working environments result in misunderstanding. The monochronic thinkers insist on following the schedule when the polychronic thinkers prefer to achieve the business during off-work events. In association with cultures, monochronic time often ties in with low-context cultures, whereas polychronic time correlates to high-context cultures.

Applying Halls’ theory to Taiwan and Germany, which are the targeted subjects of this research paper, distinctions of these 2 cultures emerge to the surface. Social culture in Taiwan appears to be high-context and polychronic comparing to in Germany which represents a low-context culture and monochronic thinking. To mediate the communication flow so as to build the bridge between a Taiwanese and a German for mutual understanding requires a cultural interpreter. Which described by Halls’ word, ‘interfacing’.

In communication, one must acquire and aware of the context of cultures the counterpart come from. A Taiwanese needs to specify the details and meanings of his or her message to the Germans, while a German needs to retrieve the background information of the Taiwanese before meeting and observe their gestures and expressions during the talk.

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Between Taiwan and Germany To outline the distances of these 2 addressed cultures, Hofstede’s theory of cultural dimensions is employed.

Indexes suggest that Taiwan possesses a hierarchical societal culture.

Everyone tends to accept his or her given role without requesting the adjustment. The society is highly collectivistic stressing on the family value and loyalty of membership to its extended relationship network. Loyalty overrides most of other societal regulations and rules. The below average scores on masculinity demonstrate a less competitive society atmosphere.

Caring for others is weighted higher than achievement in the personal career. Preference for avoiding uncertainty shows an emotional need for rules and intolerance of unorthodox ideas and behaviours. Anxiety caused by uncertainty is suppressed by hard-working. Pragmatic thinking is practised due to the influence of Confucianism. Traditional virtues are adapted to modern norms if feasible. The society shows a strong propensity for thriftiness and perseverance in achieving results.

In Germany, the power distribution is decentralised and comparatively even. Hierarchy is often questioned, and leadership faces challenges if no corresponded expertise is shown. Small families focusing the relationship between parents and children are most common. Loyalty depends on personal preference. Germany is a masculine country that ambition and self-achievement are valued in pursuit of success. Status is often exhibited by cars, watches and technical devices. Systematic approaches to thinking and planning are requested to proceed. Such phenomena can be reflected in its law system. The pragmatic way of doing things suggests that truth is not one and only, but rather depends on situations, context and time. The German culture is restrained. Indulgence is likely to be prevented, and desire is controlled.

Hofstede, G. (2011).

Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). Available at: https:// doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1014.

Hofstede Insights. (2018).

Taiwan - Hofstede Insights. [online] Available at: https://www. hofstede-insights.com/country/ taiwan/ [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

Hofstede Insights. (2018).

Germany - Hofstede Insights. [online] Available at: https://www. hofstede-insights.com/country/ germany/ [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

Ethnic eating environment serves as a communication channel consists of food, objects and people. The cultural interpretation stresses on the presentation, the settings and the interaction. A group of Taiwanese who has lived in Germany forms an overlapping field of experience with the Germans as depicted by Schramm’s model. They attend as the interpreters and translate the food, rules and norms into a language to help German eaters to understand. In the next chapter, research on how an ethnic eating experience serves as a channel to communicate Taiwanese culture to German eaters will specify the communication flow under a cross-cultural structure.

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2.4 FOOD EXPERIENCE MEANINGS AND UNDERSTANDING 62

How Food Communicate?

After knowing the position of food in the process of communication, the questions follow as what forms an ethnic food experience and where this experience leads to. If an ethnic eating environment serves as a communication channel of its ethnic culture, eating as the communication process forms an experience that leads to an individual interpretation. This interpretation catalyses understanding of the ethnic culture and generates meanings to oneself. Therefore, the communication occurs not only between 2 cultural groups but also in the eaters. Eating is a process of self-dialogue.

Through measuring the distance to the ethnic group on the opposite side of the communication, an eater identifies the place he or she stands.

The definition from Jeff Carreira is borrowed to dissect the relation between experience and understanding: ‘Experience is the knowing of things’ and ‘Understanding is the knowing about things’. In Carreira’s explanation, experience is fact. One could see a ghost and deny it is a ghost, but the fact of seeing a ghost is undeniable. In other words, one could only deny his or her understanding of an experience, not the fact of having it. Therefore, experience does not drive to understanding, yet it often creates meanings to the person who has experienced it.

The American philosopher Mark Johnson argued that meanings stemmed from the bodily interaction with the outside world. Through the processing of sensorimotor, humans transform their perceptions and feelings into concepts and reasons that make sense to themselves. Consequently, meaning is embodied. In Johnson’s words, ‘an embodied view of meaning looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environment’. The interaction with the environment in an ethnic eating experience is illustrated as the message transmission that involves physical and behavioural elements.

Interactions between food and eaters, tools and eaters, furniture and eaters, space and eaters, eaters and their eating companions and eaters and potential servers accelerate eaters to grasp meanings of an eating environment and connect to their past, present and future experiences.

“We are born into the world as creatures of the flesh, and it is through our bodily perceptions, movements, emotions, and feelings that meaning becomes possible and takes the forms it does.”

Carreira, J. (2018). Experience and Understanding. [online] Philosophy Is Not A Luxury.

Available at: https:// philosophyisnotaluxury. com/2011/11/17/experience-andunderstanding/ [Accessed 3 Apr. 2018].

Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, pp.1-16.

Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, pp.1.

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Some examples will be brought out here to explain the meanings seized during interactions with food and people. The mentioned events were the researcher’s personal experience, and the meanings were based on her interpretation of the experience: Case 1 Anida placed a box of gummy bears in the master working room. People constantly reached for it while working on their thesis. The box got empty quickly whenever it was refilled, only the untasty candies remained.

Tryon, M., Stanhope, K., Epel, E., Mason, A., Brown, R., Medici, V., Havel, P. and Laugero, K. (2015).

Excessive Sugar Consumption May Be a Difficult Habit to Break: A View From the Brain and Body. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 100(6), pp.2239-2247.

Meaning Food played a role of consolation, and the food preparer was seen as the comfort giver. Whenever people reached for a gummy bear, this colourful and sweet creature represented the redemption of their suffocated souls. They earned a piece of comfort by the sweetness on the tongues, which released them for a moment from the workload. This transition from sense (sweet) to emotion (pleasure) is rooted in humans’ physical experience. Scientific studies have proven that sugar reduces levels of cortisol, the so-called ‘stress hormone’. Consuming sugar suppresses brain’s reaction to pressure and minimises the stressful feeling.

Gummy bear - redemption, comfort, release of stress, reduction of anxiety

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Case 2 It was the day to submit thesis proposal. After more than 3 hours of presentations, exhaustion was shown on every face. For some, their depressed looks told their dissatisfaction of the performances. Sparkling wines were brought out to celebrate the closure. At that moment, the group separated into two: the ones who were relieved and relaxed, and the rest who apparently still bothered by their frustrated moods and had difficulties to acknowledge the idea of ‘celebration’. If one did a lousy job, there was no reason to celebrate failure. The wine was bitter for them, as the mocking of their miscarriages.

Meaning In the provided case, people who succeeded and failed the task experienced distinctly with the wine. Sparkling wine associated with the celebration of the event closure. However, the message was distorted due to the different states of minds and the metaphor wine signified. Winners deserved wine. Losers, however, generated an opposite feeling. They acknowledged their failure and immersed in regret. Wine represented the victory, hence, for the losers, was inappropriate. It delivered a contradicting message from their state of minds that was perceived as teasing. Beer could be a more suitable drink for such situation.

The perception of the signals carried by different types of alcohol is rooted on a cultural basis. Wine is a more sophisticated and expensive product than beer. It is often served to announce the uniqueness of the events and the people. Sparkling wine in Germany further associates with one-ofthe-lifetime situations, such as birthday, opening ceremony, wedding and new year. Beer, on the other hand, presents artless scenarios. One can drink beer anytime at anywhere with anyone for any reason.

Sparkling Wine - celebration, success, mock of loser

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Case 3 I just finished helping a team of bachelor students to organise an exhibition for the next day. We had prepared for a giveaway of candies and snacks collected from a sweet trade fair. Our trophies were abundant, filling up four working tables and the rest still staying in boxes. The students have left. I was picking a selection to bring back to the master working room. It was the same day of the master final exam. All of the presentations were finished at this time. I knew some were upset about their performance. I knew that they all gathered in the room waiting for the result, weary and worried. Snacks would cheer them up, even not for the success but the closure. I piled up three baskets of popcorn and one box of lollipops on my arms and walked back to the master room.

People have already started the celebration. There were chips, cakes and wine on the table. They waved me in before realising what was in my arms. An overflowing cheer was burst out as if they were never so happy to see me. My mission was well executed. Even some were still stressed, most of them seemed more cheerful than before. Anida commented that it was the most ‘useful’ teaching assistance project among us. The popcorn baskets were opened and shared in the group. I found Xiaofei and Ziad sneaked some lollipops out to give away. Later when I left the room, Patricia, Hassan and Nahal thanked me before they left.

Meaning Popcorn stood in the mentioned situation for consolation. The message of the food giver (the researcher) delivered the care and was sent with food. It was received and understood when the food was shared. The feeling was transformed into gratitude which was suggested by the ‘thank you’ and smiling faces from the food takers to the giver. In this case, the oversized package influenced how the message was received. The oversized package suggests sharing, without selecting who deserves a piece. It avoided the classification of ‘who I cared more’ by the shared portions and prevented any exclusion of people.

Popcorn - consolation, party Oversized package - share, care for all

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Case 4 It was a big day. We were about to present the sweet project. Everyone was tired and nervous, but excitement still prevailed on the face. Because following after the presentation, we were going to give away all sweets and snacks gathered at the trade fair. Several audiences came into the room way before the start of the presentation to get a good spot. Our dearest doorman, never seen stepping outside his chamber, had arrived at our floor and pried for candies. Audiences gradually filled the room until we realised there was no spare room in front of the tables which students’ models were placed on for presenting. The professor decided to let the students present in front of the screen. The audiences seemed to cheer louder as if they were genuinely happy to see our outcome of the project. The music revealed the glamorous display of the dazzled, colourful sweet stuff under a white cloth. People started clapping and shouting, and the crowd scrambled to the front without order. It was like a festival. Candies were thrown and flying in the air; one popcorn basket split and all popcorns scattered on the ground; many hands waved, and things were passed down. People were laughing and shared their trophies.

Meaning People took a similar attitude as carnivals towards this event. The giveaway of candies was used to celebrate the closure of the semester. Its revelry image was imprinted even stronger when presented in audience’s’ eyes were the abundant goods of sweets. As an annual convention of the school, people took this event as a tradition and treated it as a ceremony to reward their hard works. In another sense, it attracted people to come because it stated the ‘tradition’, giving the event a profound meaning.

Giveaway of sweets - celebration, carnival, tradition, ceremony

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Case 5 The popcorns and sweets brought back from the exhibition were now sitting in my closet. I stored for a special friend when he visited me so that we could share them together. I craved for sweets at night after dinner. A voice told me to open the basket of popcorns, but my rational refused to do so since the action meant betrayal. On the other side, an awkward feeling was generated while thinking of eating oversized popcorns alone. It seemed to be inappropriate and suggested one who consumed this huge portion of food alone was unhealthy and sad. The image of a person sitting in a dark room stuffing popcorns from an oversized package to his or her mouth stuck in my head. Eventually, I buried my desire and took a piece of truffle as a reward.

Meaning Popcorn, in this case, extracts a distinct emotion from the case 3. Even it was still used for comforting, the meaning was interpreted in an opposite direction due to the different situation. The satisfaction of eating popcorns in an oversized package stresses on the idea of ‘sharing’. When the eater sat alone in the room expecting to share popcorns with her friend, eating popcorns at that moment suggested the betrayal and moreover, the contradiction of her imagination and the reality. It is similar to the case of wine that losers feel mocked by its representation of success.

Eating popcorns alone, therefore, tends to generate a somewhat negative feeling.

Eating oversized popcorn alone - betrayal, sad, loneliness

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Even understanding cannot be forced and can be misinterpreted, meanings grasped through an eating experience weight a significant value to the eaters.

Since meaning is embodied, it is not possible to be designed. However, an eating experience based on the bodily engagement to the environment can be designed to catalyse understanding. The design lays on the interaction of the physicals and the behavioural: What is the food? What are the eating tools? How does an eating space interact with the attendants? What happens between eaters? What happens between eaters and servers?

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2.5 STIR UP!

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To examine the communication function of food, the researcher collaborated with feel free, an organisation advocating female empowerment through masturbation, and together launched the project STIR UP! in 2017. Stirring, move in circles to mix, is a common method of cooking as well as female masturbation. The project ‘STIR UP!’ aimed at encouraging both men and women to explore and discuss the relationships between food and sex, while challenging the gender-biased settings in these 2 of human’s most basic needs. The participants were asked to apply cooking as a creative tool for communicating their sexual stories, in other words, cook their stories about sexuality into dishes and eating. The workshop was held at KISD FoodLab on June 23, 2017, and at Freiraum Würzburg on January 20, 2018. feel free feel free was founded by Louise Yau when she discovered topics about sex, especially related to female sexuality, were treated as a taboo in most of the eastern cultures. Openly discussing sex and sexuality often causes a shameful feeling. In many situations, these topics are implicated in gender biases and discrimination, which evolves distorted cognition of sex and women’s relation to it. Sex is captured as filthy, immoral, corrupt and therefore should be kept in secret. Such misinterpretation leads women being unaware or ignorant of their bodies, sexual needs and self-perceptions, in a worst case, prevent women from learning how to take care and protect themselves. Due to the silence on sexual topics, the information is acquired depending on individuals. Sexual knowledge is gained from empirical experience, intimate relationships or active study. On the other hand, one who avoids this information stays unknowing. The division outlines a massive gap of communication until someone breaks the silence. Louise was inquired by a friend that if her vaginal lubrication would make her pregnant. With the shock, Louise was urged to build a safe platform for women to understand their sexual needs by encouraging self-pleasure through masturbation.

Techniques and stories are shared on the feel free website. Besides the online source, Louise outreaches the potential target groups by holding monthly events feel free Brunch.

feel-free. (2018). feel-free. [online] Available at: https://www.feelfree.org/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2018].

feel free Brunch feel free Brunch is a meetup event primarily opened for a small group of women. Questions addressing the personal experience of sex and masturbation catalyse participants to share their stories and techniques.

The sharing illustrates the diversity of individual mindsets and perceptions.

It demonstrates the attendants that ‘being different is not wrong’ as well as ‘to accept differences with open-mindedness’. feel free Brunch is not only informative but also inspiring and touching. With good food and beverage, the event often lasted longer than the scheduled time.

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Chow Chow. (2018). Chow Chow. [online] Available at: https://www. chowchowfood.de/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2018].

Chow Chow Chow Chow is an online recipe platform founded by the researcher to introduce recipes from East Asia to Germany. ‘嚼嚼 (jiáo jiáo)’ in Mandarin, the researcher’s native language, implies the action and the sound of chewing. The pronunciation is similar to the greeting ‘ciao ciao’ which is often used among friends and family in Germany. Chow Chow offers recipes from different Asian regions and cultures, the information of the original ingredients and their substitutes that can be found in Germany.

The instructions on the utensils, cooking methods and shopping guides are also provided. This project started in 2015 with the researcher’s recognition of how distinctly western people identify Asian food from how East Asians identify their home food. The term ‘Asia’ seems to be overly generalised in Germany to represent a single exotic culture, regardless of the fact that Asia as an enormous continent contains billions of population, various cultural characteristics and inter-cultural influences. The features of Asian food under this narrow perception are, therefore, cut down to few. This cultural minimisation, or generalisation, showcases in the supermarkets where goods are named after Asian sauce, Asian vegetables and Asian-styled.

The researcher felt the duty to resolve this misconception by presenting the diverse Asian food, with the belief that food is a way of communication catalysing cross-cultural understanding. Chow Chow was utilised to represent the co-organiser of STIR UP!.

Combining the topics of sex and food was the first cross-field experiment collaborated by Louise and the researcher. Through brainstorming, this exploration was set tunes in the form of workshops which provided room for interactive activities. The use of food metaphors allowed both sexes to unfold stories depending on how much they were willing to show, and therefore, gave flexibility to those who felt not comfortable to speak out in the first place. The workshop started with a series of activities introducing the attendants to the concept of the workshop as well as leading them to reflect on their previous experience. What the attendants learned through the process were in the end transformed into ingredients and nutrition that were cooked into their food and eating design.

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Figure 2.5.1 STIR UP! visual advertising

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KISD FOODLAB 2017.6.23

A participant from group C was plating for the presentation.

Yu Yang, H. (2017). STIR UP! FoodLab. [photograph]

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The Good Food - Liebe auf den zweiten Blick. (2018). The Good Food. [online] Available at: https:// www.the-good-food.de/ [Accessed 15 Apr. 2018].

Tampopo. (1985). [film] Directed

by J. Itami. Japan: Itami Productions, New Century Productions.

The Godfather: Part III. (1990). [film] Directed by F. Coppola. USA: Paramount Pictures, Zoetrope Studios.

Overboard. (1987). [film] Directed

by G. Marshall. USA: MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Star Partners, Hawn / Sylbert Movie Company.

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The first STIR UP! was held at the FoodLab in Köln International School of Design. FoodLab is a kitchen where students and school employees can realise their ideas for projects and events. Space was divided into 2 for the workshop, the presenting area and the cooking area. Most of the activities took place in the presenting area. Tables were covered with white papers for attendants to take notes. Slides were projected on the wall to assist the presentations. The food resource for the cooking section was collected from a local organisation The Good Food. The participants were a group of 6 international students from Brazil, China, Colombia, Germany and Mexico.

The workshop consisted of activities as follows: 1. Movie Clips Screening - How food correlates to sex?

2. Presentation - Why does women’s sexuality (masturbation) matter to both sexes?

3. Open Discussion - Gender-biased settings of food and the dining experience.

4. Creative Cooking - Make a dish that tells your story related to masturbation and sexuality.

5. Closure - What could male and female benefit from promoting gender equality? Tips for male and female to enrich communication about sexuality.

Movie Clips Screening 4 movie clips from Tampopo, The Godfather: Part III and Overboard introduced the participants to the core discussion of the workshop. With regard to the association between food and sex, the clips revealed the similarity of sensations and satisfaction derived from eating and sexual arousal, furthermore, questioned if the present societal behaviours and decisions were still ruled by the conventional formulation of gender roles.

Presentation Louise presented the concept of the patriarchal system and how it impacted on male and female’s attitudes towards sexuality. In a patriarchal society, women are perceived as the extension of men. Taking control of women’s sexuality becomes a proof of men’s capability. If a woman cannot retrieve satisfaction from sexual intercourse, the blame is often on the man.

When a woman gains pleasure through masturbation, it states a result of dissatisfaction with his effort on the bed. Both sexes are restricted and damaged by the system. Louise declared that the right for both sexes to explore their sexual needs through masturbation was a path to gender equality. By knowing what they want to understand who they are, women and men are set free from their conventional roles while claiming their entitlement. The exploration of masturbation is a process of empowerment.

As a friend shared with Louise, ‘Masturbation is cooking for myself’.

How Food Communicate?

Open Discussion In the section of open discussion, the researcher shared a paper about how food packagings on the basis of gender stereotypes influenced purchase behaviours. When a packaging design follows a congruent gender schema, for instance, healthy food in feminine packaging and unhealthy food in masculine packaging, the product is rated as more attractive by both female and male examiners. On the contrary, when a packaging does not align with the congruent gender schema, for instance, ‘a muffin for real men’, the product is perceived as less attractive even the product is the same.

‘Consumers assess the taste of a food or beverage by comparing the human values symbolised by the product to their human value priorities’, as a 2012 research paper stated. In other words, consumers tend to choose food products which they see the shadows of themselves. By raising the awareness that individual food choices were socially shaped, the researcher left 4 questions to the participants for open discussion: Q1. What is the food you consider as ‘girl’s’ or ‘boy’s’ food?

Q2. Since we all came from different cultures, is there any specific food and eating protocol based on gender bias in your culture?

Q3. Do you feel your eating behaviour or habit is influenced by social stereotypes of genders?

Q4. Have you ever been constrained or constrained others’ eating behaviour because it was not ‘girly’ or ‘manly’ enough? What do you feel about it?

Zhu, L., Brescoll, V., Newman, G. and Uhlmann, E. (2015). Macho Nachos: The Implicit Effects of Gendered Food Packaging on Preferences for Healthy and Unhealthy Foods. Social Psychology, 46, pp.182-196.

Allen, M., Gupta, R. and Monnier, A. (2012). The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation.

Journal of Consumer Research, 35(2), pp.294-308.

The aim of the open discussion was to catalyse the intra-conversation in participants by recalling their life incidents regarding gender roles and stereotypes. The memories awakened their feelings in association with the similar situations, including having sex and masturbation.

Participants were requested to transform what they had learned related to their sexuality into food designing. 2 participants joined one group. 15 minutes were given to discuss the concept and 45 minutes for cooking.

Before the cooking, the researcher gave hints on how to utilise food as a mean to tell stories.

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Creative Cooking 3 dishes were made by group A, B and C. Each group presented their concept and the stories related to it.

Group A consisting of 2 males visualised male genital with a red paprika.

The paprika was filled with a multi-flavoured green sauce symbolising the mixed feelings derived from this inborn organ. In their words, sexuality was merged with different tastes: it gave you pleasure as the sweet taste; its spiciness excited you; it might also taste sour and bitter. These tastes came in combination. Some were dominant, and many subtle aromas might be distinguished in the process of eating.

Group B was comprised of one female (Louise) from Hong Kong and one male from Colombia. Each member chose 2 components to represent what was familiar to them and what was not. The female felt most comfortable to cook with eggs and least with potatoes. The male felt at ease with avocado and not with ginger. Interestingly, the chosen ingredients also implied the cultural representations of the members’ origins. Egg is an easy ingredient which young people in East Asia learn to cook with when they leave the family, while potato is an imported good associating mostly with western cuisines.

Similarly, avocado is a common ingredient in South American food while the usage of ginger is limited. The familiar components (egg and avocado) covered on the exotics (potato and ginger) to express the exploration of sex.

Sex was viewed by this group as a mutual learning process starting with the familiar tastes towards the unfamiliar. To explore the unknown is scary, yet it may lead to something tasty.

Group C included one female and one male. They expressed the story of Adam and Eve and emphasised on eating design. Salad leaves covered the genitals made of potato (vagina) and paprika (penis). When the leaves were removed, 2 components combined during eating. After a bite was taken on the paprika, the sauce dripped on the potato implied the sexual intercourse. It reached the harmony flavour when two became one.

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Presentation of group A Yu Yang, H. (2017). STIR UP! FoodLab. [photograph]

Presentation of group B Yu Yang, H. (2017). STIR UP! FoodLab. [photograph]

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Closure and Feedback The workshop closed with Louise’s summary. She encouraged the participants to outspeak their needs to their partners as well as suggested some useful questions to help an intimate relationship. The feedback given by the participants proved that food was capable of serving as a channel of communication. Feedback received includes:

Gonzalez, S. (2017). Feedback.

Labato, M. (2017). Feedback.

‘The discussions were very fruitful and open; the setting was very nice as well as the teamwork. Working with food also lightened the topic, making it easier to open up.’ ‘ Now I understand why it’s necessary to open this topic. Why didn’t we talk more about male masturbation?’

‘Cooking is an amazing idea to prototype experiences, well done.’

Heitmann Arraes, H. (2017).

Feedback.

Zhang, C. (2017). Feedback.

Bäumer, R. (2017). Feedback.

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‘I discovered some surprising correlations between eating habits and sexual behaviour.’

‘There is a strong correlation between food and sex that we have ignored it for a long time. Too many aspects of this topic are interesting and reflect on ourselves.’

‘Will you continue working on this topic?’

How Food Communicate?

Group B was selecting ingredients.

Yu Yang, H. (2017). STIR UP! FoodLab. [photograph]

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Presentation and open discussion Yu Yang, H. (2017). STIR UP! FoodLab. [photograph]

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FREIRAUM WÜRZBURG 2018.1.20

Freiraum Würzburg. (2018).

Freiraum Würzburg. [online] Available at: https:// freiraumwuerzburg.wordpress. com/ [Accessed 15 Jun. 2018].

Call Me by Your Name. (2017). [film] Directed by L. Guadagnino.

Italy, France, Brazil, USA: Frenesy Film Company, La Cinéfacture, RT Features, Water’s End Productions, M.Y.R.A. Entertainment, Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo (MiBACT), Lombardia Film Commission, Memento Films International.

E. Williams, L. and A. Bargh, J. (2008). Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth. Science, 322(5901), pp.606-607.

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The positive feedback received proved the capability of food communication.

The second workshop was held in collaboration with local organisations in Würzburg on January 20, 2018. Freiraum is a space holding a philosophy of free giving and taking. Everyone has access to the room for realising their competences. Everything is for sharing, and no commercial activities are allowed. Freiraum has an equipped kitchen which is a perfect site for the workshop. A significant difference lay on the participants who were mainly native Germans, whereas, in Cologne, the workshop attracted more international students. This time, bodily sensations were focused during the exploration of food and sex. A new session was added to the program for participants to awaken their senses of hearing, smell and touch in the process of cooking. The workshop consisted of activities as follows: 1. Movie Clips Screening - How does food relate to sex?

2. Exploration of Senses - Senses in cooking, eating and sex 3. Presentation and Open Discussion - Gender roles in sex and food 4. Creative Cooking - Cook a dish to tell your story about sexuality.

Movie Clip Screening 3 movie clips from the movies Tampopo, The Godfather: Part III and Call Me by Your Name introduced the correlated sensations between eating and sexual experience. In the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, ripe fruits as a symbol of sex awakening intertwine the story of a teenage boy meeting his first love in Italy. Together, they swim, sweat and explore each other’s body.

The plump, aromatic fruits hanging down from the blossom peach trees signify the sex maturity of the teen. The scent, the tender pulp under the soft skin and the sweet juice has driven the curious boy to pleasure himself with a hollow peach.

Exploration of Senses The senses of hearing, smell and touch were explored with food items.

In the hearing part, the participants were asked to listen to food-related sounds and guess the related actions. The sounds played included phases of food preparing, cooking and eating. Without sight, a familiar sound of daily activities turned into abstract and stimulated the imaginations. For the section of smell, the participants were requested to sniff coffee, a mixture of oriental spices and fish sauce with closed eyes. Studies have found that smells can awaken memories in association with specific emotions in human brains. This recollection has a scientific term ‘olfactory memory’. The participants connected the odours to certain scenarios in their memories and shared their feelings. In the last exploration on touch, participants remained closed eyes while focusing feelings of their hands. Flour and water were added in sequence to each person’s bowl. A 2008 paper has discovered that physical temperature encodes trust information in interpersonal relationships. When a research participant was asked to rate a fictional person after holding a warm coffee cup, he or she tended to rate the target person as ‘warmer’, more humane, trustworthy and friendly. Most of the participants seemed to enjoy this process. Some of them remained to play the dough until the cooking section.

How Food Communicate?

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Results of the creative cooking Hezinger, D. (2018). STIR UP! Freiraum. [photograph]

Presentation and Open Discussion The presentation of feel free combined the regimes of food and sex to explain the concepts of gender equality. Louise brought out 4 questions to the participants: Q1. Have you ever encountered gender biases with regard to cooking and eating?

Q2. Have you ever been taught or corrected about how to cook or eat because of your gender? How did you feel?

Q3. What do masturbation and sex mean to you? Are they related?

Q4. Have you ever talked about your sexuality? What were the reactions you received? Were they positive or negative?

Creative Cooking The exploration of senses and the learning from the previous sections were the tools to transform participants’ stories into dishes. 10 participants formed 5 cooking groups. 15 minutes were given to discuss the design concepts and one hour for cooking. Several participants had worried about their ability to create before the workshop. The concerns vanished as soon as the cooking started. Despite that all of the participants were not designers, they implemented their ideas comprehensively. With the hints given, participants did not stress only on the appearance of the dishes but also on how to eat.

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Feedback Feedback collected included: ‘You proposed a metaphor I never thought of. Combining 2 different topics opened up a new language to talk about masturbation.’

‘I learned a new language to express myself through the analogy of consumption and cooking.’

‘I hope you will make this seminar everywhere in the world because the contents are very rich. I would like to hear and see your experience in some years. Go on.’

Sänger, C. (2018). Feedback.

Merker, S. (2018). Feedback.

Gerolt, L. (2018). Feedback.

One female participant explained her wish to have an all-female workshop because she was not comfortable to tell her stories when males were present. Many opinions addressed the time given to open discussion could be longer. It pointed out an interesting aspect to look into the differentiation of cultural characteristics. This was a quiet group of participants who often remained silent after questions were thrown out to them. The next question followed up when the organisers received no response. The request for extended discussion caused confusion for Louise and the researcher. A German friend explained that the silence after the questions was the time German participants structured their thoughts. Another reason could be the existing language barrier since the workshop was conducted in English.

Nevertheless, it showcased that the precise interpretation of participants’ behaviour in accordance with their cultural background was an important lesson for the organisers.

One male participant shared his destructive experience in an intimate relationship which had caused him resistant to cook. As he claimed, this workshop healed his wound and helped him to regain the joy of cooking. The effect of food communication is enormous. Food has become a gentle carrier of our loads, moreover, an exit for the unsaid words.

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How Food Communicate?

Group discussion in creative cooking Hezinger, D. (2018). STIR UP! Freiraum. [photograph]

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

3.0 TAIWAN TO GERMANS

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

RESEARCH STRUCTURE AND FORMATS With the aim to learn if an ethnic eating experience could serve as a communication channel between cultural groups, Germans and Taiwanese in Germany were selected as the target groups of this study. In this phase of research, Germans were the receiver in the communication process decoding the cultural messages of an ethnic eating experience sent by Taiwanese.

A series of questions and ethnic eating scenarios in Taiwan were designed to lead the eating experience. The designated research structure was segmented into 3 phases: pre-interviews, eating events and interviews of reflection and feedback.

The program was launched in WĂźrzburg in the Bavarian State of Germany.

16 Germans were invited to participate while the researcher observed their behaviours and interaction during the eating process. Chow Chow, the food website run by the researcher, was applied as the event entry to attract participants. The events were promoted online through Facebook and offline through flyers and direct contacts. The 6 eating events covered 6 different eating scenarios in Taiwan, including Hot Fry, Vegetarianism, Fish and Seafood, Breakfast, Noodles and Hot Pot. Interviews were conducted with each participant before and after the eating to investigate their changes of mind states towards Taiwanese culture. 14 valid samples were collected.

pre-interviews

eating events

hot fry

vegetarianism

fish and seafood

breakfast

noodles

hot pot

interviews of reflection and feedback

Figure 3.0.1 Research Structure

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

Aim Pre-interviews support the researcher to acknowledge the in-depth information about participants’ background and states of mind, and to make comparison of the changes after they experience the eating events.

Format Face to face interview. Conducting the interviews at participants’ places or the researcher’s place.

When Before the eating events Duration 1 hour

Pre-Interviews The questions of the pre-interview included 4 parts: profile, cultural sensitivity, ethnic eating experience and substantive knowledge about Taiwan. ‘Ethnic’ was replaced by ‘foreign’ in interviews due to interviewees’ unfamiliarity of this term. profile 1. Please tell me your name, age, and gender.

2. Which city did you come from?

3. What is your educational background? cultural sensitivity 4. Do you have chances to use foreign languages in daily life? What language is it? / Have you ever had chances to learn a foreign language?

What language is it?

a. In what situations do you use these languages?

b. What were the intentions to learn these languages?

5. What could be the intentions for you to learn a foreign language?

6. Have you ever interacted with foreign people in Germany? Please describe them.

7. Have you ever experienced intense interaction with foreign people?

8. Have you ever travel abroad? Where have you been?

9. Have you ever lived in a foreign country? Where and for how long? ethnic eating experience 10. Do you like to try new food?

11. In what situation will you try food that you haven’t tried before?

12. Have you ever had foreign cuisines? What were they?

13. When you had foreign cuisines, did you aware of the cultural background of this food? (Why the food is formed in this way?)

14. Have you ever tried foreign cuisines in Germany?

15. Please describe one foreign eating you have experienced.

a. Did you learn anything about this culture from the eating?

b. Do you feel understanding more about this culture after the dining

experience (how people think and behave, the cultural norms and values)?

16. Have you ever dined outside Germany?

17. What are the differences of eating ethnic food in Germany from in the region where the food is introduced?

18. Do you think food can be a way to introduce/learn/communicate a culture? substantive knowledge about Taiwan 19. Do you know Taiwan?

a. Where is it?

b. What do you know about Taiwan?

c. Have you ever been to Taiwan? For how long?

d. Have you ever tried Taiwanese food? What food is it?

e. What do you know about the Taiwanese culture?

20. If you were invited to a Taiwanese dinner, what would you expect to be on the dining table?

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Eating Events 6 eating events depicted 6 different eating scenarios in Taiwan. Each eating event consisted of a group of 3 or more eaters. The eating scenarios included Hot Fry, Vegetarianism, Fish and Seafood, Breakfast, Noodles, and Hot Pot. During the events, the researcher observed participants’ behaviour and interaction to analyse how an ethnic eating experience communicated to the eaters.

Interviews of Reflection and Feedback The questions of the interviews of reflection and feedback included 2 parts: on-site eating experience and feedback. on-site eating experience 1. Please describe the eating event.

2. What do you think about the experience?

3. What did you feel during the event?

4. What have you learned?

5. Do you think that what you learned from this event change or improve your understanding about Taiwan?

6. Do you think eating in an ethnic eating environment helps you to understand a culture better?

7. What does this experience mean to you?

8. Can you reflect on German culture with this culture learned?

9. Do you think that food is a good communication channel to introduce/ learn a culture? feedback 10. What do you think about the interview?

11. What did you feel during the interview?

12. What can be improved?

Aim To acknowledge participants’ states of minds and compare the changes before and after the events.

Format Face to face interview. Conducting the interviews at participants’ places or the researcher’s place.

When One day to one week after the eating event, to give time and space for the transformation of an individual experience into meanings to oneself.

Duration 30 minutes to 1 hour

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3.1 PREINTERVIEW ANALYSIS

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

A total number of 14 valid samples were collected. 9 participated the preinterviews before the eating events. 5 were interviewed after the events due to their spontaneous participation in the eating. These 5 interviews were combined with questions about participants’ reflection and feedback of the eating events. The pre-interviews included questions about the profile, the levels of cultural sensitivity, the ethnic eating experience and the substantive knowledge about Taiwan of the participants.

Profile The age of participants ranged from 20 to 29. The group consisted of 4 males and 10 females. The participants originated from all over Germany and inhabited in Würzburg in the Bavarian state of Germany during the research.

Their nationality was Germany including 3 with immigration backgrounds of Poland, Switzerland and Spain.

All of them had received higher education in fields of design, psychology, social work or pedagogy. 5 of them continued second bachelor studies, and 2 sought for or had received the graduate degrees.

This group of participants carried multiple eating preferences. 6 were omnivores. The other 8 participants consumed no meat or had reduced meat in their diet. Among these 8 people, they defined their eating habits with different names. 5 were vegetarians or preferred vegetarian food. 2 were political vegetarians, or pescetarians, meaning they ate no manufactured meat but fish and seafood were allowed. One defined herself as ‘flexitarian’, implying that her consumption of no meat might shift in accordance with the situations.

Their profiles illustrated a group of Millennials, or Generation Y, who Howe, N. and Strauss, W. (2000). retained high intelligence and showed traits of social awareness. According Millennials Rising: The Next Great to Howe and Strauss’s book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, Generation. New York: Vintage Millennials are the generation born after 1982. The majority of research Books. papers had further defined the mid-1990s as the end of this generation.

Millennials were depicted as ‘more numerous, more affluent, better educated Twenge, J. (2006). Generation Me: and more ethnically diverse’ and manifesting ‘a wide array of positive social Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, habits’ including ‘a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty and 1 Entitled--and More Miserable good-conduct’1. Aside from their exhibited individualism and confidence, Than Ever Before. New York: Free Millennials were also characterised as narcissistic and self-entitled, which Press. named by psychologist Jean Twenge as the Generation Me2. These traits were 2 gradually unveiled throughout the following research content.

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Cultural Sensitivity This group of participants carried multi-language skills. All participants were capable of communicating in English. 13 of them had learned more than one foreign language besides English. 9 were able to conduct basic conversations in at least 2 foreign languages. Their advanced language ability was highly profited from the school education. Either or not schools provided the first contact, all of them were obligated to learn foreign languages during the study period. For these participants, foreign languages were applied on a daily basis, including in professional environments (school, works), in leisure events and activities (trips, media, socialisation), and in intimate relationships (friends, family, lover). Nearly all participants were motivated to learn foreign languages by the wish to communicate to foreigners. Other motivations included the practical uses of the languages and the attraction by the languages and the cultures.

‘Foreign language’ as a term used in the interviews indicates a language which is not one’s first or native language. 3 of the participants have immigration backgrounds and were raised bilingually. Therefore, both German and their parents’ languages were considered native languages to these participants and thus excluded from their foreign language skills.

All participants had had or maintained close contacts with foreigners in- and outside Germany. Close contact indicates a series of intensive interactions between 2 people, such as living or working together, or sharing intimate relationships for a period. Most of the close contacts with foreigners of this group occurred outside Germany, whether during travels or study exchanges.

7 participants had had professional working experience with international colleagues. 7 had or had had foreign flatmates in Germany. 5 had close foreign friends, and 4 had ever had romantic relationships with foreigners.

All participants had travelled outside Germany. Half of them had been to Asian countries (Asia here indicates the countries located on the Asian continent, including India, Arabic countries and Russia). Among them, 5 had been to East or Southeast Asia. 7 participants had ever resided outside Germany. 11 of them had stayed abroad for at least 3 months.

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Ethnic Eating Experience 9 participants showed strong interest in trying new food. 2 preferred familiar food for daily meals, however, trying new food depended on if they were introduced to it. Another 2 claimed their likings of new food, yet they were often cautious while tasting. The encounters of new food were categorised into active searching, chance seeking and passive receiving. 4 participants inclined to the first category, which searching for new food places and testing new recipes were their hobby. 5 chance seekers were not as keen on new food as the active searchers, yet if the food sparked their interest, they strived for more information. 5 stayed in the passive receiving. Most of the time, they took what were introduced to them. Trying new food for this studied group had a tight link to the change of environments. It connected in a major part with travelling or opening of new restaurants.

All participants had ethnic eating experience in- and outside Germany. Most of them could associate the food with its ethnic background during or after consumption. 5 mentioned that the in-depth acquisition of the ethnic culture in an eating experience required the presence of people from this ethnicity or a cultural mediator who was capable of translating the cultural implications of the food. 3 vegetarian attendants admitted that they would consume meat during travelling, in order to obtain a more comprehensive cultural experience or to avoid extra effort to look for suitable food.

In the recalling of their previous ethnic eating experience, the use of the ingredients was brought up most frequently by 10 of the participants. 9 could memorise the names of the dishes. Tastes and eating etiquettes came at the third place, followed by the presentations of the food and interaction with the service and between eaters, eating settings and environments, eating tools and the preparations of the food. 8 participants autonomously reflected on the German eating as well as societal rules and norms by recognising the differences between 2 cultures. 4 participants extended the symbols signified from the food, objects, conversations, behaviours, and interaction to interpretations of the customs, norms and values of the associated (eating) cultures.

9 participants felt understanding more of the associated cultures after the ethnic eating experience they described in the interviews. 4 could not connect the food experience with the ethnic cultures presented. 1 gave her definition of the term ‘culture’ and claimed ‘I can connect with everybody in the world by sharing food, but I don’t have to understand every part of them in order to socialise’.

Weigand, S. (2017). Pre-interview.

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

According to the fact that many ethnic eating took place in restaurants, half of the participants indicated that many ethnic restaurants failed to either deliver adequate or accurate information of the ethnic culture the food represented or attract their interest in the associated cultures. However, 3 participants found ethnic restaurants as a good resource to acquire knowledge of a new culture.

Comparing the same ethnic food experience in Germany to in the original regions where the foods were introduced from, the significant distinctions noticed by the participants were the use of ingredients, the eating atmosphere and the settings of the eating environments, followed by the tastes of the food and the eating etiquettes. 2 participants mentioned that ethnic foods introduced to Germany were not the same as the original foods. For instance, stir-fried noodles which were introduced to Germany as Chinese food could be found all over Germany. It generalised the impression that stir-fried noodles represented Chinese cuisine. When the participants travelled to China and experienced Chinese food, they were surprised by the diversity of Chinese cuisine that covered various styles besides noodles.

An intriguing phenomenon was discovered. During the interviews, Italian cuisine, specifically pizza and pasta were mentioned by 10 participants in descriptions of ethnic eating experience. 8 suggested that the Italian food was different in Italy from in Germany. Another 2 held an opposite opinion claiming that no significant difference lay between Italian food in these 2 places. It is worth noting that 5 participants did not perceive or consider pizza and pasta as foreign food since these foods had been adopted in the daily diet by the majority of young Germans from their childhood. The project Pizza non Pizza was formed under this observation.

MĂźhlbauer, T. (2017). Preinterview.

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Before the eating events, 5 of the participants agreed that food could be an entry to learn an ethnic culture. One participant didn’t think he could gain insights about the culture except for the food itself, but he agreed that food could trigger his interest in the associated cultures.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Substantive Knowledge about Taiwan 13 participants claimed they were aware of Taiwan before the eating events. 10 participants were able to point out the geographical position of Taiwan. Among them, 6 had acknowledged that Taiwan is an island. Taiwan was known for its political conflicts with China to this studied group. 3 mentioned their impression of Taiwan was connected to metropolis views.

Other information about Taiwan of the participants included the Buddhism religion, the highly developed economy, technology as a critical industry, the street food culture, the influence of the west, the imported Taiwanese goods in Germany and its nature.

Only one participant had been to Taiwan and had stayed 7 months for study. 6 have Taiwanese friends or friends who had visited Taiwan.

5 participants had tried Taiwanese cuisine. They described the food as diverse covering various tastes and ingredients. To specify a fact here, the researcher had cooked for these 5 participants in the past. Therefore, their impressions of the Taiwanese food could gain from the researcher’s food choices, except for the one who had been to Taiwan. 4 among all the participants admitted that they were not able to identify Taiwanese cuisine even if they had possibly tasted it.

The collected answers demonstrated that Taiwan was a blurry concept for this studied group. They did not possess a specific image related to its cultural character, significances and even stereotypes. Furthermore, they borrowed images of other Asian cultures to describe their impressions of Taiwan. 2 participants admitted that they were not able to differentiate Asian countries and cultures.

When the participants were inquired about their expectations for the food at the eating events, vegetables, rice, soy sauce and fish were mentioned most frequently. 3 participants had no specific expectation. Other answers included soup, chicken, noodles, rice noodles, noodle soup, spring rolls, seafood, tofu, bean sprouts, meat, ginger, mooncake, peas and coriander.

Some vague answers given were steamed stuff, special beans, something cooked in broth and something filled. 3 presumed the food similar to Chinese food, and one assumed the food similar to Korean style. One expected Banh Cuon which originated from Northern Vietnam. In the aspect of the tastes of food and the forms of eating, different dishes with a wide variety of flavours and ingredients, long-lasting eating, salty breakfast, soup in the morning, fresh, light and spicy taste, use of different spices and use of chopsticks were brought up.

The given responses revealed traces of diverse Asian cuisines, suggesting that the participants were neither familiar with Taiwanese food nor capable of telling different Asian cuisines apart before the eating events. Although the participants might react out of their general impressions of Asian food, the answers were a result of their comparisons to the German diet. Asian food was perceived and expected to be healthier, fresher and contains multiple ingredients, spices and tastes.

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

3.2 EATING EVENTS AND OBSERVATION

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

A total number of 16 Germans participated in 6 different events imitating the eating scenarios in Taiwan. 2 of the participants conducted incomplete interviews. Therefore, their data were only collected for the eating observation. Every event consisted of 3 to more eaters including the researcher. Some of the participants joined the events more than one time for the need of comparison.

The roles of the eaters were categorised into the cultural sender, the cultural mediator, and the cultural receiver. The researcher represented as the cultural sender in the eating events, who transmitted the Taiwanese culture through the eating process to the German eaters, whom in this case were the cultural receivers. Cultural mediators defined by the researcher are the people standing in between two cultural groups, who have in-depth knowledge about Germany and Taiwan as well as are capable of translating the cultural implications of the objects, words and behaviours mutually towards both sides. Explained by the model of communication, cultural mediators serve as the channel of a communication process. Therefore, those who joined the events multiple times were more likely to turn into cultural mediators due to their increasing familiarity with the ethnic eating.

The events were held in the kitchen of the researcher’s place which located in the Dencklerblock, Wßrzburg. 6 eating scenarios in Taiwan were Hot Fry, Vegetarianism, Fish and Seafood, Breakfast, Noodles and Hot Pot.

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EATING 1 HOT FRY

A hot-fry bistro on sidewalks Chen, Y. (2018). Hot Fry. [brush pen].

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Date 2017.6.6 Participants Yen Ju Chen (researcher/cultural sender) Dominik Hezinger (cultural mediator) Thomas Mühlbauer The eating group included Dominik Hezinger and Thomas Mühlbauer. The 2 German participants had known each other since childhood and lived in the same flat for 7 years. They were also the flatmates of the researcher. Dominik was the only German participant who had been to Taiwan. He served as a cultural mediator in this and the following events.

Eating Style ‘Hot Fry’ is a style of food that served in sidewalk bistros in Taiwan. Eaters order plates containing various seasonal ingredients from meat, seafood to vegetables. Each plate costs on average around 2.5 euros, which allows eaters to have a vast variety of plates to taste different ingredients and flavours. The chef prepares the food with his massive wok after orders are taken. The stir-fry technique accelerates the speed of preparation. Dishes are delivered piping hot straight to the tables. That’s where the name ‘Hot Fry’ came from. Chefs pay attention to the consuming tempo of every table and manage to provide new dishes right on the point. Most of the hot-fry bistros open from late afternoon to midnight, making them a suitable spot for celebrations and showing foreign friends the midnight folk culture in Taiwan. The eating environments are often loud and casual. Beer in bottles is distributed in 200 ml glasses and drunk with a salute ‘kan’ or ‘kan bay’ which means ‘cheers’ or ‘bottom-up’.

Setting A small square wooden table stood in the middle of the kitchen surrounded by 3 seats. The table surface was covered by newspapers in Chinese. Other objects lay on the newspapers. In the centre of the table was a cup filled with chopsticks. Surrounding the cup were 4 different-sized black round plates and one black rectangle plate with different food. The 5 dishes were Classic Fried Rice, Hakka Stir-Fry, Stir-Fried Beef with Scallions, Egg Pancake with Dried Radish and Stir-Fried Seasonal Leafy Greens. The attendants sat at each side of the table. In front of each person were one white bowl and one short water glass filled with beer.

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DOMINIK

egg pancake with dried radish

individual bowl

individual bowl

stir-fried beef with scallions chopstick cup classic fried rice

Figure 3.2.1 Hot Fry Eating Setting 104

stir-fried seasonal leafy greens individual bowl hakka stir-fry

beer glass

YEN

THOMAS

beer glass

beer glass

CLASSIC FRIED RICE

00:20 | for 3-people meal 120 g pork - julienned into 3 mm 360 g cooked jasmine rice 2 eggs - whisked 2 scallions - finely diced 1/3 iceberg lettuce - julienned salt white pepper 2 tbsp soy sauce marinade for pork 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tsp white rice vinegar several drops of sesame oil a pinch of potato starch

Fried Rice is a dish existing in many East Asian cuisines. Fried rice mixed with vegetables, meat and sauce functions as Italian pasta with the aim to use up the leftover ingredients. To qualify as good fried rice, the rice grains must remain separate after cooking. Massive oil and high heat are often applied while stirring. Overnight rice which excessive water has evaporated from it is preferred by some chefs to create the clear texture of grains.

Soak pork strips in marination for 10 minutes while preparing other ingredients. If you prefer a mild taste, just skip this step.

Turn to medium heat. Add 2 tbsp oil to the wok. When oil turns hot, toss pork strips and stir-fry until medium-well. Remove pork from wok and set aside.

Add 4 tbsp oil to the wok. Add eggs to the centre. Stir eggs quickly with a spatula until they solidify. Toss scallions and stir-fry until fragrant. Toss cooked rice.

Now comes the crucial part. The mouthfeel of good fried rice is fluffy. To make rice grains separate requires good heat and techniques. Press the rice with a flat side of the spatula to the shape of pancake. Flip the edge to the centre and press it flat again. The pressing helps rice grains to receive even amount of heat. The flipping avoids the damage of the intact rice grains.

Continue the press-flipping procedure until rice grains separated and well mixed with ingredients.

Toss medium-well pork back. Toss lettuce juliennes. Continue the pressflipping technique until lettuce softened and ingredients are well mixed with rice. Add salt and white pepper. Add soy sauce according to individual preference to enhance the taste.

HAKKA STIR-FRY

00:20 | for 3-people meal 300 g pork belly - julienned 100 g dried squid - softened in hot water and julienned 6 dried tofus - sliced 2 stalks of celery - julienned 1 scallion - chopped into 5 cm long pieces and divided by green and white colour 1 chilli pepper - julienned 2 tbsp soy sauce salt 1 tsp fine sugar 1 tbsp rice wine white pepper sesame oil

Hakka is an ethnic group distributing in southern provinces of China and villages of Taiwan. The people speak Hakka language and possess a distinct culture from other Han people. Hakka means ‘guest family’. Their ancestry migrated constantly and settled down in the mountainous areas. Salt was used to preserve food during travel. Hakka cuisine characterises with the use of preserved ingredients and the heavy taste.

Stir-fry dried tofus without oil until golden. Remove and set aside.

Add oil. SautĂŠ the white parts of scallion until slightly charred. Toss chilli pepper. Toss pork belly and stir-fry until medium-well. Toss squid juliennes and tofus. Stir-fry until the aroma releases. Toss celery. Add soy sauce, a pinch of salt, sugar and rice wine. Stir-fry until pork belly is well-done and celery is softened. Add a preferred amount of white pepper and few drops of sesame oil.

STIR-FRIED BEEF WITH SCALLIONS

00:20 | for 3-people meal 300 g beef steak - julienned 3 scallions - chopped into 5 cm long pieces 2 chilli peppers - julienned 2 cloves of garlic - roughly diced 5 g ginger - julienned 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp oyster sauce 1 tbsp rice wine black rice vinegar marinade for beef 1 egg yolk 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp rice wine a pinch of starch

Stir-Fried Beef with Scallions is a classic dish in hot-fry bistros. Pork, lamb and chicken meat are all suitable for this recipe to replace beef.

Marinate the beef strips for 10 minutes while preparing other ingredients.

Divide the white and green parts of scallions. Press the white parts until slightly break to release the aroma.

Heat up a wok over medium-high heat. Add oil and toss the white parts of scallions and ginger juliennes. When their aroma releases and the ingredients are slightly charred, toss chilli peppers and garlic. Stir-fry until fragrant. Remove the ingredients from wok and set aside.

Toss beef to the same wok and stir-fry until medium-well. Add back the removed ingredients. Add soy sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine. Toss the green parts of scallions and stir-fry until softened. Add a splash of black rice vinegar before turning off the heat.

EGG PANCAKE WITH DRIED RADISH

00:10 | for 3-people meal 1 dried radish - soaked in water for 10 minutes and diced 4 eggs - whisked 1 scallion- chopped into rings

Dried radish is sun-dried and salted white radish which is a common ingredient in the East Asian regions. Before cooking, dried radish has to soak in water to reduce the salinity. Because of the high level of salt in the radish, additional salt is not required for this dish.

Heat up a small pan. SautĂŠ dried radish without oil for 3 minutes. Add 1 tbsp of oil and stir-fry until the aroma releases. Remove dried radish from the pan.

Add fried dried radish, scallion and 1 tsp oil to the eggs and mix. Add 2 tbsp of oil to the heated pan. Pour the egg mixture into the pan and spread it evenly.

Turn to low heat and cover up with a lid.

When the bottom turns golden, flip the pancake over and bake until the other side is slightly golden. Turn off the heat and serve.

STIR-FRIED SEASONAL LEAFY GREENS

00:10 | for 3-people meal seasonal leafy green - divided into leaves and stems 2 cloves of garlic - sliced salt

On Taiwanese dining tables, plates of vegetables are necessary to balance the tastes and nutrition. The most common method is to stir fry the seasonal greens with either garlic, ginger or scallion. Salt as the only spice extracts the innate sweetness of the vegetables.

Heat up a wok or pan over medium heat. Add 2 tbsp cooking oil. When oil turns hot, toss the stems and stir-fry until the aroma releases (about 1-2 minutes). Usually stems need longer cooking time than leaves to be softened.

Therefore, toss the stems first. Add 1-2 tbsp water and cover up with lid for one minute.

Uncover the lid and toss garlic. Stir-fry until the aroma of the garlic releases.

Check if the stems turn soft. If you are not sure, taste it. If they taste raw and earthy, add another 1-2 tbsp water and cover up with lid for 1 minute. Repeat this step until the stems are medium cooked. Toss the leaves and stir-fry with the stems until they are softened. Add salt at the end.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

(left) Jasmine rice (right) Sticky rice

Plain noodles

Soba noodles

Mung bean noodles

Egg noodles

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

EATING 2 VEGETARIANISM

Scene in a vegetarian buffet restaurant in Taipei Chen, Y. (2018). Vegetarianism. [brush pen].

Date 2017.7.5 Participants Yen Ju Chen (researcher/cultural sender) Dominik Hezinger (cultural mediator) Thomas MĂźhlbauer (second-time participant) Jonas Bonas Lisa Raimund Alba Hipp The eating group included Dominik Hezinger, Thomas MĂźhlbauer, Jonas Bonas, Lisa Raimund and Alba Hipp. All the participants lived in the same block of building and shared different depths of relationships with one another. Jonas and Lisa were college friends with Dominik and acquaintances of Thomas and the researcher. Alba was a fresh face to Dominik, Thomas and the researcher. She was introduced to the event through Jonas and Lisa and decided to participate at the last minute before the eating. Therefore, her interview was collected afterwards.

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Eating Style Vegetarianism in Taiwan has been far influenced by the religious beliefs.

Portraits and statues of Buddha decorate the vegetarian restaurants and buffets presenting the concept of ‘no killing’. Buddhist diet in Taiwan can be categorised into lacto (includes dairy products but no eggs), ovo (includes eggs but no dairy products) and ovo-lacto vegetarianism (excludes both dairy products and eggs). Garlic, spring onion, Chinese onion, garlic chive and asafoetida accelerate blood circulation and increase body temperature. For the strict practitioners, these 5 vegetables are considered interfering with the practice and, therefore, forbidden in their diet. Most of the food places specify the type of vegetarian dishes on the menu.

Vegetarianism is also used as a means to trade with God. When one prays something from God, he or she has to make an exchange by giving offerings or sacrificing his or her belongings. The promise may be to exercise vegetarianism until the wish is fulfilled. The trend of vegetarian consumption has also spread on young generations with regard to health, animal ethics and environmental friendliness.

Vegetarianism is a blessing in Taiwan owing to the rich natural resources and the various cooking styles. Abundant vegetables, mushrooms, fruits, soy products, rice products, spices and sauces are used to enhance the diversity of flavours and nutrition.

Setting A small square wooden table stood in the middle of the eating space surrounded by 6 seats. 7 dishes and a rice pot containing cooked rice were placed in the centre of the table. The 7 different dishes included Spicy Cauliflower in a medium-sized white round plate, Ants Climbing a Tree in a massive white round plate, Stewed Tofu with Aubergine in a deep white round plate, Stir-Fried Dried Tofu with Green Paprika in a medium-sized white round plate, Stir-Fried Cabbage in a white rectangle plate, Egg Pancake with Dried Radish in a small white round plate, Cucumber Salad in a small glass bowl and Rice with Sweet Potato in a rice-steaming pot. Surrounding the dishes were individual bowls and teacups filled with hot green tea. Chopsticks in a cup were set on the heater beside the dining table. A portrait of ‘Guanyin’, or the Goddess of Mercy, was posted on the back wall of the dining space to mimic the eating scenario of vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan. Due to the limited space, 2 chairs stood directly against the wall. If a participant in the corner needed to visit the toilet, the rest must leave their chairs to make the way.

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JONAS

ALBA

heater tea

chopsticks cup

individual bowl

individual bowl

tea egg pancake with dried radish

spicy cauliflower

cucumber salad

individual bowl

DOMINIK

Figure 3.2.2 Vegetarianism Eating Setting 118

stir-fried cabbage stir-fried dried tofu with green paprika tea

individual bowl

THOMAS

ants climbing a tree

tea Guanyin portrait

wall

individual bowl tea

individual bowl

stewed tofu with aubergine

LISA

YEN

rice with sweet potato

tea

SPICY CAULIFLOWER

00:20 | for 6-people meal 1 cauliflower - chopped into florets 2 fresh chilli peppers - sliced 3 cloves of garlic - roughly diced 4 tbsp soy sauce a pinch of fine sugar

Spicy Cauliflower is a dish belonging to the Xiang cuisine, one of the 8 traditional Chinese cuisine styles. Xiang cuisine is characterised by its flavourful spiciness and has its impact mostly in the Hunan province of China.

Pork belly in the original style is omitted in this recipe.

Cook cauliflower in boiling water with a pinch of salt for 1 minute. Remove from the pot and throw it into cold water to retain its crunchiness. Drain the cauliflower and set aside for later use.

Add some cooking oil to the wok. Toss chilli and garlic in and stir-fry until fragrant. Toss cauliflower in. Add soy sauce and sugar. Stir-fry until the cauliflower thoroughly absorbs the sauce.

ANTS CLIMBING A TREE

00:20 | for 6-people meal 100 g of mung bean noodles soaked in water for 30 mins 2 dried Shiitake mushrooms soaked in 300 ml water for 30 mins and diced into small cubes 6 champignon mushrooms chopped into small cubes 2 stalks of celery - chopped into small cubes 1 tbsp broad bean paste 2 tbsp soy sauce salt

Ants Climbing a Tree gained its name from the appearance. In the original recipe, minced pork is used to fry with mung bean noodles, which appears as ants (minced meat) climbing on tree branches (mung bean noodles). This recipe provides a vegetarian version by replacing the meat with mushrooms.

Preserve the mushroom water for later use. Chop the softened mung bean noodles in half to make them easier for stir-fry.

Add oil to the wok. Stir-fry Shiitake mushrooms and champignon mushrooms until fragrant. Add broad bean paste and soy sauce. Add the mushroom water to mix with the sauce. When the sauce boils, toss mung bean noodles in and mix well. Let the noodles simmer in the sauce.

When the sauce is absorbed by the noodles, toss celeries in and mix well.

Adjust the taste with salt at the end.

STEWED TOFU WITH AUBERGINE

00:20 | for 6-people meal 300 g soft tofu - cubed 1 aubergine - chopped into 5 cm long pieces 1 clove of garlic - minced 10 g ginger - minced 100 ml vegetable broth 1 tsp mushroom sauce (the vegetarian version of oyster sauce) salt fine sugar 1 tbsp rice wine a handful of basil leaves

Tofu is a kind of bean curds made out of soybeans. Soft tofu as a member of the tofu family has a fine texture which is suitable for soup and salad dishes.

Prepare a small pot of oil to deep fry aubergine. Heat the oil up to 150° C. Toss the aubergine and fry until golden and soft. Remove the aubergine from oil and drain. Set aside for later use.

Heat up a wok over medium heat and add 2 tbsp oil. SautĂŠ garlic and ginger to release the aroma. Add mushroom sauce, a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar. Toss aubergine in and gently mix it with the sauce. Add broth. When the broth starts to boil, gently toss the tofu in. Simmer for one minute.

Add rice wine and basil leaves at the end.

STIR-FRIED DRIED TOFU WITH GREEN PAPRIKA

00:15 | for 6-people meal 1 green paprika - chopped into stripes 3 dried tofu - sliced 1 scallion - chopped into 5 cm long pieces 2 cloves of garlic - sliced 1 tbsp Shacha sauce 1 tbsp soy sauce fine sugar 1 tbsp black rice vinegar

Dried Tofu, or Dougan, is the end product of soft tofu after dehydration. It has the brown appearance but lighter colour inside. Dried tofu has a firm texture comparing to other varieties of tofu.

In a heated wok or pan, sautĂŠ dried tofu without oil until the water evaporates. Add oil and continue to sautĂŠ the dried tofu until golden.

Toss scallion and garlic. Stir-fry until the aroma releases. Toss green paprika and stir-fry until slightly softens. Add Shacha sauce, soy sauce, a pinch of sugar and 4 tbsp water. Mix well the ingredients with the sauce. When the sauce is absorbed by the ingredients, add black rice vinegar and turn off the heat.

STIR-FRIED CABBAGE

00:10 | for 6-people meal a half of a tipped cabbage - torn or chopped into smaller pieces 3 cloves of garlic - sliced 2 tbsp cooking oil salt

Stir-Fried Cabbage which is many Taiwanese favourite vegetable dish is available in hot-fry, vegetarian, seafood, noodle bistros and on dining tables at home. Cabbage’s natural sweetness is brought out by hot oil, and its crunchiness enlightens the taste buds. Besides the essential salt, spices like garlic, scallion, ginger, and additional ingredients like bacon, carrot, dried shrimps are added according to individual preferences.

Add cooking oil to a heated wok or pan. Stir-fry cabbage for 2 minutes until the aroma releases. Add about 2 tbsp of water to the cabbage and cover up with a lid. Steam for one minute. Cabbage consists of hard stems. Combining the techniques of stir-frying and steaming reduces the cooking time and the use of oil.

Uncover the lid. Toss garlic slices and mix with the cabbage. Check if the cabbage is softened. If not, add another 2 tbsp of water and cover up the lid for one minute. Repeat the steps of stir-frying and steaming until the cabbage reaches your preferred texture. Add salt at the end.

CUCUMBER SALAD

01:20 | for 6-people meal 1 cucumber - chopped into 5 cm long pieces fine sugar 1 tsp salt 6 cloves of garlic - finely minced 10 g ginger - finely minced 1 chilli - julienned 2 tbsp white rice vinegar sesame oil

Cucumber Salad is an appetiser served aside heavy dishes such as Braised Pork. Its sour and spicy taste in combination with the grease creates the harmony in mouths.

Add a pinch of sugar and salt to cucumber and mix with hand until they melt.

Toss minced garlic, ginger and chilli juliennes in. Add rice vinegar. Mix well and marinate in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

Add a splash of sesame oil before serving.

RICE WITH SWEET POTATO

01:30 | for 6-people meal 3 rice cups (540 g) of rice 1 sweet potato - peeled and diced

The Taiwanese elderly often associate sweet potatoes with their childhood poverty. Due to the proper weather and environment, sweet potatoes grow abundantly in every season all over the island. People relied on consuming sweet potatoes and the potato leaves to survive in food shortage during war and post-war period. When the rice was scarce, sweet potatoes were cooked in rice congee to fill the family’s stomachs. In the modern, prosperous society, sweet potato is seen as nutritious and regains its popularity.

Cook with Rice Cooker Wash rice in a strainer until the water turns from turbid to clear. Put rice in the inner pot of a rice cooker. Add 3 rice cups (540 g) of water to it. The ratio of rice grains and water is 1:1. Make the rice grains lie evenly in the pot.

Place sweet potato cubes evenly on rice. Cover the pot with lid and press the cooking button. Some rice cooker may need additional water in the outer pot.

Please follow the instructions of your rice cooker provider.

When the cooking button jumps up, use a rice paddle or a wooden paddle to flip the rice. The flipping redistributes the heat and water to each rice grain.

During the process, the excess water evaporates. Cover up the lid for another 10 minutes. The undercooked rice grains get slowly steam-cooked and reach the perfect texture.

Cook with Pot Wash rice grains in a strainer until the water turns from turbid to clear. Put rice in the pot. Add 3 rice cups (540 g) of water to it. The ratio of rice grains and water is 1:1. Make the rice grains lie evenly in the pot. Place sweet potato cubes evenly on rice.

Cover the pot with lid and turn to medium heat. Do not uncover the lid during the cooking process. When water starts to boil, turn the heat down to minimum.

To know if the rice is ready requires experience. Normally you can hear the water boiling. When the sound quiets down, the rice is almost ready. Wait for another one minute and turn the heat off. Remain the lid for another 10 minutes. The steam in the pot will continue to cook the rice.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Shaoxing wine

Black rice vinegar

Soy sauce

Rice wine

White rice vinegar

Sesame oil

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

EATING 3 FISH AND SEAFOOD

Exhibited fish tanks in front of fish restaurants Chen, Y. (2018). Fish and Seafood. [brush pen].

134

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Date 2017.7.11 Participants Yen Ju Chen (researcher/cultural sender) Dominik Hezinger (cultural mediator) Thomas Mühlbauer (third-time participant) Jonas Bittner Franziska Jannsen The eating group included Dominik Hezinger, Thomas Mühlbauer, Jonas Bittner and Franziska Jannsen. Jonas and Dominik had worked together.

He was also an acquaintance of Thomas and the researcher. Franziska was introduced to the event by Lisa Raimund. She was a stranger to other participants, which is shown in her description of the event during the interview. Franziska’s interview was conducted after the event.

Eating Style Foods supplied by the superior nature are the blessing gifts of the island. The prosperous fish and seafood resources enrich the Taiwanese cuisine with the tastes of oceans. Various types of fishes, shrimps, clams, oysters, sea snails, scallops, mussels, crabs, squids, octopuses, seaweeds and roes are not alien components in family meals. However, some ingredients appear to be rarer which can just be found in specific regions or restaurants. Restaurants along the coasts provide no menu but only the goods they captured in the morning by preserving the living sea creatures in tanks or on ice. These fishes and seafood were often exhibited in front of the restaurants to attract passersby.

Customers order their dishes straight at the gate. Chefs seasoned the fresh ingredients with minimal spices. Ginger, spring onion and rice wine are primarily used to reduce the fishy odour and create harmonious flavours. The major arts of seafood and fish cuisine include sashimi (raw fish slices with dipping sauces), water boiled (served with dipping sauces), steamed, deepfried and stir-fried. Cookery styles of the neighbour cultures, such as the use of chilli, lime juice, basil and fish sauce in Thai cuisine and the application of miso, tsuyu (a mixture of soy sauce and extracted fish stock) or teriyaki flavour in Japanese cuisine, may be borrowed. Some restaurants offer culinary service for people to bring their purchased goods from the harbours.

People can also buy fresh fishes and seafood from the restaurants.

Setting A square table was set in the middle of the dining space with 5 chairs surrounded. 8 different dishes lay in the centre of the table, including Steamed Tilapia in a white rectangle deep plate, Squid Balls in a medium clay round plate served with salt, white pepper and a quarter of lime, StirFried Peas and Mushrooms with Oyster Sauce in a deep white round plate, Mussels with Five-Flavoured Sauce in a medium white round plate, Drunk Shrimps in a small blue pot, Fried Rice with Shrimp Paste in a big white round plate, Stir-Fried Seasonal Leafy Greens in a big white round plate, and Cucumber Salad in a crystal bowl. Each participant had one bowl and a pair of chopsticks. 6 pictures of seafood were posted on the walls to mimic the original eating environment of the fish restaurants in Taiwan.

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THOMAS

JONAS

individual bowl cucumber salad

drunk shrimps

fried rice with shrimp paste

individual bowl

YEN individual bowl

stir-fried seasonal leafy greens

pepper salt stir-fried peas and mushrooms with oyster sauce

mussels with five-flavoured sauce

individual bowl

DOMINIK

Figure 3.2.3 Fish and Seafood Eating Setting 136

individual bowl

fish picture

wall

steamed tilapia

FRANZISKA

squid balls

STEAMED TILAPIA

00:30 | for 5-people meal 1 tilapia 1 small chunk of ginger - peeled 10 g ginger - sliced 1 scallion white pepper salt 4 tbsp cooking oil

Tilapia is a freshwater fish commonly raised in fish farms in Taiwan. It is a cheap and abundant resource, with tender meat and few bones. Fresh seasonal and local fishes can replace tilapia in this recipe.

Rinse the fish in clean water. Dry its surface with napkins. Grab the chunk of ginger to rub the fish skin from head to tail on both sides. The ginger helps to neutralise the unpleasant fishy smell. Apply a layer of salt and white pepper on fish. Set aside.

Divide the white and green parts of the scallion. Chop the white part into 5 cm pieces and flap them with the knife blade to release the aroma. Take a long plate. Place ginger slices and white scallion in the centre. Lay the fish on top of them. This technique makes the fish absorb the aroma of the spices and lift the fish a bit higher on the plate so that it gets evenly cooked while steaming.

If you have a steamer, follow the instruction of your machine provider and steam the fish for 20 minutes. If you don’t have a steamer, use a pan which is bigger than the fish plate. Add water to 1/3 of the pan’s height and bring it to boil. Place a bowl downward on the pan and place the plate on it. The aim is to lift the fish plate above the boiling water. Cover up with a lid on the pan and steam for 20 minutes. Add more water to the pan if the water evaporates entirely during the steaming. Otherwise, do not uncover the lid.

Julienne the green part of scallion finely. When the steaming is ready, bring the fish plate out and place the juliennes on top of the fish. Heat up the cooking oil. Pour the hot oil on the fish. The oil brings out the aroma and glaze the fish.

SQUID BALLS

00:20 | for 5-people meal frozen squid balls 1 lime or lemon - quartered white pepper - ground salt

Fish and seafood balls are a type of food ingredients popular in coastal regions of Taiwan. They are made out of all kinds of fish and seafood sorts.

Fish or seafood meat ground with pig fat and spices are shaped in balls and used in congee, soups, as well as for deep-fry and grill. Due to the unavailability of squid in Germany, frozen squid balls are used in this recipe.

Unfreeze squid balls. Wipe off water on the surface. Wrap the balls with a layer of cooking oil and fry on a pan until the skin turns golden.

Sprinkle white pepper and salt on the balls. Serve the lime on the side.

STIR-FRIED PEAS AND MUSHROOMS WITH OYSTER SAUCE

00:20 | for 5-people meal 1 pack of pea pods 6 champignon mushrooms chopped into half 2 cloves of garlic - sliced 1 tbsp oyster sauce 1 tsp fine sugar 1/2 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp rice wine salt

Oyster sauce is a thick sauce made from oyster extract, sugar, salt and cornstarch. It is ideal for stir-frying meat and vegetables. Oyster sauce is most known for flavouring ‘chow mein’, or fried noodles, a dish gains its popularity in North America and Europe.

Nip off the tips of pea pods and remove the fibre on the sides. Set aside.

Add oil to a wok. Sauté garlic slices until the aroma releases. Toss pea pods and mushrooms and stir-fry. Add oyster sauce, fine sugar, soy sauce and some water. Stir-fry until the ingredients soften. Add rice wine. Adjust the taste with salt at the end.

MUSSELS WITH FIVEFLAVOURED SAUCE

00:10 | for 5-people meal mussels five-flavoured sauce 1 clove of garlic - ground 5 g ginger - ground 1 chili - ground 1 scallion - finely chopped 1 tbsp ketchup 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp white rice vinegar 1 tsp fine sugar 1 tsp sesame oil

Five-flavoured sauce consisting of sweet, sour, salty, spicy and umami tastes is often served on fresh seafood in Taiwan. The sauce can be applied on different seafood such as squid, oyster and octopus.

Cook mussels in boiling water until the shells open. Remove and drain.

Drizzle the five-flavoured sauce on top of the mussels.

DRUNK SHRIMPS

overnight | for 5-people meal tiger shrimps (better with shells) 4 slices of ginger a half lime or lemon marinade for shrimps 200 ml Shaoxing wine 1 slice of Dong Quai 1 tbsp wolfberries 3 red dates fine sugar salt

Drunk Shrimps is a cold dish which is often served in traditional banquets.

The shrimps are marinated in cooked Chinese herbal medicines in Shaoxing wine. Drunk Chicken is another dish made in the same style.

Add 300 ml water to a small pot. Toss Dong Quai, wolfberries and red dates in and turn the heat on. When water starts boiling, add Shaoxing wine and turn off the heat. Add a pinch of salt and sugar. Set aside to cool down.

Boil another pot of water with high heat. Toss ginger slices in. When water boils, toss the shrimps and the half lime. Cook the shrimps until they turn red and appear as the shape of the letter ‘U’. Remove the shrimps to cold water. Soaking in cold water right after cooking creates the tender texture of the shrimp meat. When the shrimps cool down, drain the water and put the shrimps into the cold marinade. Marinate the shrimps overnight in the fridge.

FRIED RICE WITH SHRIMP PASTE

00:20 | for 5-people meal 2 rice cups (360 g) of cooked rice 120 g shrimps without shells a quarter of iceberg lettuce julienned 3 cloves of garlic- ground 1 chilli - julienned 1 tbsp Kapi (Thai shrimp paste)

Shrimp paste is made of fermented shrimps and salt. It has a unique smell that either attracts or scares away people. Due to the high level of salinity, shrimp paste is used as a condiment. When mixing with spices like garlic, shallot, chilli and fish sauce, it is served as a dipping sauce or drizzled on fried vegetables. Shrimp paste exists in regions of China, Hong Kong, Korea and Southeast Asia. It is often known as the ‘Thai’ flavour in Taiwan and utilised by seafood restaurants.

Add 4 tbsp of oil to a wok and heat up over medium heat. Sauté shrimps until medium-well. Remove the shrimps and set aside.

Toss garlic and chilli. Stir-fry until the aroma releases. Add shrimp paste and stir-fry until fragrant. Toss rice. Press the rice flat as a pancake so that the grains receive heat evenly from the bottom. Flip the rice from the edge to the centre, and press them down again. Repeat the press-flipping procedure until the shrimp paste evenly colours the rice grains.

Toss shrimps. Toss lettuce and continue the press-flipping procedure until the lettuce softens.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Shacha sauce

Peanut and sesame paste

Shrimp paste

Broad bean paste

Mushroom sauce

Oyster sauce

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

EATING 4 BREAKFAST

A breakfast collection of burger, omelette, pancake, hash brown, black tea and Job’s tears milk provided by a breakfast deli in Taiwan Chen, Y. (2018). Breakfast. [brush pen].

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Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Date 2017.7.16 Participants Yen Ju Chen (researcher/cultural sender) Dominik Hezinger (cultural mediator) Thomas Mühlbauer (fourth-time participant) Johanna Rafalski Philipp Hofmann The eating group included Dominik Hezinger, Thomas Mühlbauer, Johanna Rafalski and Philipp Hoffman. Johanna was a college friend of Dominik.

She lived in Bamberg and visited Würzburg for few days during the research. Philipp was also a visitor in Würzburg. His interview was failed to be collected. Therefore, he is only mentioned in the eating observation.

Johanna’s interview was conducted after the event. Both Johanna and Philipp dwelled in the Dencklerblock previously for a period of time. They were acquaintances of Dominik, Thomas and the researcher.

Eating Style Breakfast is considered as an important meal to start a day in Taiwan. In the former agricultural society, families gathered around the round dining table and had breakfast together in the early morning before farming.

Breakfast consisted of congee, pickled tofu and vegetables, peanuts and fried breadsticks was influenced by Japanese cuisine when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. Accompanying the retreat of the Chiang Kai-shek government in 1949, the diverse inland food culture was brought to Taiwan. The military as a mixture of people from all over China carried their regional breakfast preferences to the island. Since then, the breakfast choices blossomed.

Dumplings, pancakes, steamed buns and soy milk became widespread from the military dependents’ villages. This type of food has later dominated territory of the market with the establishment of the 24/7 breakfast chain stores.

何昱泓, 林幸萱 and 盧德昀 (2016). 沒說你不知道的台灣早 餐史. [online] 台味誌. Available at: https://www.tai-way. com/2016/08/14/296/ [Accessed 22 Apr. 2018].

In response to the rapid pace of the modern society, traditional breakfast eating with family has shifted to a more convenient way. Breakfast delis and vendors offering freshly-prepared omelette, sandwich, onigiri and soy milk to students, office workers and commuters have become a daily scene in the morning street of Taiwan. Breakfast combinations launched by convenience stores have also popularised in the young generations. With the influence of Japanese, Chinese and American cultures, the fused ingredients tell the stories about the versatile breakfast culture of Taiwan.

Setting A square 75 cm table was set in the middle of the dining space with 4 chairs surrounded. 2 Omelettes with Tuna and Corn were served separately in a black and a white rectangle plates. 3 Taiwan-Style Onigiris were wrapped in plastic sheets. Soy milk in a glass bottle, 4 cups of black coffee, 4 empty glasses and 5 pairs of chopsticks were placed on the table.

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

DOMINIK

soy coffee milk coffee

onigiri coffee soy milk

onigiri

omelette with tuna and corn

soy milk coffee

THOMAS

152

PHILIPP

Figure 3.2.4 Breakfast Eating Setting

soy milk coffee

soy milk JOHANNA

YEN

onigiri

omelette with tuna and corn

OMELETTE WITH TUNA AND CORN

00:30 | 4 portions batter for wrappers 4 tbsp plain flour 3/4 tbsp starch 1 egg 1 scallion - finely diced a pinch of salt 200 ml water 1 canned tuna without oil 200 g sweet corn pepper 4 eggs thick soy sauce or oyster sauce

The classic breakfast omelette in Taiwan comes with a layer of wrapper made of flour, starch, egg and scallion. The fillings are diverse. This recipe introduces the omelette with tuna and corn and the technique of making the wrappers from scratch. The leftover wrappers can be preserved in the freezer.

Mix the batter. The texture should remain in the form of liquid. Mix tuna, corn and a pinch of ground pepper in another bowl. Set aside for later use.

Use a medium-sized pan. Add 1 tbsp cooking oil and heat over medium-low heat. When the pan turns hot, add a thin layer of batter that covers the pan surface. Swirl pan to make batter even on the pan. When the bottom side of the batter turns solid and loose from the pan, carefully flip it over and sautĂŠ the other side until firm. Set the wrapper aside and continue the same procedure with the rest batter. Remain an adequate amount of oil before adding new batter to the pan.

Set ready-made wrappers aside. Turn to medium heat and add some oil to the pan. Beat an egg in the pan. Break the egg yolk with a spatula. Before the egg turns solid, cover a wrapper on the egg.

When the bottom of the egg turns solid, flip the egg together with the wrapper upside down (the egg side faces up and the wrapper on the bottom).

Place tuna and corn in the middle of the egg. Fold both edges of the wrapper to the centre. Then gently roll over the omelette and move it to a plate.

Continue the same procedure on the next omelette.

Drizzle thick soy sauce on the omelettes before serving.

TAIWANSTYLE ONIGIRI

00:40 | 4 portions 540 g cooked sticky rice 1 bag of salted chips meat floss or fish floss fried eggs 4 eggs - whisked 2 scallions - diced salt fried dried radish 100 g dried radishes - soaked in water for 30 minutes and diced 3 cloves of garlic - finely minced 1 chilli pepper - finely minced sesame oil

Taiwan-Style Onigiri is a sticky rice roll filled with deep-fried breadstick, fried egg, meat floss (ground dried meat), fried dried radish and pickles. It’s often served as breakfast and eaten with soy milk. Fried breadstick in this recipe is replaced with salted chips to create the crunchy mouthfeel. Meat floss and dried radish are both available in Asian shops.

Dried radishes contain a high level of salinity. Soak them in water 30 minutes beforehand. Then dice them into small cubes.

Heat up a pan. Stir-fry radishes without oil until water evaporates and the aroma releases. Add cooking oil, garlic and chilli, and stir-fry until fragrant.

Add few drops of sesame oil before turning off the heat. Set aside.

Use the same pan to fry eggs. Add 1 tbsp oil to the pan. Mix scallions and salt in the whisked egg and slowly add to the pan. The shape is not important for this recipe. Divide the cooked eggs into 4 equal portions.

Now bring all ingredients together. The following process is similar to making maki (sushi roll). Prepare a clean towel. Place a sheet of plastic wrap (around 20 x 30 cm) on the towel. Apply a 15 to 20 cm thin square of sticky rice in the centre of the plastic wrap. Place chips, meat floss, a portion of fried-egg and fried dried radish in lines in the centre of the rice square. Hold the towel and wrap it to close the ingredients in the rice. Shape it into a roll.

Repeat the wrapping procedure on the other 3 onigiris.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Meat floss

Bonito flakes

Dried wakame seaweed

Preserved mustard greens

Dried shiitake mushrooms

Dried radish

Dried tofu

157

Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

EATING 5 NOODLES

A noodle stand in Yunlin, Taiwan Chen, Y. (2018). Noodles. [brush pen].

Date 2017.7.18 Participants Yen Ju Chen (researcher/cultural sender) Dominik Hezinger (cultural mediator) Johanna Westermann Patrycja Flia Saraina Weigand The eating group included Dominik Hezinger, Patrycja Fila, Saraina Weigand and Johanna Westermann. Patrycja and Johanna studied together in the psychology department, but they were not familiar with each other. Saraina was an alien guest to all other participants including to the researcher.

She was a resident in the Dencklerblock and met the researcher during a community event. Patrycja and Johanna were both new faces to Dominik and the researcher. The interview of reflection and feedback of Johanna was failed to be collected. Therefore, her data was only taken for eating observation.

Patrycja’s interview was conducted after the event.

158

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Eating Style Food preferences vary in this immigrant island from the north to the south, from plains to mountains, from the west metropolis to the east indigenous tribes, and from one ethnic group to another. Wheat products have become one of the staple foods since the Chiang Kai-shek government fled to Taiwan after the civil war against the communist party of China, bringing the wheat culture from the mainland China to the island. Various styles of noodles, buns, flatbread, pancakes, dumplings and pastries became everyday choices on Taiwanese dining tables.

Noodle delis and vendors may offer multiple side dishes in glass cabinets, including salads, tofu and braised animal organs. In noodle delis, customers pick the side dishes as appetisers to their tables and order noodles as main dishes from the menus. The freshly-cooked noodles will then be delivered to the tables by the service while customers enjoy the side dishes. Except for the main dishes delivery and payment, most of the steps are self-service.

Dumplings, wontons and braised pork with rice are usually the alternative options available in the delis. In the rural areas of Taiwan, many noodles vendors run their business at sidewalks of streets. The stand serves as a centre island with few seats surrounded. Customers order food straight from the vendor and find places to sit down. Because noodles are prepared for an individual portion, it is a suitable food for eating alone. A typical combination for a single eater is noodles with a plate of seasonal greens and a bowl of soup.

Setting A square 75 cm table was set in the middle of the dining space with 5 chairs surrounded. On the table were a cup filled with chopsticks and forks, a glass bottle with water and 5 water glasses. The heater at the corner of the dining space was used as a platform to place additional items. A rectangle black wooden basket laying with a long side down on the heater was used as the container for side dishes. Tofu Salad and Spinach Salad were placed on the first layer, and Eggplant Salad and Cucumber Salad were placed on the second layer. When the participants arrived, the researcher prepared the noodles after orders were taken. The menu included Seaweed Soup with Eggs, Noodles with Braised Pork, Braised Pork with Rice, and Noodles with Peanut and Sesame Sauce. The participants had the side dishes while the main dishes under preparation.

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Cross-Cultural Communication through Eating Experience Design

SARAINA tofu salad (1) eggplant salad (2)

spinach salad (1) cucumber salad (2)

(1) = layer 1 (2) = layer 2

JOHANNA

noodles with peanut and sesame sauce water

noodles with braised pork water

YEN

rice with braised pork

water

chopstick cup

water

water rice with braised pork

DOMINIK

Figure 3.2.5 Noodles Eating Setting 160

noodles with braised pork

PATRYCJA

water bottle

TOFU SALAD

00:05 | for 5-people meal 300 g soft tofu - sliced or divided into bite-size 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp oyster sauce sesame oil a handful of bonito flakes 1 scallion - finely diced

Tofu salad exists in various styles. In Taiwan, it is often served with century eggs, scallions and thick soy sauce. This recipe introduces a variant of tofu salad influenced by Japanese flavours. Bonito flakes, or Katsuobushi in Japanese, are the shaved dried tuna commonly used for garnishing and enhancing the umami taste.

Place tofu in the centre of a serving plate. Mix soy sauce and oyster sauce before drizzling them on the tofu. Add few drops of sesame oil. Garnish with bonito flakes and scallion on top of the tofu.

SPINACH SALAD

00:10 | for 5-people meal 200 g baby spinach 3 cloves of garlic - finely minced salt sesame oil white sesame seeds

Spinach salad as a common Korean cold plate has gained its popularity since the Korean pop culture swept over Taiwan. Soon after, it has become available in some noodle bistros as an appetiser.

Cook spinach in boiling water for one minute. Remove and rinse under cold tap water. Gently squizz the water out from the spinach with hand. Mix the spinach with garlic, salt, sesame oil and a preferred amount of sesame seeds.

EGGPLANT SALAD

00:10 | for 5-people meal 2 eggplants - chopped into 5 cm long pieces and soaked in salted water sauce for eggplants 2 cloves of garlic - finely minced 5 g ginger - peeled and finely minced 1 scallion - finely diced 1 chilli pepper - finely diced 2 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp black rice vinegar 1 tsp sugar sesame oil

Eggplant is produced abundantly in Taiwan. The Taiwanese sorts appear to be long and thin cylinders, differing from the European cultivars which are usually in gourd shape. Soaking the chopped eggplants in salted water would prevent the colour from turning dark.

Cook eggplants in boiling water for 3 minutes. Rinse the eggplants under cold tap water and drain. Place eggplant in the serving plate and drizzle with the sauce.

SEAWEED SOUP WITH EGGS

00:10 | for 5-people meal 1.5 l water 10 g ginger - julienned dried wakame seaweed 1 scallion - diced sesame oil salt white pepper 2 eggs white rice vinegar

Seaweed soup existing in many East Asian cuisines is flavoured with regional specialities. Japanese use miso as the soup base, while beef or clams enrich the soup in South Korea. In Taiwan, eggs are the indispensable ingredient.

Seaweed and eggs as 2 convenient and cheap components allow the noodle stands and bistros to sell the soup at a low price but still earn a profit.

Noodles with soup also make a hearty meal for single consumers.

Boil the water and toss ginger in. When the water boils, toss a preferred amount of seaweeds. Cook for 3 minutes. Whisk the eggs in a bowl and add few drops of white rice vinegar. Slowly add the eggs to the boiling soup in a clockwise direction. Toss scallion. Add salt, white pepper and few drops of sesame oil.

BRAISED PORK

03:00 | for 5-people meal 1 kg pork belly - diced into 1 cm cubes 6 shallots - diced 1 bulb of garlic - roughly diced 15 tbsp soy sauce 2 tbsp crystal sugar 6 tbsp rice wine 1 tsp white peppercorns 2 scallions 1 l water boiled eggs (*optional) five-spice 1 tsp cumin seeds 5 cloves 3 star anises 1 tsp Sichuan pepper 1 cinnamon stick 1 tea bag

Braised Pork, or Lo Bah in Taiwanese, is a classic meat sauce which contains 90% of pork and is often drizzled on top of steamed rice. The 2 major components are pork belly and soy sauce-based gravy. While the grease extracted from the pork belly gives the smooth mouthfeel, the gravy absorbs the essence of 5 oriental spices (five-spice) releasing a unique aroma. Traditionally, the braising gravy is used continuously by adding fresh ingredients daily. Some bistros with great history characterise the gravy that lasts over a hundred years.

Put the five-spice and white peppercorns into a tea bag for later use.

Add oil to a pot. SautĂŠ shallots over medium-low heat until golden and crispy.

Set aside for later use. Remain the oil in the pot.

Toss pork and stir-fry until medium well. Toss garlic and shallot crisps. Stirfry until the aroma releases. Add soy sauce, crystal sugar, rice wine, water and scallions. Place the tea bag of five spices in the pot. Cover with a lid and stew for at least 2 hours.

The gravy can be used for braising eggs as well. Prepare some boiled eggs in advance and cook them in the gravy with the pork.

NOODLES WITH BRAISED PORK

00:10 | 1 portion 100 g plain noodles or soba noodles braised pork 1 scallion - diced a half of braised egg (*optional)

A pot of braised pork has multiple functions for a noodle bistro. The pork is poured on top of steamed rice or plain noodles. The gravy flavours boiled vegetables as a dressing sauce. The extra gravy is taken to stew eggs, tofu and animal organs which are the typical side dishes at noodle bistros and stands. Under this circumstance, Noodles with Braised Pork is often an available option on the menu.

Cook the noodles following the package instruction. Remove and drain.

Drizzle a preferred amount of braised pork on the cooked noodles. Place the braised egg on and garnish with the diced scallion.

NOODLES WITH PEANUT AND SESAME SAUCE

00:10 | 1 portion 100 g plain noodles 20 g cucumber - julienned peanut and sesame sauce 2 tbsp peanut and sesame paste 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp black rice vinegar 2 cloves of garlic - finely minced 50 ml hot water

Noodles with Peanut and Sesame Sauce can be made either hot or cold. To balance the intense nutty flavour, cucumber juliennes are often added on top of the noodles. The peanut and sesame sauce in this recipe uses the readymade peanut and sesame paste as the base. The paste is available in most of the Asian shops.

Cook the noodles following the package instruction. Add the sauce and place the cucumber strips on the cooked noodles.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Dried chilli

(left) White pepper (right) Green Sichuan pepper

(left) Cumin seeds (right) Sichuan pepper

Five-spice

(left) Star anises (right) Cloves

Cinnamon

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EATING 6 HOT POT

A set of twin-side hot pot with spicy broth and clear broth Chen, Y. (2018). Hot Pot. [brush pen].

Date 2017.7.28 Participants Yen Ju Chen (researcher/cultural sender) Dominik Hezinger (cultural mediator) Charlotte Sänger Antonia Heinrich Helene Niederfeilner Noemi Böcker The eating group included Dominik Hezinger, Charlotte Sänger, Antonia Heinrich, Helene Niederfeilner and Noemi Böcker. The 4 new participants were classmates in psychology study and seemed to know each other well.

They were introduced to the event by Franziska Jannsen who also studied in psychology. They were new faces to Dominik and the researcher. Noemi’s interview was conducted after the event.

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Eating Style Hot Pot is a traditional style of food for reunion and celebration situations in many East Asian countries including Taiwan, China, Japan and Korea.

Families and friends sit around the table sharing a pot of food while exchanging their recent events. Plates of raw vegetables, mushrooms, meat slices, fish fillets, seafood, tofu, noodles and so on are placed surrounding a large boiling pot in the centre. Eaters throw the ingredients into the pot, wait for them to be cooked, and pick the items they want to eat into individual bowls. A typical way is to boil the food in batches. Ingredients that require long cooking time are thrown in at first. The following batches then rely on eaters’ decision. After each batch is thrown, eaters wait for the broth to boil again. For the hygiene concern, during the cooking, food in the pot must not be picked out, and new food must not be thrown in. There may be one person in charge of the cooking and food distribution. Eaters may have individual sauce mixtures in small sauce plates to dip the food. Food in the pot is always for sharing. No one can claim a piece of meat even he or she threw it in.

Hot pot culture in Taiwan takes inspirations from different regional styles.

The flavours are decided by broth and ingredients that come along with. Spicy broth made out of chillies and Sichuan pepper is often served with cubes of duck blood and tofu. Sour broth with a base of pickled mustard greens gets along with pork. Milk broth containing slices of pumpkin is suitable for enriching the vegetarian hot pots. The ‘Army Stew’, a Korean style of hot pot, using kimchi (pickled cabbage) as the base often comes with instant ingredients such as lunch meat, rice cakes, sausages, ramen noodles and a slice of cheese. The Japanese ‘shabu-shabu’ which applying small pots is designed for individuals. These are all available styles in Taiwan that provide a wide selection for hot pot lovers. In some restaurants, multiple options for broth and ingredients are provided. Other restaurants focus on specific styles of hot pot.

Setting A square table was set in the middle of the dining space with 6 chairs surrounded. A red electronic steaming pot was used as the cooking pot on the table. In the pot was the soup base for Spicy Hot Pot, cubes of firm tofu and bamboo shoots. Another small red pot was placed on top of 2 brick stones, in between the brick stones was a foil can of fuel gel. In the small pot was the soup base for Vegetarian Hot Pot, sweet corns and wood ears.

Between 2 pots were the 3 dipping sauces, including the Peanut and Sesame Dipping Sauce, Radish Dipping Sauce, Sacha Dipping Sauce and a raw egg for the Sacha sauce. Surrounded the 2 pots were plates with different raw ingredients. The black and white colour plates were to distinguish the components for spicy and vegetarian hot pots. The black plates contained thin slices of pork belly, potatoes, mung bean noodles, 2 types of leafy greens, mushrooms, okras, baby corns, dumplings and fish balls. The white plates were containing the same vegetarian ingredients as the black plates were with additional silk tofu. A glass bottle of water, 2 cups of eating utensils and bowls were placed on the heater due to the lack of space.

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water bottle

NOEMI

ANTONIA

potatos and mung bean noodles

brick dumplings and fish balls

vegetarian hot pot

YEN

brick

vegetables and mushrooms

peanut dipping sauce shacha dipping sauce

radish dipping sauce

spicy hot pot

DOMINIK

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potatos and mung bean noodles

CHARLOTTE

meat slices

Figure 3.2.6 Hot Pot Eating Setting

vegetables and mushrooms

HELENE

dumplings and tofu

eating tool individual cup bowls eating tool cup

SPICY HOT POT

03:00 | for 4-people hot pot ingredients for beef broth 1 kg beef bones 10 g ginger - sliced 2 scallions - tips removed 2.5 l water 2 tbsp rice wine ingredient for soup base 2 l beef broth 10 g ginger - sliced 4 scallions - chopped into long pieces 10 cloves garlic - sliced 2 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns 5 star anises a preferred amount of dried chilli peppers (kung pao) 10 tbsp broad bean paste 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tsp salt 1 tsp sugar suitable ingredients for hot pot firm or soft tofu - cubed duck blood jelly - cubed beef or pork belly - finely sliced meat, fish or seafood balls dumplings bamboo shoots - cubed potatoes leafy greens tipped cabbage mushrooms noodles

This spicy hot pot utilises beef broth, Sichuan pepper, dried chilli and broad bean paste as the base. It is a style brought into Taiwan from Chongqing, a southwest city in China. The spicy hot pot is famous for its hotness. Tofu, duck blood jelly and beef entrails are the common ingredients. Spicy hot pot is often served in a pot divided by a metal board in the middle. One side contains the spicy soup base and non-spicy soup base in the other. The design satisfies all eaters whether or not they enjoy hot food. This twin-side hot pot was named after Mandarin duck, a duck species which often appears as a pair.

A soup base is necessary for a hot pot. This recipe contains two steps including preparing beef broth and using the beef broth to create the soup base.

Beef Broth Put all the ingredients into a pot, cover up with a lid and bring to boil. When the water starts boiling, turn to low heat and let it stew for 2 hours.

Remove the scum on the surface. Filter the broth to remain the clear broth.

Soup Base Add 2 tbsp oil to a big pot. Toss Sichuan peppercorns and sautĂŠ until the aroma releases. Toss ginger, scallions, garlic, star anises and chilli peppers.

Stir-fry until fragrant. Add broad bean paste and stir-fry until aromatic. Add beef broth, soy sauce, salt and sugar. Cover up with a lid and bring to boil.

Turn to low heat and cook for 30 minutes.

Remove all ingredients from the soup. The soup is used as the base for the spicy hot pot.

VEGETARIAN HOT POT

00:40 | for 2-people hot pot ingredients for soup base 1 onion - quartered 3 tomatoes - quartered 3 stalks of celery or 1 quarter celery root - roughly cubed 2 carrots - cubed 2-3 bay leaves salt 2 l water suitable ingredients for hot pot firm or soft tofu - cubed dumplings bamboo shoots - cubed potatoes leafy greens tipped cabbage mushrooms noodles

There are various styles of vegetarian hot pots. The soup base can either made from herbal medicines, milk, soy milk, miso or vegetable broth. This recipe introduces the vegetarian hot pot with clear soup base.

Soup Base Fry onion and tomatoes with oil. Add the rest of ingredients. Add water and let it boil for 30 minutes. Adjust the flavour with salt at the end.

Remove the ingredients from the soup. The clear broth is used as the soup base for the vegetarian hot pot.

PEANUT AND SESAME DIPPING SAUCE

00:05 | 1 portion 1 tbsp peanut and sesame paste 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tsp white sesame seeds 2 cloves of garlic - finely minced a half of scallion - finely diced 1 tsp white rice vinegar 1 tsp sesame oil water

Peanut and Sesame Dipping Sauce is most suitable to eat with lamb and mutton.

Mix the ingredients.

RADISH DIPPING SAUCE

00:05 | 1 portion 1 white radish 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 tbsp water 1 tbsp fruit vinegar 1 tsp fine sugar

Radish mash in light soy sauce is a sauce style influenced by Japanese cuisine. Its refreshing, vinegary and slightly spicy flavour is suitable to accompany intensive tastes.

Shred or grate the white radish finely. Mix a preferred amount of radish mash with the rest of the ingredients.

SHACHA DIPPING SAUCE

00:05 | 1 portion 1 tbsp Shacha sauce 1 tbsp soy sauce 1 raw egg yolk 1 tsp garlic - minced 1 tsp scallion - minced

Shacha sauce is a condiment made from shrimp or fish extract, garlic, and peanuts. It is a variant of the Satay sauce which is popularised in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Instead of the sweet, nutty taste of Satay, Shacha stresses on the umami flavour derived from seafood. It is a common dipping sauce for hot pot in Taiwan. In addition, Shacha also comes along in rice, noodles and meat dishes.

Mix the ingredients.

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Rice measuring cup

Rice paddle

Chef’s knife

Cleaver

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OBSERVATION AND ANALYSIS OF EATING From the observation of the 6 eating events, the roles of the attendants were summed up into cultural sender, cultural mediator, and cultural receiver.

The researcher as the food preparer and the host of the events represented the cultural sender. The observation emphasised on the behaviours of the cultural mediator and the cultural receivers, as well as the interaction between these 3 parties.

Cultural Mediator Cultural mediation is a communication channel lay in between 2 cultural groups. Everyone can be or becomes a cultural mediator as long as he or she has experienced or has knowledge about the 2 cultures that stand at the ends of a cross-cultural communication process. Who plays a cultural mediator is capable of translating the implications of behaviours, words and objects mutually towards the sender and the receiver’s sides.

The cultural mediator, which in the 6 eating events was played by Dominik Hezinger who had experienced both Taiwanese and German cultures, appeared to be more confident in taking actions than other eaters because of his familiarity with the eating styles. In most cases, he was the first person who started the eating. His actions demonstrated other attendants the ‘correct’ way to behave in a new ethnic eating environment and delivered information about the cultural implications and norms. With the knowledge of the eating etiquette, the cultural mediator served as a role model to the cultural receivers. Behaviours of Dominik might contradict the German norms of eating, such as no elbows on the dining table, the use of serving utensils, not finishing the shared plates - showing the cultural mediator had adopted the new ethnic eating norms. Dominik insisted on the ethnic eating norms which he had learned from the previous situations. The other participants tended to mimic his actions and behaviours.

The cultural mediator transmitted his knowledge about the food, the eating styles, the corresponding backgrounds and the cultural implications through words and actions to the receivers, for instance, showing the method to hold chopsticks and giving information about their wooden material. At the Fish and Seafood event, Dominik explained how Taiwanese enjoyed sucking the shrimp heads. He could foresee and feed the crucial information responding to the receivers’ curiosity due to the same path he has formerly undergone, as well as his ability to evaluate the scenarios with 2 worldviews.

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Dominik supported the host to deliver her messages while ensuring the German participants received the correct meanings. The cultural mediator has the ability to translate one ethnic cultural language to the other side, which during the eating events, was the ability to translate the Taiwanese eating customs and rules to an explanation that German eaters would comprehend. Vice versa, when the host lost tracks of the participants’ reactions, behaviours and conversations, Dominik filled the void of her understanding. Furthermore, owing to the adequate knowledge of the ethnic eating culture, he could quickly examine the situations to fix the problems, support the needs of the German eaters and make sure the eating proceeded smoothly. For instance, at the Hot Pot event, Dominik distributed the beer to every participant’s glass before the host had taken any action. When he noticed one glass was empty, he brought another bottle and distributed it.

Dominik might take over the leading role of the events and be treated as the host by the new attendants when the host was absent. New attendants tended to seek for confirmations or re-confirm the information from him instead of the host given the overlapping foundation of their cultural references. When Dominik had less information to answer a particular question, he sought help from the host.

Dominik was more excited about the food than the eating settings. It was needless for him to overcome obstacles while encountering the eating scenarios. Therefore, he focused more on the tastes. He paid few interests in the briefing the host gave to the participants. The interview with Dominik suggested that given the eating scenarios were familiar to him, his memory could mix up with other eating events.

Dominik was capable of interpreting the acquired information, building links between the items of the Taiwanese eating and its cultural implications, and giving his explanations to specific norms.

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Cultural Receiver The German attendants in the 6 ethnic eating events stood for the cultural receivers in the communication process. mimic In a new ethnic eating environment, the German participants tended to mimic the pioneer person. Dominik was often the first who took actions after the host indicated the starts of eating. The behaviours of him demonstrated the eating customs and norms to other Germans. They hence followed and imitated Dominik’s operations. In many situations, when Dominik began to pick food from one plate, the other attendants picked the same food after him. Moreover, German attendants tended to observe and mimic one another to confirm what behaviours were allowed and tried not violet the eating protocols. At the beginning of the Hot Pot event, Antonia first picked an okra and threw it into the boiling pot. Noemi and Charlotte both copied her choice throwing more okras into the pot.

Mimic was the first step to learn a new eating tool, too. Before the event started, the participants tended to practice chopsticks in their hand even if it was not their first experience. Mischievous behaviours might appear with chopsticks. On the other hand, if a tool was provided on the dining table, the German participants tended to apply it even in the unnecessary or unsuitable situations. For instance, using chopsticks to pick up thick sauces. Some participants insisted on using chopsticks throughout the whole eating. The reason varied. In the mindsets of these participants, eating ethnic food with the corresponding eating tools provided a comprehensive cultural experience.

Eating tool has a meaningful connection with the food. Applying proper tools allowed eaters to associate with specific eating behaviours and further the cultural implications. For instance, chopsticks were designed for bite-sized portions. It connects with the sharing style of the East Asian cuisines. Every eater picks each time a bite of food while leaving the major part to others.

Through the eating style, the virtue of caring for others in the chopstick cultures is showcased. In this case, chopsticks served as the vehicle conveying the ethnic culture to the German eaters.

Eating etiquettes were learned autonomously by some participants through the application of corresponding eating tools. The newbies might discover new functions. An ethnic eating experience catalyses eaters to reason the usage of the tools. Moreover, in the researcher’s observation, managing chopsticks generated positive feelings in the German attendants.

Of course, applying new eating tools could lead to an opposite feeling. Some attendants adopted the eating behaviours of their familiar food styles to utilise the eating tools. For instance, rolling noodles on chopsticks was inspired by rolling spaghetti on a fork. At the Fish and Seafood event, Franziska had the long greens rolled on her chopsticks before sending to her mouth. Several attendants struggled with chopsticks. Their eating behaviours turned into primitive when they could not overcome the difficulties or tried to change to a tool inappropriate to the food style. In the observation of the events, various methods were applied to support the eating with chopsticks, including combining a spoon with a single chopstick to pick the food. Eating 192

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with bare hands appeared frequently. The only goal for these eaters was to put the food into their mouths. If frustration occurred as the attendants repeatedly failed to manage the new eating tools, they might give up and search for alternative solutions. As a result, who failed or struggled with the eating tools tended to show less awareness or knowledge of the ethnic culture introduced in their interviews. confirmation While encountering new food, the German attendants initially verified the information about the food ingredients, the cuisine style and the eating rules before starting, to make sure the food was ‘safe’ as well as if they behaved correctly. This seeking for information and approval was defined as ‘confirmation’ by the researcher. If information and approval were not delivered at the first place, the attendants asked for them before taking any action, even when the host had indicated the start of eating. If the host was absent, the attendants confirmed the information with Dominik, the cultural mediator. Sometimes, they passed the host and turned to Dominik for confirmations owing to the common language and the similar mindsets.

Before any new action was taken, a confirmation was required by the German participants. Even when the participants had acquired adequate information during the eating process, they might repeatedly confirm their actions beforehand. The German attendants also asked for permissions to change the chopsticks to their familiar eating tools. Eating flew effortlessly after the confirmations were delivered and received. The attendants often grew confidence as the event proceeded.

German-minded At the eating events, after the Taiwanese eating norms were introduced, many German attendants remained the mindsets following the German table etiquette. Complying with the German eating regulations was revealed by the behaviours, interaction and discourses of the attendants. For instance, at the Noodles event, both Johanna and Patrycja lift up one side of their bowls to scoop the leftover soup. Whereas in Taiwan, eater sits straight and lifts the bowl near to mouth with one hand while ladling the soup with the other hand. Other cases included: The attendants tended to stay at the table until everyone finished their food; Many attendants were reluctant to finish the sharing plates before confirmations were delivered, leaving a scarce amount of food on nearly empty plates; If dipping sauces were provided, the attendants scooped the sauce on their food, instead of dipping the food into sauces. The German eating etiquette might maintain on the cultural mediator as well.

The cultural-constructed mindsets also exist in the associated concepts of food. Whereas in Germany, ‘egg’ seems to be associated with ‘breakfast’. At the eating event of Hot Fry, Thomas commented the Egg Pancake with Dried Radish as ‘tastes like breakfast’. The same situation happened when the researcher travelled with a German family to Greece. When an egg dish was served on a dinner table, the father joked: ‘Ah! You have some breakfast!’.

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cultural receiver as cultural mediator The cultural receivers were, at the same time, cultural mediators to one another. The attendants who had experienced the similar food, food styles or eating cultures turned into cultural mediators, assisted each other in the eating process and exchanged information. The attendants gradually adapted to the new eating style as the events proceeded while transforming into cultural mediators themselves. One example suggests that cultural receivers have the ability to learn during an ethnic eating experience: At the Vegetarianism event, Lisa acquired the techniques to handle chopsticks and shared her method to Alba. On the other hand, the German attendants might assist the host to seize the meanings of other attendants’ behaviours, interaction and ingroup jokes. They became the cultural mediators translating cultural implications to the host. ethnic eating experience as cross-cultural communication In the observation of the eating events, the German attendants grew to understand the ethnic culture introduced by the eating experience. At the initial encounter, the attendants noticed differences comparing to their daily eating, such as tastes, ingredients, food presentations, eating tools, eating styles, eating rules and customs. Second, the attendants retrieved information through the interaction with the food, the objects, the environments and other eaters. As an example, participants discovered the techniques to apply the eating tools while experimenting the usages of them.

With the method retrieved, they autonomously adopted the proper eating etiquette without any guidance. This process indicates that eaters’ behaviours may change according to the eating settings, and eating protocols may be autonomously seized through an eating experience.

The style of Taiwanese cuisine catalysed the sharing behaviour. Dishes were placed in the centre of the table for everyone to reach without effort.

Eaters took individual portions to their bowls while considering others with the amount they left. When someone picked food from a sharing plate, another person had to wait for his or her turn. The interaction between food and eaters as well as between eaters were the process to learn the proper eating etiquette. The concept ‘care for others’ was thus grasped through the courtesy and considerate behaviours towards one another.

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Another example demonstrated the approach towards cultural implications with food ingredients. Tofu is often associated with vegetarian diet in Germany. It is taken as a significant substitute for meat products and beloved by the vegetarian groups. This phenomenon generates the bias that ‘tofu is a vegetarian food’. Many meat eaters avoid tofu because they quickly assume that vegetarian food tastes bad. On the other hand, the sorts of tofu in Germany are finite. Due to the unfamiliarity with this oriental ingredient, inventory recipes are still limited to the vegetarian consumers. However, tofu comes in various forms in East Asia. It exists in diverse tastes and combinations which are enjoyed by both vegetarians and non-vegetarians.

At the Vegetarianism event, soft tofu to the German participants was a fresh ingredient. Its tender texture with the food style presented surprised them.

Jonas was curious about how popularised tofu was in Taiwanese cuisine.

Through this question, the attendants were made aware of the cuisine style in Taiwan. In such case, soft tofu served as the channel to communicate the Taiwanese cuisine and further the concepts associating with it. Applying Schramm’s communication model, tofu (receiver’s field of experience) was familiar to the German attendants (cultural receivers). By learning soft tofu (overlap of the fields of experience), they gained insights about the Taiwanese cuisine (message). From this point, the cultural receivers might relate to the concept of ‘balanced’ diet upheld in most of the Asian cuisines.

In another aspect, a taste experience may lead to meanings to oneself and hence generate a communicating process to oneself. Noemi described the Peanut and Sesame Dipping Sauce was a new taste for her. Even if she had experienced different peanut sauces in the past, the combination of peanut and sesame paste with garlic, scallion, soy sauce and vinegar extended her views. In her words, ‘I felt the moment I took the peanut sauce, there was a voice in my mind telling me “ok, it’s something different from what you know”.

I knew peanuts, and I knew peanut butter, but I didn’t know this one’. New food stimulated the attendants’ sensation. It awakened them to notice the subtle changes of what they felt. The feelings processed through the rational minds were reasoned by the attendants with their previous experience.

Eventually, the tastes were transformed into meanings to themselves.

In the interviews of reflection and feedback, many descriptions of the 14 participants stressed that the eating experience catalysed self-learning.

New experience may generate conversations with oneself, in other words, an intra-communication process.

Böcker, N. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

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3.3 INTERVIEW OF REFLECTION AND FEEDBACK ANALYSIS

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The interviews of reflection and feedback were conducted with 14 German participants after the eating events. The questions included the on-site eating experience and the feedback.

On-Site Eating Experience The descriptions of the 6 eating events from the participants can be categorised into several aspects. Sorting by the number of times subjects mentioned by different participants is as following: food ingredients (14), food presentation (13), interaction between participants (13), tastes (12), eating tools (8), eating atmosphere (8), conversations during eating (8), interaction between participants and the host (8), description of other participants (8), reactions of participants to the food and eating settings (7), food and eating style (6), food textures (5), settings of the furniture (4), original eating situations of the food (4), settings of the eating equipments (3), taste combination of the different dishes (3) and settings of the dining space (1).

The eating group 1 included Dominik Hezinger and Thomas Mühlbauer with the eating scenario Hot Fry. Their descriptions lay on the food ingredients, presentation, the interaction between participants and the tastes. Comparing to other groups, they especially stressed on depicting the setting of the furniture and the eating tools. Thomas had more detailed descriptions of the food and eating style.

The eating group 2 included Alba Hipp, Jonas Bonas, Lisa Raimund, Dominik Hezinger and Thomas Mühlbauer with the eating scenario Vegetarianism.

The descriptions of Alba, Jonas and Lisa focused on the food ingredients, presentation, the interaction between participants and the tastes. The differences from other groups were their descriptions of the conversations during eating. Jonas and Lisa had further depicted the food textures, their reactions to the food and eating settings, and the interaction between them and the host.

The eating group 3 included Franziska Jannsen, Jonas Bittner, Dominik Hezinger and Thomas Mühlbauer with the eating scenario Fish and Seafood.

The descriptions of Franziska and Jonas lay on the food ingredients, the tastes and the interaction between the participants. The eating atmosphere and the description of other participants were also emphasised in their memories. Franziska had further impressions about the eating tools, the food presentation, the conversations during eating and the interaction between the participants and the host. Jonas, on the other hand, focused more on the sensations of the food texture and the taste combination of the different dishes. Both participants mentioned they ‘ate with stranger(s)’ but described the dining atmosphere as positive.

The eating group 4 included Johanna Rafalski, Philipp Hoffmann, Dominik Hezinger and Thomas Mühlbauer with the eating scenario Breakfast.

Philipp’s interview was failed to be collected. Only Johanna was interviewed about the eating event. Johanna’s description concentrated on the food ingredients, presentation, tastes and textures, the eating style and the interaction between the participants and the host.

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The eating group 5 included Patrycja Fila, Saraina Weigand, Johanna Westermann and Dominik Hezinger with the eating scenario Noodles.

Johanna’s interview after the event was failed to be collected. Therefore, her data was only used for the eating observation. Patrycja and Saraina’s descriptions lay on the food presentation, ingredients, tastes and the interaction between them and the host. The other focuses were on the eating tools, the eating atmosphere, their descriptions of other participants and the conversations during eating. This group had more than one and a half hour talks about the definition of culture, capitalism and the educational system. Both participants mentioned the lasting discussions at the event.

The preparation process of the noodles also left both participants profound impressions.

The eating group 6 included Noemi Böcker, Helene Niederfeilner, Charlotte Sänger, Antonia Heinrich and Dominik Hezinger with the eating scenario Hot Pot. The descriptions of the 4 new participants covered the most comprehensive aspects, except for the settings of the eating space and the taste combination of different dishes. The same subjects mentioned by all 4 participants were the food presentation, ingredients and the interaction between the participants. 3 of them brought up the food and eating style, the atmosphere, the original eating situation of the food and their reactions to the food and eating settings. All 3 described the eating atmosphere as ‘natural’. impressions and feelings 12 participants expressed the positive impressions of the general eating experience. The other 2 participants claimed the positive influences of their eating behaviours and extended their worldviews brought by the experience.

3 participants felt the host’s effort and love from the food and the event settings. One mentioned that the invitation sent by the host shortened the distance between the guests and the host.

Some elements were particularly mentioned by the participants to express their fondness of the experience, including the cuisine, the learning of unique ingredients, the flavour combination, the eating styles, the idea of ‘sharing’, the application of chopsticks, eating in a community and the dining talks.

2 enjoyed the meeting with new people, and another 2 appreciated the opportunities to experience new types of eating.

Comparing to the participants’ previous expectations of the events, one admitted that he assumed Taiwanese cuisine was similar to Thai food, but the experience changed his opinion. Another one had anticipated particular food and tastes after learning the event theme. However, he experienced the flavours that were out of his imaginations. One participant mentioned that there were more vegetables than she expected.

In descriptions of their emotions and feelings in the events, 3 participants spoke of that they were tired before the events, another 4 were excited and curious about the upcoming events. During the eating, 2 participants felt either awkward, worried or depressed because they weren’t capable of 198

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managing chopsticks or getting used to the eating style (afraid of interfering other eaters while picking the food from sharing plates to their bowls). 2 said the eating atmosphere made them relaxed. 3 felt comfortable in the dining situations, and the other 2 sensed the interactions between people were natural. After the eating, 2 participants claimed that they were full but had no nauseous feeling as usual, which surprised them. 4 felt the experience was refreshing. 3 felt pleased on their way home.

The feelings were sorted according to the timeline. Before the events, tired, weary, anxious, worried, excited and curious feelings existed in the participants. During the eating, awkward, uncomfortable, excluded, bad, conscious, relaxed, cosy, comfortable, convenient, cool, different and natural were used to depict the participants’ states of minds. After the eating, full, energetic, happy, grateful, good feelings were generated. learning What had learned by the German attendants during the eating events were categorised into the learning about differences of East Asia, learning about Taiwan, learning about self and the reflection on German culture.

An ethnic eating experience visualises the uniqueness of regional and cultural characters which is unperceivable by words. 3 participants claimed that the ethnic eating experience had helped them to distinguish East Asian nations and their cuisine styles. One proclaimed that she had developed much knowledge about Asia than before.

An ethnic eating experience catalyses learning of the ethnic culture.

However, this learning could based on intepretations. One participant assumed that since a family meal could contain 7 different dishes, eating with family seemed to be highly valued in the Taiwanese society. Therefore, she concluded that Taiwanese women on average worked more at home than German women so as to take care of their families. Another participant supposed that members of social communities in Taiwan had tighter bonds between one another. Johanna, who had joined the Breakfast event, suspected from the nutritious components and the portion of food that breakfast appeared to be an essential meal in Taiwan.

Intriguingly, more than half of the participants had learned more about themselves through the new eating experience. Many had discovered their new eating preferences, including the flavours, ingredients, eating tools, eating etiquettes etc. They had found themselves easy to accept and adapt to the new styles in their daily eating. Some had driven to open up to new things.

The others had been drawn awareness on the food-related issues. Some participants were inspired by the table conversations which overturned their mindsets and worldviews.

In the comparison to the German eating, except for the obvious distinctions as the ingredients, eating tools, eating behaviours and protocols, several aspects were noticed by the participants.

1. Meat products were indispensable in the traditional German diet. Fewer vegetables were used compared to the Taiwanese food.

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2. A German meal composition was more monotonous than a Taiwanese meal. A family dinner in Germany often consisted of one main dish and 2 side dishes, whereas a dinner for a nuclear family in Taiwan often included minimum 3 dishes, one soup and rice, which each dish might consist at least 2 different elements.

3. The German-styled eating emphasised on individual eating. Eaters held food in their own plate. Sharing food from individuals’ plates was unusual. The same concept was applied to the sauce. Sauce was distributed on individual plates instead of dipping individuals’ food in one common sauce plate or bowl. Taking Fondue as an example to compare with Hot Pot in Taiwan, even the pots were both for sharing, in Fondue, ingredients were stuck on individuals’ sticks and would not be shared.

4. Due to the individual style of the German food, interactions between eaters occurred less throughout the eating on German dining tables.

Conversations appeared more after the food.

5. German diet appeared to be heavier and less healthy than Taiwanese diet.

Several participants mentioned that the nauseous feeling after a German meal did not occur after the Taiwanese eating events.

6. German diet was perceived by the participants as more ‘efficient’ suggested by its faster food preparation, simpler food compositions and the individualistic style of eating.

7. Several participants described the Taiwanese eating as more ‘interactive’ and ‘communicative’. understanding of Taiwan 6 participants agreed that the ethnic eating experience improved or changed their understanding about Taiwan. 5 stated that the events did not provide the understanding of the holistic Taiwanese culture but the aspects of its eating culture. Food was a visualised component of a culture that helped the participants to overthrow their stereotypes and extend their views of Asia. 3 claimed that the experience evolved their interests in Taiwan. Dominik who had been to Taiwan thought the events awakened his memories of Taiwan.

Mühlbauer, T. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Hezinger, D. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Hipp, A. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

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meanings In response to the question ‘What does this experience mean to you?’, the participants were given a chance to express the transformation of their experience to meanings. Except for Thomas, he claimed that the eating experience ‘didn’t mean anything particular to me’. He also stated that he didn’t develop any further understanding of the Taiwanese culture and people through the eating events, merely the eating culture.

Dominik Hezinger (Hot Fry) ‘I like to get in contact with other cultures because my thinking gets flexible. I like authentic situations for eating, travelling and everything.’

Alba Hipp (Vegetarianism) ‘I should think about my own culture first in order to know how and what I introduce it to other people. Sometimes when we are in our country, we forget another person is from a different culture. I will have this in mind and be more interested in knowing more about the background of a foreigner.’

Research Phase One: Taiwan to Germans

Jonas Bonas (Vegetarianism) ‘It’s an interesting topic for me: How healthiness is valued in a culture and affects the way people cook and think? [...] I’d like to add this topic to my daily thinking. Usually, you eat because you are hungry. I get more conscious about food through the event. [...] Another thing is I like to share meals with others and learn from their reaction.’

Lisa Raimund (Vegetarianism) ‘It’s always nice to share, especially personal things. I feel sharing food from your own culture is something personal. It’s nice that you open this space. I feel it’s up to something intimate. You can see somebody cares about what they give to you because they want to do something nice for you.’

Franziska Jannsen (Fish and Seafood) ‘The experience made me realise that I maybe wanted to change my eating style. I realized how much I liked to share plates and eat with my fingers. Knife and fork keep food distant.’

Jonas Bittner (Fish and Seafood) ‘An experience, a chance to learn something new. There were some moments during the event I wasn’t thinking, but merely felt the food with my sensation. New things help me to be more aware of myself and the experience.’

Johanna Rafalski (Breakfast) ‘When I was in Argentina, I really missed the German bread culture.’

Patrycja Fila (Noodles) ‘It means a lot to me because I like to know new people and different cultures. And I also like to learn different opinions about different topics. [...] The food was different for me. It’s not something regular that you can get it from a typical restaurant. You have to go somewhere special.

Maybe that’s the reason why people don’t try new things. Because they don’t want to put extra work on something they don’t know, such as the exotic ingredients, their usages and the combinations. There are so many options, but they only use simple ingredients because they are easy to get in the common stores. [...] We don’t make an extra effort to go to a Polish store or Chinese store, also because after this, we don’t know how to combine the ingredients. We see them, but we don’t know what to do with them. That’s also my problem. I see it, and I don’t know how to do with it.

That’s why I’m not buying different kinds of stuff.’

Saraina Weigand (Noodles) ‘I really like the idea of this project. It’s always beautiful to see how people live. I don’t know you very good, but I was at your home and saw how you live. I had a very nice evening.’

Bonas, J. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Raimund, L. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Jannsen, F. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Bittner, J. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Rafalski, J. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Fila, P. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Weigand, S. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

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Böcker, N. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Niederfeilner, H. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Sänger, C. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Heinrich, A. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

Noemi Böcker (Hot Pot) ‘It was a reminder for me that I am interested in sharing cultural perspectives with other people. There’s still so much to explore in the world, and the world does not circle here but also everywhere else.’

Helene Niederfeilner (Hot Pot) ‘I tasted another culture. What the event means to me is to get in touch with a foreign culture and evolve my interest in this culture. I felt it’s interesting, and I want to know more.’

Charlotte Sänger (Hot Pot) ‘I felt honoured and well-treated to be invited to a dinner from a stranger.

You hosted me and took care of everything. I have a feeling that I am connected to you somehow. You were very welcoming. This means a lot to me. And I felt completely comfortable to come to your place again (for the interview). I started to consider you as someone I know, even though we just shared a dinner.’

Antonia Heinrich (Hot Pot) ‘First, it made me think about the Asian cultures, especially Taiwanese culture. Exchanging information between cultures is cool. Now, I do not see Asian people as a huge entity, but to look into details and think about the details.’ food communication Most of the participants agreed that an ethnic eating environment possessed information of the culture that catalysed learning and understanding. More than half of them mentioned that the presence of cultural senders was crucial in the experience to learn the associated culture. Not merely would the information of the ethnic culture be conveyed by words, but also by the behaviours and interactions of the people with the ethnic background.

13 participants agreed that food could either communicate, introduce or trigger their interests in the related culture. One believed that food could merely communicate its eating culture. In his opinion, to retrieve a holistic view of an ethnic culture required someone from the eating culture involved in the eating experience.

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Feedback on the Interview 8 participants mentioned that the interview questions required them to recall and relate to their previous experience while providing space for their interpretations. This process helped the participants to structure their thoughts and understand the purpose of the research. 6 thought the research topic and the general experience were interesting. The questions also assisted them to bring back their memories and reflect on themselves.

Some raised their awareness on food-related issues. Some discovered new meanings in food and eating.

For further improvement of the interview, the first interviewee mentioned that some questions were repetitive and too detailed. One participant suggested that the researcher could share more information about Taiwan during the eating event. 2 participants thought that the research aim should be more clarified before the interviews for them to build the linkage between food and culture. Other opinions included releasing the questions before meeting so that participants could recollect details in their memories, serving desserts and drinks at the eating events, adding the time factors (when to eat, how long to eat, what to eat at specific time etc.) to the eating events.

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3.4 SUMMARY

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This phase of research has analysed the communication functions of food and the potential of an ethnic eating experience to catalyse cultural understanding.

The attracted group to the research participation was Millenials who have obtained high education and carried high social awareness. They possess multi-language skills and live in international communities. Travelling widens their field of vision. New food is a daily activity for them. Their food choices have become a means of voices to utter their values and beliefs.

The researcher had discovered that Asia was not an emphasised subject in this study group. In their knowledge of Taiwan, they were mainly conscious of its conflicts with China. Apart from that, their images of this island were often borrowed from other Asian perspectives.

Through observation, the researcher identified that the German attendants could capture cultural implications of the objects, words and behaviours in an ethnic eating environment. The behaviours of eaters adjusted according to the settings. By mimic and confirmation, eaters gradually transformed into cultural mediators. Every element including ingredient, taste, eating tool and eating style could overlap with eaters’ fields of experience and hence serve as a channel of the cross-cultural communication process. Furthermore, the communication did not occur merely between 2 cultural groups but also in the eaters. By comparing to the home diet, eaters perceived the difference between theirs and the other cultures while acknowledging their standpoint.

Encountering new food catalysed self-learning and generated meanings to oneself.

An ethnic eating experience visualises a culture. It could extend eaters’ worldviews and overturn their mindsets. Eating together and sharing food shortens the distance between strangers. Food can trigger eaters’ interest in learning the culture and provides an entry towards mutual understanding.

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4.0 GERMANY TO TAIWANESE

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RESEARCH STRUCTURE AND FORMATS To build an effective communication suggested by Schramm’s model, it requires overlap of the fields of experience of the message sender and receiver. Therefore, in this phase of research, 3 Taiwanese who had stayed in Germany for different lengths of time were interviewed. The experience of Taiwanese and Germans intersected in Germany, forming an overlapping zone while providing room for understanding. The interviews aimed to acquire information about the integrating process of the Taiwanese people in Germany and the role of food for them. With different backgrounds, 3 Taiwanese carrying different purposes to Germany had experienced diverse aspects of German living that were distinct from their expectations.

In order to retrieve a comprehensive understanding of the Taiwanese attendants’ experience in Germany, multiple methods were applied to the interviews to retrieve in-depth information, including photojournal, guided tour and emotional mapping. After the attendants agreed to participate the interviews, they recorded their daily events by notes or photos for 2 to 5 days. The attendants’ accommodations where the interviews took place revealed details of the characteristics of the attendants. The interview questions addressed the attendants’ profiles, daily routines, integration process and whether food provided consolation or catalysed communication.

The notes and photos taken recollected the attendants’ ordinary or unusual memories. At the same time, the researcher asked them to select an emoji corresponding to their emotions and feelings at the moment the events occurred. The acquired data illustrated attendants’ working and living environments, social networks, the changes of mindsets during the stay in Germany as well as the meanings and roles of food for them.

participants record their daily routines

interviews

guided tour

photojournal

emotional mapping

Figure 4.0.1 Research Structure

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Photojournal In order to retrieve a holistic view of their life in Germany, the researcher requested the attendants to record their daily incidents by notes and photos for 2 to 5 days before the interviews. These photos helped the researcher to illustrate attendants’ physical environments and ask in-depth questions.

Guided Tour Interviews were conducted at attendants’ accommodations, which introduced the researcher to their familiar environments while obtaining information and insights of their characters.

Interviews The questions of the interview were categorised into 4 sections: profile, daily routine, integration process and food consolation and communication. The researcher adjusted questions depending on situations. profile 1. Please tell me your name and age.

2. How long have you been in Germany?

3. What are you doing in Germany?

4. What was the reason you came to Germany?

5. What were the reasons to choose Germany instead of other countries?

6. Do you speak German? What is your level of the language skill (A, B, C)?

7. What languages do you use to interact with people in Germany?

8. Do you plan to go back to Taiwan?

a. Why do you want to go back? / Why do you want to stay? daily routine 9. Please show me the photos you have taken for the interview.

10. Please describe the photos.

11. What did you feel? Please choose an emoji that describes most accurately of your feeling at that moment. integration process 12. How will you define ‘cultural difference’?

13. What are the cultural differences you have encountered?

14. What are the differences between German and Taiwanese culture that you find difficult to overcome?

15. Have you ever felt unfairly treated based on your ethnic background?

What were the situations?

16. Do you feel you changed into a different person in Germany?

a. What are the changes on you? Can you describe them?

b. How do you feel about these changes?

17. Are you satisfied with your current state in Germany? Why or why not?

18. From your experience with Germans, how much do you think they know about Taiwan?

19. Is it important for your that your acquaintances/colleagues/friends/lovers to understand Taiwanese culture? Why? 20. In which aspects do you use mostly to introduce Taiwan (history, politics, culture, food, people etc.)?

21. What are the moments you ‘feel home’ in Germany?

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food consolation and communication 23. Do you cook in Germany?

a. What do you cook?

b. Do you cook Taiwanese food in Germany?

24. What is your comfort food?

25. What role does food play in your daily life? Is the meaning of Taiwanese food different from other food?

26. Have you ever invited people from other cultures for Taiwanese food?

a. Please describe the scenario.

b. How did they feel about the food and the eating experience?

c. How did you feel?

27. Do you think Taiwanese food is a good way to introduce Taiwanese culture?

Emotional Mapping Pictures of emojis were provided when the attendants described their daily routine. Attendants selected emojis which depicted most accurately of their emotions and feelings when the incidents took place.

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4.1 INTERVIEWS

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INTERVIEWEES

From top to down: Yu Min Tsai, Yue Fu, Po Chiao Fang (Photos provided by interviewees)

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YU MIN TSAI

Date 2017.8.23 Age | 27 Year of Arrival | 2015 Period of Stay | about 2 years Current City of Stay | Cologne Current Focus | Bachelor study in KISD Profile At his third year of graduate study in communication design in Taiwan, Yu Min came to KISD as an exchange student. After one year of stay, he registered as a regular student starting from the middle stage of the bachelor study. The sensitive political and societal atmosphere in Taiwan influenced his decision for not finishing the graduate school. At that time, the Sunflower Movement driven by students and civic groups were against the passing of the CrossStrait Service Trade Agreement between the ruling party and the Chinese government. Yu Min had the ambition to discuss this topic by means of the thesis research, yet later found himself powerless in front of its complexity.

Coming to Germany was never in Yu Min’s plan. However, he grasped the opportunity considering the chance offered and the affordable financial requirement. After arriving in Cologne, he found the people and the living environment enjoyable. Many design studios which were fit to his competence also situated in the surrounding area. Yu Min perceived the city as openminded to foreigners. The pace of life was slower and closer to his ideal way of living than in Taiwan. He felt alive by little things to enjoy, such as taking sunbaths in good weather.

Yu Min only began to learn German after his arrival. He forced himself to practice German in everyday scenarios and actively search for learning materials. Conducting daily matters in German was not a problem for him, yet English communication occupied a primary proportion of his daily life. Yu Min utilised 3 languages at most: English for school and working environments, Mandarin at home with his flatmate from Hong Kong, and German for situations where English and Mandarin were not applicable.

Yu Min planned to return to Taiwan after accumulating several years of professional experience in Germany. Friends and family were the major drives, as well as he felt the responsibility to take care of his parents. If without this bond, the general low payments and long working hours offered

by Taiwanese enterprises could not attract him. Yu Min wished to establish his studio after returning.

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In meeting new friends, Yu Min claimed that he had built robust relationships with people in different phases of life. Thus he didn’t feel the need to earn more friends in the current state. He made friends mostly in schools and at works. Intended social situations made him uncomfortable. He avoided parties where the major encounters were strangers to him. At the beginning of his current study, he has hanged out for the most part with international students. Gradually, he became good friends with a few German students since the international came and went away. Yu Min preferred long-term projects also because it allowed him to build a lasting and stable connection with the partners. The socialisation took place usually in school. Occasionally, they went to exhibitions or cafes together.

Yu Min had once shared a flat with a German lady who frequently travelled from place to place, came only once a month. He said it felt weird to let a person he barely knew (the German lady) to enter the house while his bedroom was, at that time, the public living room.

The German ways of socialising, perceived by Yu Min, were taking sunbaths, chatting during smoking, and partying. Yu Min and the researcher reached a consensus that the idea of ‘party’ was defined differently in German and Taiwanese cultures. Party is seen as revelry in Taiwan. People carry specific purposes of visiting a party, either to release stress, to hunt for sexual partners or to escape from reality. Whereas in Germany, partying is close to a daily routine as eating, grocery shopping and Sunday church. It could take place for every possible reason, from birthday, labour’s day, weekends to good weather, which a Taiwanese may find unusual and challenging to adapt to.

The language barrier lay in between was also believed by Yu Min as one of the causes that intimidated him to visit a party.

In his description, Yu Min’s lifestyle had drastically changed after he made up his mind to stay in Germany. At the year of exchange, he hanged out frequently with international students, stayed up overnight and spent money freely. Now, as he depicted, he lived ‘like an old man’.

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Daily Routine 2017.08.15 - 22

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He made lunch. It was a traditional Taiwanese dish mixing marinated cucumbers with minced pork. Yu Min replaced cucumbers with zucchini which was available in local supermarkets. He claimed that he mainly cooked Taiwanese dishes or applied Taiwanese flavors. He often stored dumplings at home, which were considered as a fast-cooked food by Taiwanese.

2

He had found a cafe Ten Ten near KISD. He often worked there during the school break because they offered mocha drinks, a Japanese tea which was a popular product in Taiwan. Customers were allowed to stay and work on laptops as long as they wished after ordering a drink, similar to the cafe culture in his hometown. He rarely found this atmosphere in other cafes in Cologne. He felt comfortable to work in Ten Ten.

3

Yu Min carried bubble tea he bought few days ago in Düsseldorf on the street. Teamate was a drink shop featuring Taiwan style tea products.

He was pursuing a feeling of home. Bubble tea was a speical medium of memory because it was hard to find in Germany.

4

He went to TH Deutz to print because the school offered automatic printing machines. Yu Min admitted that he would avoid situations requiring him to get involved in social interaction, like talking to staffs in printing stores.

5

When he worked at school, he preferred to hide at a quiet corner, such as in the computer room (C-lab). Therefore, he didn’t need to engage in conversations with others. The school break left him a pleasurable and private time. He didn’t find it lonely while most people went away for vacation. He enjoyed more to interact with his acquaintances and friends.

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Yu Min thought bread was not a proper food for meal, merely an option to save money and time. Comparing to the living standard in Taiwan, he felt unbalanced to have only bread with the same price of a proper meal back home. He preferred to buy bread in Backwerk because he didn’t need to talk with the staffs.

7

While situating in crowded area like Neumarkt, Yu Min masked with an unamused face to avoid contacts with passersby. He usually went to such area with specific goals, such as purchasing a book. He would not linger around.

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When grocery shoppoing in Asian shops, he preferred to purchase goods made in Taiwan, Hong Kong or Japan rather than in China due to the bad reputation of Chinese product control, although Chinese products were major in most Asian shops. Yu Min also preferred to buy ingredients that were easy to cook, such as noodles, vegetables, mushrooms and tofu, the goods which were not available in local supermarkets. An Asian shop was located between his place and school, therefore, he visited it quite often.

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Integration Process Yu Min found his current environment culturally diverse. Hence, there were differences required him to cope with. Take class discussion as an example, Yu Min had noticed that Asian students appeared to be indirect in their expressions. He assumed that had to do with the education they received and the environment they grew up in Asia. Take himself as an example, he had to structure his thoughts and evaluate if his information useful for the counterparts before speaking out. Therefore, he couldn’t react as immediately as the western students. However, it catalysed self-reflection and improvement, as Yu Min claimed. Asian students might have their chances to speak given away due to their no response. This experience would, nevertheless, influence their future conducts.

Yu Min’s definition of ‘cultural difference’ was based on the individual-level variation of growing paths which shaped individual characteristics.

Yu Min believed that every person was an embodiment of his or her nurturing environment, which represented his or her culture. Separating individuals from their culture was impossible.

Therefore, individual differences indicated cultural differences. However, due to the natural borders and the developing language systems, culture had divided into multiple characters and worldviews according to nations. Differences between national cultures were easy to detect, yet cultural difference existed, as well, among individuals.

Following his definition, the German characteristic as Yu Min had perceived in classes, was the straightforwardness. As he experienced, if a German student disagreed with the team decision, he or she would show respect but refuse to help with the teamwork. Whereas in Taiwan, the collective decision was often obeyed by every team member whether or not he or she agreed with it. Working harmony was taken as the priority.

Nevertheless, cultural differences were nothing for Yu Min to ‘overcome’. The confrontation might influence how he behaved, but it was needless to change himself intendedly to become similar to Germans. Yu Min mentioned that in most situations where he found difficult to cope with were the people who held strong opinions or had distinct life experience from his, regardless of their nationality.

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In topics of unfair treatments which might be caused by his ethnic background, Yu Min described one case he had encountered on U-Bahn, where an old man carrying a bike asked him to give away his seat while there were still many spare seats. Yu Min considered that if he was not an Asian or if he could speak fluent German, the old man wouldn’t have treated him rudely. Another case happened in a school project, which he was excluded by the leading professor from the working group without particular reasons. However, these were rare cases.

Yu Min credited it to his avoidance of frequent social interactions.

The experience in Germany had changed Yu Min in a good way as he perceived. He turned more direct and brave in bringing out questions. The core of him remained while earning the flexibility to display himself.

In general, Yu Min was satisfied with his condition in Germany, except for his limited financial support.

The life was simpler and more straightforward.

He could accomplish things that supposed to be done without being bothered by the outside voices.

There were less social issues and social stress to deal with than in Taiwan. Yu Min felt the German environment had given him more room and time.

Most of the Germans Yu Min had met heard about Taiwan. He pointed out that many Taiwanese were unconfident in their national identity. They were keen on uttering their dilemma of the threatening Chinese government to the outside world so as to prove their existence. It was a topic that interested people in Germany as well. In cultural exchanges, Yu Min often discuss the behavioural differences between Germans and Taiwanese as well as the history of Taiwan.

There were moments in Germany that made Yu Min feel ‘home’. Working on laptop in cafes, for instance, carried him back to the time in Taipei where cafes were often occupied with working students. He liked to visit Taiwanese food places in Düsseldorf once in a while to recollect the home tastes.

Research Phase Two: Germany to Taiwanese

Food Consolation and Communication Yu Min frequently cooked in Germany. He preferred home flavours over new tastes. Comfort food for Yu Min was noodles and dumplings which were his longtime favourite. Food healed and satisfied Yu Min, especially in Germany where daily cooking was inevitable. He was proud when he could recreate the home food with local ingredients. Yu Min was faithful to his eating convention.

He could not adapt to bread and never tried to adopt the German diet. If bread were the only option, Yu Min would choose white toast since it was a common product in Taiwan. In addition to his persistence of Taiwanese flavours, Yu Min visited Asian food places once a week.

Yu Min once invited a group of internationals for hot pot at his place. 2 guests were not used to the style and couldn’t eat much. The others showed interests. In Yu Min’s observation, the mixing of various ingredients and tastes could be the reason for dislike. However, this was merely his assumption judging by the guests’ reactions. The potential negative responses were the concern of Yu Min while introducing Taiwanese food to foreigners. When he felt excited to share good tastes, he worried in the meanwhile if people would not understand them. Introducing home food to others was still an entertaining event for Yu Min. When he received positive feedback, he felt himself being understood. This feeling of belongingness was not limited to food, but also extended to music and other preferences of things.

Yu Min didn’t think that to introduce the Taiwanese culture was easier through food. However, street food as a significant scenario composing the view of Taiwan, as Yu Min suggested, was a topic hard to miss in his depiction of home.

Food and music were two elements for Yu Min to connect to Taiwan. When tasting or hearing something familiar, he derived the pieces in the memories of home. Food meant special to Yu Min because he enjoyed cooking.

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YUE FU

Date 2017.8.24 Age | 22 Year of Arrival | 2016 Period of Stay | 9 months Current City of Stay | Cologne Current Focus | Au pair in a German family Profile Yue worked as an au pair in Germany, meaning that she lived with a German family as a domestic assistant, assisting the parents in childcare. 2 children she took care of were one two-year-old and one one-year-old. She worked 6 hours a day, 5 days a week. Yue claimed that living under the same roof made it hard to divide work and private life. Exceeding the regular working hours happened from time to time. However, the family treated her nicely. She took the extra works as doing friends favour.

Every morning after the parents left for work, Yue brought the children to the babysitter and took them back home in the afternoon. She looked after them until the parents turned back. She described her role as ‘filling the voids of parents’ absence’. Sometimes the parents worked from home. Yue felt the family was in a higher social class and living a wealthy life. Cologne was not the first German city Yue had lived in. Before Cologne, she lived in Munich for 3 months assisting the same family and moved with them due to the shifting of the workplaces of the parents.

Au pair for Yue was an ok job. The working content was not far from Yue’s anticipation. As soon as she got familiar with the children, the job became smooth. The difficulty she faced was the language barrier. Yue had fulfilled high-level German courses, able to operate daily conversations and more complex tasks. To communicate with children was not a problem, yet to fit in the group conversations and understand jokes remained hard for Yue. She often felt awkward in social situations.

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Yue took au pair as a chance to come to Germany which had been her top choice to live abroad. For this reason, she had learned German for 3 years in Taiwan. Working in Germany appeared to be a great opportunity to sharpen her language skill. To make use of the language was what she aimed for.

On the other hand, Yue had always longed for living in Europe. The industry in Germany fitted her competence in industrial design. Therefore, coming to Germany was on top of her list. In the beginning, Yue had considered enrolling in a German university. She realised soon after the difficulty in studying in German. Meanwhile, a design academy in Italy had accepted Yue’s application. She decided to waste no time and had prepared for her departure. Few days after the interview, Yue would arrive in Italy.

Yue wished to stay in Europe for a longer period and apply for an internship after graduation. She urged herself to achieve since it was not an easy path to come. The major East Asian students were financially supported by their families to study abroad, and so was Yue. Returning home with success to make her family proud became her goal. Still, Yue remained flexibility for the future, everything was possible.

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Daily Routine 2017.08.19 - 23

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In her daily routine, Yue had breakfast at 9-10 in the morning, lunch at 13-14, and dinner, if eat without children, at 20-22. The breakfast content followed the German style, consisting of bread and jams. Lunch was usually similar to breakfast. Yue held no expectation for daily breakfast and lunch.

However, she found bread in Germany fitted her taste better than Taiwanese bread. Yue described herself ‘living in a German way’.

2

When hanging out with her Taiwanese friends, Yue could conduct in-depth conversations due to the use of mother tongue and the similar reference.

Their expertise were all related to design and art. Yue chose an emoji ‘mischievous’, implying that she felt freer to show her other faces in front of Taiwanese friends. The atmosphere turned very ‘Taiwanese’ as Yue described, which generated a very different feeling from her daily life. The food made her feel home.

3

The family invited her to join the zoo trip. Their nephew happened to visit and went together with them to the zoo. The family often included Yue in their activities, except for visiting family and friends.

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The family constantly had visitors. When visitors came, Yue felt anxious and awkward because it was hard for her to follow the conversations. Usually, they joined dinners together. After food, when the hosts and guests had wine and chatted, Yue sought to go back to her room.

5

Yue packed for leaving to Italy. She felt sad to leave the familiar environment and friends she just met. Yet, she expected the school life in Italy. The life in Germany was slow comparing to in Taiwan. She preferred the speedy pace.

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She and the nephew went to have breakfast after sending the children to the babysitter. The nephew explained Yue the trendy topics among teens. Yue could understand his language, but felt difficult to express herself fluently in German. Socialising with Germans occurred comparably less for Yue even she lived with a German family. Besides the host family and her Taiwanese friends, she mostly hung out with other au pairs from the same language course.

7

She picked the children home and watched over them until the parents returned. The children sometimes followed into her room due to curiosity.

‘Another chaos in a new day’, she described.

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Integration Process Yue noticed the cultural differences between Germans and Taiwanese on their general habits, for instance, their different methods of washing dishes.

In Germany, apart from the use of automatic dishwashers, used cutlery and plates are washed in a sink of hot water with a splash of washing gel. They are brushed and cleaned in hot water, drained beside the sink, and dried with a clean towel before placing on the shelves or cabins. Whereas in Taiwan, dirty utensils are cleaned under cold, running tap water with a sponge and washing gel. From the aspect of Taiwanese, the German way of dishwashing can not reach their hygienic standard. A sink of water is repeatedly used on dirty plates even when it turns filthy. Vice versa, when a German sees how Taiwanese clean dishes, he or she may think they are wasting water. Other norms confused Yue including the sounds of chewing, whether or not to finish the food on individual plates, the timing of picking food from a shared plate and so on. Cultural difference is displayed over and over through details of daily matters.

However, cultural difference was nothing to be ‘overcome’, claimed by Yue. After living in Germany for a period, its norms appeared less unusual to her, and therefore, she gradually adapted to or was able to endure the differences.

She mentioned one personal case that she received a fine due to her unfamiliarity with the tram system. The controlling staffs paid no sympathy for her situation. Their contemptuous attitude toward a newcomer was perceived as inappropriate by Yue. Whereas back home, the public authorities appeared more helpful and friendly to foreigners. The different approaches of these two ethnic groups addressed the emphasised balance between rules and kindness were based on cultural mindsets. In Germany, following regulations was highly valued. As a minority as Taiwanese in Germany, Yue felt she couldn’t do much to influence the existing state of mentality.

Yue had never encountered discriminations due to her ethnicity. The only thing bothering her was the lingering stares from passersby, especially during the time in Munich. She assumed that the feeling could be mistakenly interpreted by herself since she was experiencing a new city. But after discussing with her friends, they concluded that citizens in Munich appeared to be more defensive towards outsiders.

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The experience in Germany didn’t change Yue much, as she perceived. One reason could be the narrow social circle which was either the family or the language class she had. She depicted her life as monotonous as playing the same games with kids daily. No apparent progress of herself at any level compared to the speedy pace in Taiwan, where Yue had a sense of accomplishment while keeping herself busy. She was not content with her current state of self-fulfilment.

Most people Yue had met in Germany knew more or less about Taiwan, primarily about its controversial political situation. Young people were often curious about the Taiwanese history and politics. The elder generation had learned about Chiang Kai-Shek in their high school textbooks. People also showed interests in Taiwanese cuisine. A common question Yue had been asked was ‘What do you eat for breakfast?’. Yue found it difficult to introduce Taiwanese food due to its distinct dietary concepts from Germany. Names of the dishes were often hard to translate as well. Nevertheless, she was consulted when the family cooked Asian food. One time, the host mother asked Yue for the method of frying rice, and then adjusted the cooking technique and the uses of ingredients in accordance. Eventually, the fried rice turned from the western style to the eastern style, as Yue described.

Yue noticed when the family inquired about her opinions, the questions often related to Asia, regardless of whether the issues were about Taiwan or not.

Yue felt treated as a sort of ‘Asian expert’ that she was expected to know things happened in Asia. In other cases, some newly-met people tried to connect with Yue by saying ‘I like Asian food’, that confused her about which Asian cuisine they were addressing. Yue had a feeling that they barely knew about Asia and the associated cultures.

For Yue, it is important to introduce the Taiwanese culture to the people around her. She wouldn’t force lecturing, rather instilled knowledge about Taiwan when Taiwan was relevant to the topics. Subjects Yue liked to bring into discussions were the food, the weather, the political condition and the variety of Asian languages.

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Food Consolation and Communication The moments Yue felt at home in Germany were when she tasted particular Asian dishes. Surprisingly, currywurst was comfort food for Yue. The food comforting her was connected to unhealthy diet, which was restricted from or contradicted to her ideology of eating, suggesting that the freedom of breaking the rules might make her content. Apart from that, Yue missed bubble tea and sweet soups in Taiwan.

Yue had cooked a traditional Taiwanese dinner for the host family once. She prepared 2 main dishes, one soup and rice. Yue had also demonstrated the host family some one-pot dishes, such as curry. Their responses to the food were often positive, especially for the meat dishes. However, Yue couldn’t tell if their liking was genuine or based on politeness.

The food Yue cooked in Taiwan was comparably simple, often noodle soups consisting of noodles, vegetables, and meat in one pot. Yue had dedicated her first try of a typical Taiwanese dinner to the German family. This behaviour also displayed on other Taiwanese interviewees, suggesting that they treated food as a fundamental way to introduce Taiwan. The environmental factor should also be considered. Most of the interviewees visited Germany as students. Due to the affordable price and the popularity of street food and bistros, student dorms and shared flats were often equipped with no kitchens. Not many chances to learn cooking were offered to the youth who just left home. After the arrival to Germany, they soon realised that food was more expensive, eating outside was not an everyday option, and the opening hours of food places and supermarkets were limited. In order to survive, they started to cook. Plus, why to waste a good kitchen if you have it at home?

Food played an essential role in Yue’s daily activities. Even though the content of breakfast and lunch were monotonous, she held expectation for the dinners. She enjoyed grocery shopping with the host mother and the children, that gave her the power to control what to eat for the day.

Yue perceived Taiwanese food as a part of her identity. It carried back the moments she spent with her cherished ones. Inviting foreign friends for Taiwanese food was seen by Yue as a cultural exchange. The guests were often curious and asked about the food. Her cooking methods and the unusual ingredients impressed them. However, the concern of Yue still lay on if the guests enjoyed its taste.

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The cultural exchanges on Yue’s dining table took forms in conversations and observations of individual behaviours. For instance, through her, the guests learned that avocado was not an ingredient Japanese put into their sushi. Avocado had become a common sushi component since a Japanese immigrant applied the local fruit to fit the western taste. This innovation was known by the westerns as the ‘California roll’. Through the guests, Yue realised that Asian food in Germany might be dissimilar from the food in Asia.

In Germany, people consumed Asian food based on their food preferences instead of following the original eating styles. Yue considered wasabi as an indispensable element of sushi. Despite her preference of non-spicy food, wasabi was necessary on her sushi. On the contrary, the German eaters would leave out wasabi according to his or her taste.

Food as California roll was a result of multi-cultural integration. The flows of food migration are also demonstrated on bubble tea. Chinese tea, introduced to Europe as an exotic good in the age of discovery, was taken by the British as a new fashion. After centuries when tea mixed with milk had become a custom in the British tea time, it was then exported back to the east accompanying the British colonisation. Asians treated milk tea in the same manner as Europeans to Chinese tea, mingling the taste with their fascination with the exoticism of the world on the other side. Bubble tea was invented by a Taiwanese who threw tapioca pearls, an ingredient used in traditional snacks, into milk tea. This new product had drawn public’s attention and further reached the European consumers. The creation of bubble tea has illustrated an intertwining net of intercultural influences.

Yue wouldn’t introduce her way of eating sushi as the right way to the German counterparts. Nevertheless, the different behavings on the same food enlightened her. She found it an intriguing aspect to look into cultural differences.

Taiwanese food represented a part of the Taiwanese culture, but not comprehensively, as Yue claimed. Food variety blossomed in Taiwan due to its intimate relation to our daily scenarios. In Yue’s observation, the role of food was diverse depending on the people. For some, it’s a source of happiness; for the other, they eat merely to fill the stomachs.

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PO CHIAO FANG

Date 2017.9.4 Age | 29 Year of Arrival | 2011 Period of Stay | 6 years Current City of Stay | Düsseldorf Current Focus | Manager of Teamate Profile Po Chiao was a manager of a bubble tea shop Teamate in Düsseldorf. He agreed to conduct the interview when the researcher visited his shop. At that point, he was busy with the expansion of the second shop.

Po Chiao arrived in Germany in 2011. He only went back to Taiwan few times during the years in Germany. When Po Chiao was in his last year of bachelor study, the German government had just opened the application for work and holiday visa for Taiwanese citizens. Without much promotion of this new policy, Po Chiao learned the information from a newspaper. He joined the first batch of applicants. The applying procedure was quite simple at that time. He merely required to make an appointment with the authorised office through a phone call and sent his documents by post.

The initial plan of Po Chiao was to travel through Germany by bike. He purchased a single flight ticket, deciding to be spontaneous. At first, he dwelled in a dorm room in Bonn with his acquaintance from Taiwan. He did several jobs to earn for his touring expenses, including working as service and dishwasher in restaurants and as a newspaper delivery man. These jobs by his words were ‘indecent’ but ‘fun’. In May 2011, the first bubble tea shop BoboQ had opened in Berlin. Po Chiao gained a full-time position from one of the franchises in Düsseldorf. After half of a year, the owner asked for his will to stay longer. He had a hard time considering, eventually decided to stay.

This decision had held him in Düsseldorf for the next 6 years. Nevertheless, the biking dream did not vanish. Po Chiao believed that as long as the roads existed, he always had the chance to depart. However, it was still an unfulfilled goal. Instead, Po Chiao jumped into triathlon training as his recent hobby.

Schwerdtfeger, C. and Voogt, G. (2012). Gladbach: Giftspuren in Bubble Tea. Rheinische Post. [online] Available at: https://rponline.de/leben/gesundheit/news/ gladbach-giftspuren-in-bubbletea_aid-14112751 [Accessed 9 May 2018].

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BoboQ was founded by a Taiwanese merchant. According to Po Chiao, bubble tea had led a trend in Germany back then. The founder siezed the opportunity to expand his business swiftly, allowing the franchises to run after 3 days of training with one recipe book. The reckless expansion led to the doom of BoboQ. Due to the inadequate quality control, outbursting questions about the composition of the beads by German media followed up in 2012, causing many shops shut their doors soon after. Only a few had survived, including the one Po Chiao worked in. Po Chiao felt the responsibility to keep the bubble tea culture reviving in Germany because it represented his origin.

Together with his boss, their insistence on the business gradually regained the customers. In 2015, they asked to purchase the name of the brand but got declined by the founder. Therefore, they innovated a new brand Teamate for the shop at the same site as a result.

Research Phase Two: Germany to Taiwanese

While searching for a design studio for branding in Taiwan, Po Chiao encountered obstacles in communication since most of the design studios were not aware of the behavioural differences between Taiwanese and German customers. From Po Chiao’s observation, a popular marketing strategy ‘buy one get one free’ in Taiwan wouldn’t attract German customers to bring more customers. The reasons varied. In German mindsets, if a person needs only one cup, why bother to get two? Of course, the reason might base on their unfamiliarity with bubble tea. Coupons, as another example, worked just as ineffective as ‘buy one get one free’. On the contrary, these strategies would draw a crowd if they were launched in Taiwan.

German customs were taken into consideration in Po Chiao’s design of the brand. Take eating scenario as an example, bubble tea symbolises a consumption style in the fast-paced metropolis. The reason tea is packed in plastic or paper cups attached with a disposable straw means to allow people to carry and drink it on the way. Whereas in Germany, tea correlates with leisure time. People sit down, chat, and enjoy the sun while having a cup of tea. This association contradicts to the concept bubble tea presents.

Therefore, it is not a smart idea to transplant the original settings to Germany. The cultural representation of bubble tea will not be grasped with no alteration and adjustment. In order to attract customers, Po Chiao claimed that they had a radical makeover for their new brand.

The wish of transmitting the food culture had exhibited by the logo of Teamate. A cup containing black beads with a straw on top represents the content of bubble tea. Dark green colour with the texture of tea leaf is used as the background. The logo was designated to be understandable of the food style at first sight. The sealed plastic cups for the tea remained the original idea of ‘tea to go’. In a way, Teamate introduced a notion that ‘having tea could be more casual’ to the tea drinking culture in Germany.

Po Chiao noticed the customers’ preferences were divided into German and Asian group (including Asian-Germans). German customers were more likely to choose tea with beads made from fruits, whereas the major Asian customers would not hesitate to take tapioca beads in milk tea. Tapioca beads as little black balls from the appearance often frightened Germans.

Therefore, Po Chiao specified this difference in their staff instruction manual, helping the employees to give effective recommendations to customers. The attracted age group which lay on young people below 30, however, had no difference between Taiwan and Germany.

Teamate Logo Teamate (2016). Teamate logo. [image] Available at: https://www. facebook.com/teamateeurope/ photos/a.909773735806274.107 3741828.865164780267170/920 009114782736/?type=3&theater [Accessed 11 Jun. 2018].

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Po Chiao described his German language ability as ‘able to understand 70% of the conversations and respond correspondingly’. He taught new colleagues the basic sentences to communicate with customers. Every step and decision was shaped by experience, said by Po Chiao. Teamate was his current focus. He hadn’t thought about going back to Taiwan. Despite his mom’s wish to have him home, the only incident that drove him back so far was his grandfather’s funeral.

Po Chiao had just married his Taiwanese wife in Germany a month before the interview. She was a dancer, travelling from place to place depending on the locations of performance. The couple had several close friends and acquaintances in Germany. The network of the wife seemed to be wider than Po Chiao. Most of Po Chiao’s local friends were the first or second generation of the Asian immigrants. The couples had been invited by German families.

In return, they also invited friends to their place occasionally, suggesting that they operated a functional social life in Germany.

Po Chiao had experienced Christmas in Germany. The opportunity occurred when he was dating a Japanese girl who lived with a host family in BadenWürttemberg, a southwestern state of Germany. They were both invited. The food for the Christmas dinner included a roasted turkey, potatoes, ravioli and stewed vegetables. However, Po Chiao wasn’t sure if they were the typical food for Christmas in Germany.

In spite of his career success in Germany, Po Chiao described his personality as ‘withdrawn’. Except for the chances in workplaces, he barely got in touch with the local German citizens. The main situations Po Chiao hung out with them were in gyms and sports fields. Apart from that, he preferred to spend time with his wife and the Taiwanese friends. His lifestyle had changed in Germany, as Po Chiao experienced. The reason could be related to the shift of environments. He had faded out from the online chatting groups of his Taiwanese friends as well. ‘I couldn’t catch up with their topics anymore’, said

by Po Chiao. On the other hand, he felt the transformation was inevitable in the onward phases of life. In general, Po Chiao was satisfied with his current circumstance.

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Daily Routine 2017.09.01 - 03 1

When Po Chiao’s wife was home, they usually had Taiwanese food for meal due to the wife’s preference. Po Chiao who enjoyed cooking prepared the food, and the wife assisted. He learned to cook after arriving in Germany.

The initial idea was the wish to have ‘proper food’. Sometimes, the couples ate outside. Po Chiao would search for recommendations online to find restaurants. His wife still preferred Asian cuisine among all the options. In general, Po Chiao felt content when eating with his wife.

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The food Po Chiao had when he was alone at home: pasta with sausage, tomatoes, garlic and cheese. He did research on different cuisines and found pasta could be done fast. Since, pasta had become one of his most consumed food. Po Chiao believed that rice had scarce nutrient in comparison to weat. Considering the gluten-free trend in the western society, his statement formed an interesting contrast between the viewpoints, or fashions, of the east and of the west. Pasta was also an important supplement for running marathons. Po Chiao always consumed a massive amount of pasta before games. Even he was bored with the taste, eating was merely to fill his stomach when he was alone.

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Po Chiao had a regular daily routine. If he was not at Teamate, he was purchasing ingredients for the shop. On holidays, he urged himself to engage in advanced learning. Books about marketing and management were lined up on his shelves.

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Po Chiao got in contact with the locals mainly at work, in the gym and at the sport events. He described that Germans were often ‘very serious about the games’. At the field of sports, Po Chiao admired the earnest attitude Germans carried. In other situations, take business contact as an example, Po Chiao preserved his opinions and described the people as ‘practical’. His opinion towards the socialisation with the locals was neutral.

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Integration Process Po Chiao felt there were cultural differences lay between Germany and Taiwan. For instance, the distinct pace of life. Nonetheless, cultural differences might be omitted. Po Chiao believed to live in a ‘Taiwanese style’ of life in Germany was possible. His defined the ‘Taiwanese style’ as living in an environment that was similar to Taiwan, such as grocery shopping in Asian markets, working in Mandarin workplaces, hanging out with only Taiwanese and so on. Vice versa, one could live a German life in Taiwan as well. Po Chiao found this living style unexciting. Some ethnic groups, noticed by him, preferred to form their circles in Germany.

All Po Chiao’s colleagues were from Taiwan. The majority was students or holiday workers in their 20s. From his observation, this group adapted to a new environment quickly. Many of them had several local contacts. Nevertheless, they hung out more frequently with other Taiwanese due to the relatable talking subjects and viewpoints. It was easy for them to connect with other East Asian groups as well based on the same reason. When the group grew more culturally diverse, it was harder to conduct in-depth discussions. Po Chiao assumed the language barrier was a major cause of this phenomenon.

Po Chiao had achieved the work-life balance in Germany. Through his friends in Taiwan, he noticed a widening gap of their mindsets. Many who worked in Taiwan had no motivation on their careers while acting passively on improving the current conditions. He had frequently been asked by them about his salary, which he found it offensive.

There were, however, difficulties Po Chiao had confronted in Germany. For instance, the lousy working efficiency of the Foreign Affairs Bureaus and their sour attitude towards foreigners who couldn’t speak fluent German. The only response Po Chiao could have was to endure. Whereas in Taiwan, the same conduct would cause plentiful complaints on the in-charge officials, forcing them to make changes. Looking from another side, in Germany, people were used to wait. Po Chiao transmitted this learning to his colleagues, that rather spend on one drink each time than rush.

Cultural differences revealed in details, said by Po Chiao. Now, he could interpret a German’s 230

behaviour more accurately, moreover, see things from their perspective.

Po Chiao had never felt being mistreated in Germany regarding his ethnicity. The only disturbing incidents were the verbal harassments from minors on the street. He suggested that people who claimed themselves being discriminated were often suffered from kopfkino, the delusion in their minds. But he admitted that his superior height (over 190 cm) might prevent him from unpleasant encounters. However, he did feel the constant stares from passersby. The curiosity towards Asian face existed, especially in situations where Asians were comparably rare. He spoke of one marathon where his name and nationality were broadcasted while crossing the finish line.

The experience in Germany had widened Po Chiao’s scope. He learned to judge things through multiple aspects. In a collective society as Taiwan, strong viewpoints spread quickly and stir up powerful impacts. This characteristic may catalyse breaking changes on public policy making and drive social innovations. On the other side, the narrow tolerance for opposite opinions or heterogeneous behaviours often leads to whisper and verbal bully. Po Chiao felt freer to be himself in Germany without being restricted by the outside voices.

Many Germans Po Chiao had in touch with knew about the political situation of Taiwan through news. Transmitting Taiwanese culture to the world was an essential task for Po Chiao. He put this ambition on establishing Teamate. At the start of the business, he had considered to place the Taiwan island as the logo background and provide brochures from the Tourism Bureau of Taiwan in the shop. These plans were given up eventually because they could distract focus from the product.

If the product could trigger customers’ interest, they might generate curiosity about the culture behind. That’s what Po Chiao believed. Food was accessible to learn about a new culture.

On the fence of the terrace at Po Chiao’s place, a Taiwanese flag was hung up, suggesting that he firmly related himself with his nationality. Such desire of outspeaking his identity was also attested by his persistence on the promotion of bubble tea.

Research Phase Two: Germany to Taiwanese

Food Consolation and Communication The moment Po Chiao felt at home in Germany was in the place he lived.

Apart from that, he barely missed Taiwan, and he hadn’t gone back for a long time. Comfort food for Po Chiao were sweets, pizzas and fried chicken. This preference of junk food hadn’t changed regardless of time and environment.

The meanings of food to Po Chiao had no differentiation between Taiwanese and German food. Taiwanese food did not play a unique role. He might recall the flavours from seeing food pictures, but it wouldn’t motivate him to look for recipes. Food supplied for Po Chiao’s spirit regarding his eating partners and the shared moments. The recollection of tastes brought back Po Chiao’s memory of the people he ate with. Eating together with his wife soothed him particularly.

The couple had invited German friends to their meals. The food options were not restricted to Taiwanese food, but they did try some specialities from Taiwan in the previous events. The reactions were mostly positive. The guests would follow the table etiquette during eating. Po Chiao noticed some interesting behaviours, including that the guests were not able to clean the chicken meat if it’s attached to bones.

Po Chiao agreed that Taiwanese food could be a channel to introduce Taiwanese culture, but not represent it. Some food was restricted by time (breakfast, holidays, etc.), some associated with the regions, some were seasonal. The introduction wouldn’t be holistic if only single food item or dish was exhibited.

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4.2 SUMMARY

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Research Phase Two: Germany to Taiwanese

In spite of the different reasons, focuses and goals of the 3 Taiwanese interviewees, their stories provided insights to look into the Taiwanese community in Germany. Through the similar patterns revealed, food’s roles in Taiwanese away from home were unfolded.

Germany seemed to provide a more laid-back lifestyle compared to Taiwan.

From the statements of Yu Min and Po Chiao, they did retrieve not only the feeling of ‘aliveness’ and ‘freedom’ but also reach the work-life balance. The simplified social circles allowed them to focus on current missions without influenced by the outside voices.

Fang, P. (2017), Interview.

Tsai, Y. (2017). Interview.

Responsibilities and goals drove the Taiwanese interviewees. The Confucian traits were shown on their wishes of ‘returning home with achievements’, ‘taking care of the parents’ and ‘establishing the business’. They introduced the eastern mindset on pursuing virtues as family ethics and task fulfilment in life.

All interviewees perceived their social circles became smaller and simpler in Germany. Even they didn’t tend to stick in the environments close to Taiwan, the contacts with the natives were limited. Intimate relationships were often built on the similar ethnic backgrounds. The reasons were on the base of the existing language barrier and the different mentality and attitudes towards friendship between Taiwan and Germany. The distinct style of socialisation and talking subjects also hesitated the Taiwanese, which might lead to awkward feeling or avoidance of social situations.

Details of daily matters and behaviours revealed the cultural differences between Taiwanese and Germans based on their divergent mentalities. For Yu Min and Yue, cultural differences were not problems to be overcome. They generated difficulties in communication, yet were able to be adapted to or be endured. The experience in Germany widened the scope of the Taiwanese interviewees. They developed dual worldviews which allowed them to judge from multi-perspectives.

Cases of mistreatment and discrimination regarding the ethnic backgrounds of the interviewees were rare. The lingering stares from passersby occurred most frequently, implying the present curiosity of the German public towards Asian appearance.

Taiwan was known for its political conflicts with China to the German acquaintances of the interviewees. Apart from that, the majority had scarce information about the island, furthermore, about East Asia. All the three interviewees sought various forms to introduce Taiwan, including in discussions, branding and food.

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All interviewees came to Germany as students or graduates. It suggests that they never experienced cooking on a regular basis before Germany due to the living style of students in Taiwan, which student accommodations were often not equipped with kitchens. However, they all prepared more sophisticated dishes for their foreign counterparts than the food for themselves, such as a table of traditional dinner or hot pot. Their behaviours indicate that food was used as a mean to introduce the place they came from.

Fila, P. (2017). Interview of Reflection and Feedback.

All interviewees did not entirely adapt to the German diet. Most of them applied home flavours in the chances to cook for themselves. A German participant Patrycja had depicted the similar phenomenon in the previous research phase. Her parents came from Poland and only cooked Polish food at home. She was surprised by the new tastes when a German friend invited her to the family dinner.

Taiwanese food recollected the interviewees’ memories. The familiar flavours associated with the scenarios and moments with their beloved ones. Yue Min felt healed while having Taiwanese food, whereas Yue perceived Taiwanese food as part of her identity. Nonetheless, comfort food for the interviewees was not restricted to Taiwanese specialities. Food soothed Po Chiao depending on his eating companions, specifically his wife.

The moments of feeling at home in Germany for this studied group were often connected with having the food from home. Yu Min had mentioned that he liked to carry bubble tea on streets in Germany to pursue the familiar eating scenario in Taiwan. It suggested food carries the functions of consolation and reconfirmation of eaters’ identity.

By the interviewees, Taiwanese food could serve as a channel to introduce Taiwanese culture, yet not comprehensively due to its complexity and diversity. On the other hand, food could satisfy the needs of belongingness when the food preparers received positive feedback. As Yu Min claimed, when people reacted positively to the food he shared, he felt himself being understood. The sense of belongingness was conveyed through food and formed an overlapping field of communication towards empathising and understanding.

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Research Phase Two: Germany to Taiwanese

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5.0 EATING EXPERIENCE DESIGN

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A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

By collecting the data from the natives and the Taiwanese group in Germany, the researcher implemented her findings through the design of an eating experience. The banquet was held in the Dencklerblock, WĂźrzburg, on 19th of May, 2018. Both groups were invited to conduct a conversation on the dining table. The eating included 3 German and 3 Taiwanese participants, the researcher and an assistant supporting her with the dining process.

The meal consisted of appetiser, main course and dessert. Each dish and course provided an overlapping field of German and Taiwanese experience as a channel of communication, either on the ingredients, tastes, styles or the associations with memories. The series of courses represented the journey of a Taiwanese to Germany, from the initial encounter, knowing the unfamiliar through the familiar, to feel at home. The dining was designed at the researcher’s place in the Dencklerblock, where exhibited the living traces of her and her German partner. In other words, a place where 2 ethnic cultures merged as well as a cross-cultural communication was built.

Communication arose from food, objects, settings and words. By knowing the unknown through the known, eaters were able to perceive in others’ stands and further to empathise and understand their counterparts.

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5.1 A FOOD JOURNEY FROM TAIWAN TO GERMANY

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A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

The outcome on the ground of eating experience design was implemented in the form of a dinner banquet. Both ethnic parties, including 3 Germans and 3 Taiwanese, joined the conversation on the dining table. The banquet layout the journey of the Taiwanese to Germany through 3 courses: Initial Encounter, from Unfamiliar to Familiar, and Feeling at Home, which told the stories of their arrival, the initial encounter in a new cultural context, the measuring of differences and commonness, the adaptation and the feeling of home in an alien environment.

The design framework structured upon Schramm’s communication theory which an overlapping field of experience of the message sender and receiver provided a ground for effective information transmission. People extend their knowledge to the unknown through what they have known. The Schramm’s model was borrowed to design the dinner banquet where the elements in the eating settings showcased the intersections of German and Taiwanese experience. For instance, the Taiwanese participants who had lived in Germany were not merely the message senders but also the cultural mediators. They were able to analyse and evaluate situations with 2 worldviews and translate the message into a language which could be captured by the receivers. Another example was the main dishes. Each dish combined features that correlated the German and Taiwanese cuisines, either on the ingredients, the tastes or the styles of food. In the previous interview, Noemi Böcker described how the distinct taste (unfamiliar) of peanut sauce (familiar) from her experience extended her knowledge of the world on the other side. The familiar elements in a dish reduce eaters’ anxiety of facing new things, leading eaters to step into an unfamiliar field where they seek to explain what they have perceived.

The banquet took place at the researcher’s room where showed the traces of her and her German partner as another form of communication. The room provided a source to observe how 2 cultures coexisted in one space. Guests might assume the owner of the decors based on their impressions and imaginations of a race or gender. However, the reveal could break their stereotypes while both the Maneki-Neko (beckoning cat) and the toolset of beer-brewing equipment belonged to the German.

Bedroom as one’s most intimate space displays the daily objects and uncovers one’s identity. Through the objects and the relation between the objects and the owner, the guests could grasp a more profound and holistic picture of the characters of the room owners instead of the stereotypical ‘cultural’ jacket covering on them.

The aesthetic style of the banquet derived inspirations from the landscape of Taiwan.

Taiwan is an ocean-surrounded island where the mountainous area occupies two-thirds of the island in the east, and cities with the major population flourish on the western plains. The uses of stones, wood and glasses mimicked the view of the mountains, forests and oceans whereas the cities were depicted by metal and colourful ceramic, implying the industrialisation and the diverse cultures dwelling on the island. The main dishes were served on black and white plates according to whether the food was spicy or not. Black and white composites the symbol of ‘Taiji’ as the core explanation of the birth of the universe in eastern philosophy. Black represents ‘Ying’ addressing the earth, darkness, coldness, stillness and femininity.

White represents ‘Yang’ indicating the sky, brightness, warmth, movement and masculinity.

Ying and Yang stand at the opposite sides but not contradict each other. Every natural phenomenon possesses Ying and Yang to reach a balanced state, such as night and day, moon and sun, winter and summer, earth and sky, female and male. Every food ingredient also has a genre whether closer to Ying or Yang. In order to reach a balance, a dish often mixes the Ying and Yang aspects. Moreover, a balanced meal requires multiple dishes to reach the harmonious tastes, nutrition and health. The idea of ‘balance’ displayed in the Eastern cuisines on the combination of ingredients, flavours, colours, nutrients and food presentation.

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Process welcome and introduction

appetiser

3 people were seated on each side of the 2 lined-up tables. Each guest sat facing and next to the guests with the different ethnicity. The plan for seats was to prevent people from the same ethnic groups gathered and to provide an overview for eaters to communicate and observe.

For the appetiser, every eater was served with a sheet of placemat paper, a pair of chopsticks, one spare sauce bowl and one bowl with a Xiaolongbao, a dumpling filled with pork. Spices in different shapes and volumes, as well as sauces, were on the serving boards placed in the middle of the tables. Instructions for the appetiser were printed on the placemat papers. Eaters followed the instructions which included a series of actions to use chopsticks.

Before the banquet had started, 2 snack plates with 3 traditional Taiwanese snacks, including wasabi peas, shredded squid and sunflower seeds, were placed on the tables.

6 teacups with high-mountain tea leaves produced from Dayuling in Taiwan as well as a tea kettle filled with hot water were prepared for the guests. The tea set had been redesigned. Conventionally, tea was brew in a kettle and poured into teacups. Leaves in individual cups allowed the participants to observe the changing forms of leaves in hot water. At formal Taiwanese banquets, snacks and hot tea are served before the dishes. While the researcher was introducing the research topic and the event concept, the guests served themselves. In the same time, the banquet was documented with audio recording and photos. The guests were informed and gave consent to the documentation.

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A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

impressions

main course

After the initial encounter of the food, the researcher tossed questions to the guests about their general impressions of Taiwan and Germany and asked them to write down on note papers. For the German participants, the question was ‘What is your impressions of Taiwan and Taiwanese people? Please write down 3 descriptions’. For the Taiwanese, the question was ‘What’s your impressions of Germany and German people before and after arriving in Germany?’. The answers were collected in a bowl. The bowl was passed down and drew by the participants to open up discussions for the backgrounds of the given statements.

For the main course, 6 dishes combining features of the German and Taiwanese cuisines showcased various intertwining patterns of the German and Taiwanese experience. The ingredients, tastes and styles led to conversations about cultural similarities and differences as well as the representations of the food including the food culture, the eating philosophy, the social norms, the historical background, politics, regional differences and individual characters. The arrangement of eating process maintained the Taiwanese tradition of sharing food. Dishes were set in the middle of tables. Each eater had one bowl for rice and one 200 ml glass for beverages. Due to the small-sized utensils, the German participants learned to consider the portion they took and left for others from the sharing plates. At this phase, eaters took the active roles to feed their counterparts the information related to the food.

The last dish served in the main course section was ‘Runbing’.

Runbing is a style of spring rolls which the stuffing depends on individual preferences. The researcher asked the guests to fill their runbings with ingredients and spices. Before eating, eaters received the order to pass their runbings to the person next to them. According to the seats, the German participants received runbings from the Taiwanese participants, and the Taiwanese received from the Germans. Every eater was requested to introduce the runbing he or she made while his or her neighbour had a bite of it. Through the exchange and tasting, eaters experienced their counterparts’ interpretations and conceptualisations behind the choices of ingredients, the combinations of tastes and the food presentations. Communication in this process did not merely address between two ethnic groups but emphasise on the individual level.

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stereotypes

dessert

Culture is a double-edged sword.

It is an easy entry to illustrate one’s character referring to his or her cultural background, yet it may provide a ground for biases, stereotypes and discriminations.

During the break before desserts, the researcher drew out the topic of stereotype. Questions were brought out for open discussions: 1. For Taiwanese: What do Taiwanese think about Germans? / For Germans: What do Germans think about Taiwanese?

2. For Taiwanese: What are the stereotypes you have encountered in Germany? / For Germans: What are the stereotypes you have heard about Germans?

3. Where do these stereotypes come from?

4. What do you find difficult to communicate/interact/learn other ethnic groups in your living environment?

The dessert was a task given to the participants one week before the banquet. Each participant was requested to bring a dessert that related to ‘home’. The idea of ‘home’ was self-defined. No limitation of the food genres was set. It could be sweet or salty, food or drinks, self-made or purchased from supermarkets.

After the dinner, the researcher and the guests shared the desserts and their relations, including the stories, memories, feelings, and meanings, to ‘home’.

A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

auf wiedersehen The banquet closed with good wishes for the future self. The guests wrote down wishes in their native languages on the origami shaped as sky lanterns and covered on the candles. Sky lantern is an air balloon made out of papers. Wishes are written down on the 4 sides of the lantern. When the flammable material fixed in the centre of the hollow lantern is lit up, the lantern flies into the sky, delivering the wishes to God.

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Participants followed the instruction on placemat papers to learn to use chopsticks.

Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph]

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APPETISER INITIAL ENCOUNTER Concept Initial Encounter as the first chapter in A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany marked the start of the experience. Every encounter was new, fresh, experimental and playful in a traveller’s eyes. For the Taiwanese who just arrived in Germany, they observe and analyse the differences through their home experience while respecting and accepting new norms quickly since the western world has implanted its values on this immigration island for a long time.

For the Germans, the appetiser indicated the initial encounter of the eating tools and the eating style (how to eat). Functioning chopsticks as the first step demonstrated how Taiwanese eat.

Setting Every eater received a sheet of placemat paper where a chopstick holder, a pair of chopsticks, one spare sauce bowl and one bowl with a Xiaolongbao were placed on it. 2 serving boards and a tea kettle of hot broth lay in the middle of the tables for eaters to reach. On the serving boards, there were 5 spices and 3 sauces. The spices including scallion juliennes, ginger juliennes, minced garlic, mung bean noodles and cubed pork skin jelly were in different shapes and volumes. The sauces were soy sauce, white rice vinegar and chilli oil. Instruction for a series of actions to utilise chopsticks was printed on the placemat papers. Eaters followed the instruction to combine the Xiaolongbao with the spices, sauces and broth while practising their chopstick techniques.

Xiaolongbao is traditionally filled with pork and pork skin jelly. To make pork skin jelly requires cooking pigskin in water and rice wine for several hours to extract the colloid. The soup turns into gelatinous form while cooling down. Shredded pork skin jelly is mixed with minced pork as the stuffing for Xiaolongbao. When steam-cooking the Xiaolongbao, the jelly melts into soup and moistens the meat. The pork skin jelly was taken out from the stuffing as one of the spices for the eating experience. Besides the typical options for dipping sauce as garlic, ginger and scallion, mung bean noodles, on the other hand, are a popular ingredient in the variants of Xiaolongbao. Its unique appearance and texture was the reason the researcher added it to the spice selection.

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The instruction on the placemat papers aimed at introducing eaters the various functions of chopsticks. Moreover, the researcher wished to deliver a message to whom found chopsticks difficult to manage, that ‘different people use chopsticks differently as long as the methods apply to them’.

Even a Taiwanese who grew up in the chopstick culture could use chopsticks ‘incorrectly’ in traditional standard. The instruction for chopsticks included:

/tí/ to hold - Place one chopstick on the ring finger and hold it tightly between the thumb and the index finger. Put another chopstick on the middle finger and hold between the thumb and index fingers. The bottom chopstick is fixed.

Move only the upper chopstick with the middle and index fingers. Different people may have different methods. Consult or share your techniques with your neighbours.

/jiā/ to pick up - Take the preferred amount and items of spices from the serving board into the sauce bowl.

/bàn/ to blend - Add the preferred amount of sauces and broth to the sauce bowl. Stir to mix the spices with the sauces.

/bāi/ to break - Stick the chopsticks into the open hole of the dumpling and break the meat slightly open.

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/bō/ to sweep - Sweep the mixed sauce into the dumpling through the open hole.

/sāi / to fill in - Stuff the spices and sauces into the dumpling. Be careful not to break the bottom skin.

/sòng / to send in - Lift the bowl near to your mouth and send the dumpling into the mouth.

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Chopstick instruction on placemat papers Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph].

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XIAOLONGBAO

02:00 | 20 pieces stuffing 300 g minced pork with lean meat and fat 20 g ginger - minced 20 g shallot - minced 60 ml hot water 1 tsp salt a pinch of ground white pepper 2 tsp soy sauce 1 egg - whisked 1 tsp sesame oil flour dough for dumpling skins 150 g all-purpose flour 80 ml hot water tools a rolling pin a bamboo steaming basket

Xiaolongbao is a type of Chinese dumplings steamed in bamboo baskets. It has a wide variety which meat, seafood and vegetables are options for the stuffing. A typical version is with pork and pork skin jelly which melts into soup during the steaming. Pork skin jelly in this revised recipe is taken out due to the design of the eating experience. The open hole of the skin is also designed for the experience. Original Xiaolongbao appears to be a closed bag.

1. Soak minced ginger and shallot in 60 ml of hot water. When it cools down to room temperature, sieve out the ginger and shallot and save the water for later use.

2. Add salt to the pork. Mix with hand for about one minute until the pork turns sticky and thick. Add white pepper and soy sauce. Slowly add the ginger-shallot water while mixing. The pork gradually sucks up the water during the mixing process. Add the egg to the pork. Mix until the liquid is thoroughly absorbed. Add sesame oil. Stir and mix for about 5 minutes until the texture turns smooth. Cover up the pork with a plastic sheet and store in the fridge for at least one hour.

3. Prepare another container for the dough. Add hot water slowly to the flour while stirring. Knead the flour into a dough. Pull and press the dough for about 4 minutes until the texture becomes smooth. Cover the dough with a plastic sheet and rest it for at least 30 minutes.

4. Roll the dough into a long cylinder shape. Divide it into 20 equal portions.

Put the dough pieces into a bag or bowl to keep them moist.

5. Prepare a clean and broad working platform. Set the pork and the dough next to it. Sprinkle a thin layer of flour on the platform. Roll a piece of dough into a ball. Slightly flatten it. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a 10 cm diameter round skin. The edge of the skin should be thinner than the middle part.

6. Place 15 g of the stuffing in the centre of the skin. Use the index finger and the thumb of one hand to pleat the skin edge with 15 to 20 folds.

Use the thumb of the other hand to stabilise the meat in the centre while folding. Please refer to online video tutorials or skilful chefs for the folding techniques due to the complexity to describe by words. The folding decides much on whether the Xiaolongbao tastes good. It requires practice to fold the dumpling into a perfect shape. Continue the same procedure with the rest dough pieces and stuffing.

7. Prepare the bamboo steaming basket. Place on a clean cloth, or a sheet of baking paper with small holes. The cloth and paper will prevent the skin from sticking on the bamboo while the holes allow the steam to go through and distribute the heat evenly.

8. Take a pot which has the same diameter as the basket, or a wok bigger than the basket. Boil water in it. Place on the bamboo basket without touching the water. Steam for 10 minutes.

9. Remove the bamboo basket and serve. A typical dipping sauce for Xiaolongbao is the mixture of black rice vinegar, ginger juliennes and a bit of water.

10. Store the uncooked Xiaolongbao in the freezer if they are not going to be eaten immediately.

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MAIN COURSE FROM UNFAMILIAR TO FAMILIAR Concept From Unfamiliar to Familiar as the second chapter told the adaptation of Taiwanese to the German environment. Taiwanese gradually adopted the German perspective to evaluate situations, and further grew the ability to correlate and communicate to the locals within their cultural frames of reference. However, the process is reversible. The gap lying between the different mindsets became wider when the introduced norms and values contradicted to one’s original worldview. Therefore, the chapter can be named ‘from Familiar to Unfamiliar’ with its unrevealed meaning.

In an aspect of the food representation, dishes combining features of German and Taiwanese cuisine provided an overlap of experience, introducing eaters from the known (familiar) to the unknown (unfamiliar). For the German participants, the familiar ingredients, tastes and styles served as a vehicle to learn about what Taiwanese eat (what to eat) and further the cultural implications of what the food presented.

Setting Every eater had a small ceramic bowl and a 200 ml drinking glass. 2 bottles of beer, a bottle of citrus soda and rice were placed on the tables for sharing.

Food was prepared in the kitchen and served fresh to the eaters. The main course contains 6 different dishes which in the serving sequence as Braised Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens, Cucumber Salad, Stir-Fried Sausages with Scallions, Stir-Fried Asparagus with Champignon, Mapo Tofu and Runbing. Every dish incorporated elements inspired by the food familiar to Germans into Taiwanese culinary style.

The idea of Braised Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens was derived from Schweinebraten, a German dish typically made of pork and beer sauce.

Dishes with big chunk of pork meat existed in many food cultures. Siu Yuk, or Cantonese roasted pork, is a representative dish in Hong Kong characterising the crunchy skin and the unique aroma created by charcoal furnaces. In Taiwan, the similar style introduces the food preferences of different ethnic cultures. Pork belly braised with bamboo shoots is a classic in Hokkien cuisine, whereas the Hakkas flavour the pork belly with preserved vegetables.

Hakka, with the literal translation of ‘guest family’, is an ethnic group whose ancestors originated from China constantly travelled from one place to another. Most of the time, they fell behind other groups and retrieved the poor lands in the mountainous area. The hardship of moving and working in the mountains cultivated their thrifty nature. Preserved food and heavy tastes as the features in Hakka cuisine tell their stories. Food preserved in salt was easy to carry during their trips. Salty, oily and meaty dishes gave them the energy to do the farm works. As one of its subgroups arrived in Taiwan, the Hakkas rooted their culture in Taiwanese cuisine. The similarity of the food style led the German eaters to learn about the people on the island. Topics about the pluralistic immigrant society and multiple ethnic cultures in Taiwan were stirred up around the food.

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Cucumber Salad sharing the same concept as the previous dish was inspired

by Saure Gurken. Different from the spices as dill, mustard seeds and onions in the German pickled cucumbers, the use of garlic, ginger, chilli and sesame oil introduced the essential Taiwanese taste. Traditionally, cucumbers are sliced or chopped before pickling. To stress on the comparison of flavours, the researcher adopted small-sized cucumbers to mimic the look of Saure Gurken.

Both Stir-Fried Sausages with Scallions and Stir-Fried Asparagus with Champignon adopted fundamental ingredients abundantly produced in Germany while exhibiting the Taiwanese home cooking. German Bratwurst replaced traditional Taiwanese sausage. Green asparagus and mushrooms as two agricultural products in Taiwan were also not alien to the German eaters.

Mapo Tofu was introduced to confront the stereotype against tofu in Germany. Germany with a conventional meat-consuming culture had just opened up for the arising vegetarianism. Due to the lack of grounding base, vegetarians gained recipes from other food cultures such as Mediterranean, Middle-Eastern, African and East Asian cuisines. Tofu made out of soybeans contains rich protein, making it a suitable alternative to meat. However, the immature corresponding manufacturing and limited cookery options divided public opinions about this new good. While vegetarians advocated tofu, meat-eaters found it tasteless. Since tofu in Germany was identified as vegetarian food, the chance to explore its potential in meat dishes had been coloured with bias. Mapo Tofu originated from the Sichuan province of China characterises the dual hotness: one heats the tongue while the other giving the numb feel. Tofu and minced meat as two major components are seasoned with broad bean paste, ginger, garlic, white pepper and Sichuan pepper.

The dish overturns the image that tofu is mild and only for vegetarians. It also introduces the concept of the ‘balanced’ diet in the East Asian eating philosophy. The aspects of healthiness and unhealthiness are not standing on the opposite but the same balance, depending on how eaters combine ingredients in their consumption.

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Eaters wrapped runbings with their preferred ingredients.

Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph].

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The last dish Runbing is a style of spring rolls filled with several stuffing ingredients. As the traditional food for the Tomb-sweeping Day (Qingming Festival) in Taiwan, runbing is often prepared by the elderly after the families visit the ancestor’s graveyards in the early morning. Plates of various ingredients and wrappers are set in the middle of the table. Family members place their favoured ingredients on the wrappers and fold into rolls. The stuffing for runbing varies from region to region. In the north of Taiwan, pork meat coloured by red yeast rice, boiled vegetables and ground peanuts play the significant tastes. The southern style appears to be more complex.

Ingredients are stir-fried with oil and seasoned separately. Cabbage, carrot, celery, braised meat, sausage, shrimp, egg, noodles and dried tofu are all in the selection. In addition to ground peanuts, powdered sugar is another essential condiment.

A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

Runbing in the banquet was served to introduce the regional differences in Taiwan, and furthermore, the individual differences due to every runbing was prepared based on individual taste. The researcher asked the participants to fold their runbings. Before eating, they received the request to hand in their runbings to their neighbours. The seats had decided that the participants would obtain the plates from their ethnic counterparts. Eaters were requested to describe the tastes of runbings they received, and the preparers introduced their reasons for the combinations. 3 Taiwanese participants coming from different cities in Taiwan were able to recreate the tastes from their home experience. For the German participants, stuffed rolls appeared to be not an unfamiliar concept since Turkish dßrßm, Arabic shawarma, Mexican burrito, Chinese spring rolls and Vietnamese summer rolls were all the similar styles popular in Germany. Through exchanging and tasting runbings, eaters absorbed their counterparts’ memories and interpretations.

Linkages between individuals were built. Communication in this stage focused from between 2 groups to between persons.

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BRAISED PORK BELLY WITH PRESERVED MUSTARD GREENS

03:00 | for 6-people meal 500 g pork belly 2 slices of ginger 4 tbsp soy sauce 50 g preserved mustard greens 3 cloves of garlic - minced 5 g ginger - minced 2 star anises 3 bay leaves 1 tsp starch - mixed with 50 ml water marinade 1 tbsp rice wine 1 tbsp sesame oil a pinch of ground white pepper 1 tsp fine sugar tools a meat tenderiser with spikes (or a thin blade or a dart) a 500 ml bowl a steam cooker

Braised Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens is a classic dish in Hakka cuisine. Hakka, with the literal translation of ‘guest family’, is an ethnic group whose ancestors originated from China constantly migrated from one place to another. Most of the time, they fell behind other groups and retrieved the poor lands in the mountainous area. Preserved food and heavy taste as the features in Hakka cuisine tell their hardship of travelling and cultivating in the mountains. While food preserved in salt was easy to carry during their trips, dishes consisting of high salinity and oil gave them the energy to do the farm works. The cookery process consists of sophisticated techniques, including boiling, deep-frying, sauteing and steaming.

1. Boil the pork belly and the ginger slices in water for 15 minutes until the pork is thoroughly cooked.

2. Remove the pork. Use a tool with spikes to stick holes evenly and densely on the pigskin. This procedure makes the pigskin easy to operate in the following steps.

3. Colour the pork belly with soy sauce. Drain the pork and rest it until the skin turns dry. Add the soy sauce which was used for colouring to the marinade.

4. Take a small pot which is slightly bigger than the pork. Add oil to about 2 cm high from the bottom. Place the skin side down in the oil. Cover up with a lid. Heat the pot over medium heat.

5. During the deep-frying, you must press the lid tightly on the pot otherwise the oil will split. Deep-fry for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat.

Maintain the lid tightly covered until the sound quiets down.

6. Remove the pork from the oil to cool down. Now the pigskin turns golden brown with texture. In the meanwhile, soak the preserved mustard greens in water.

7. When the pork cools down, slice it into 1 cm thin portions. Place the pork slices in the marinade. Use a spoon to scoop the marinade and pour between slices. Make sure every side is coloured. Rest the pork in the marinade.

8. Drain the mustard greens. Roughly chop the mustard greens into smaller pieces.

9. Heat up a pan and add cooking oil to it. SautĂŠ the mustard greens until the aroma releases. Add garlic, ginger, star anises and bay leaves. Stirfry for one minute.

10. Add the pork marinade to the mustard greens. Add 100 ml water. Simmer for 5 minutes. Remove the star anises and bay leaves and set aside for later use.

11. Place the pork slices into the bowl. Place mustard greens on top of the pork slices and fill the void in the bowl. Place star anises and bay leaves on top of mustard greens.

12. Steam the bowl for at least one and a half hour in a steam cooker.

13. Remove the bowl from steam cooker. Sieve the sauce from the bowl to a pan. Heat the pan over low heat. Slowly add the starch water. When the sauce turns thick, turn off the heat.

14. Cover the bowl with the serving plate. Turn together the plate and the bowl over. Remove the bowl. Pour the thick sauce on the meat.

CUCUMBER SALAD

2 days | 10 pieces 10 small-sized cucumbers 1 tsp fine sugar 1 tsp salt 6 cloves of garlic - finely minced 10 g ginger - julienned 1 chilli - finely diced 2 tbsp white rice vinegar sesame oil

Cucumber Salad is a cold dish often served as an appetiser in Taiwan. The use of garlic, ginger, chilli and sesame oil introduces the essential Taiwanese flavour. Traditionally, cucumbers are sliced or chopped before pickling.

Small-sized cucumbers are adopted in this recipe for the design of the eating experience.

Press the cucumbers with the blade of a knife until they slightly break. This step helps the cucumber to absorb flavours of the marinade.

Add sugar and salt to the cucumbers. Rub and mix with hand until the sugar and salt melt. Toss garlic, ginger and chilli. Add rice vinegar and a splash of sesame oil. Marinate in the fridge for 2 days.

STIR-FRIED SAUSAGES WITH SCALLIONS

00:20 | for 6-people meal 2 Bratwurst 2 scallions - chopped into 5 cm long pieces 1 chilli - sliced 2 cloves of garlic - sliced salt ground white pepper

Scallion is a common spice used in the Taiwanese cuisine. Especially in hot-fry bistros, scallion, garlic, ginger and chilli are often used to stir-fry with meat, seafood and vegetables. Stir-fried sausages as a variant of this cooking style are a suitable appetiser for beer-drinking situations. Traditional Taiwanese sausages containing diced lean pork meat and fat are flavoured with sugar, rice wine, cinnamon and five-spice powder. This recipe replaces traditional Taiwanese sausages with Bratwurst.

Steam the sausages for 10 minutes to form the meat in shape. Slice the cooked sausages.

Add oil to a pan. Saute the sausage slices until both sides turn golden. Toss scallion, chilli and garlic. Stir-fry until the aroma releases. Adjust the taste with salt. Add a pinch of ground white pepper at the end.

STIR-FRIED ASPARAGUS WITH CHAMPIGNON

00:10 | for 6-people meal 200 g green asparagus - chopped into 5 cm long pieces 3 dried shiitake mushrooms softened in water for 30 minutes before slicing 6 champignon mushrooms sliced 3 cloves of garlic - sliced salt

Green asparagus and mushrooms are both prosperous agricultural products in Taiwan. Stir-fried asparagus with mushrooms as a common home dish may apply and combine different types of mushrooms. Shiitake, king trumpet and shimeji mushrooms are all possible options. Champignon mushrooms initially as a foreign good are also gradually adopted in Taiwanese cuisine.

SautĂŠ asparagus with cooking oil over medium heat until slightly charred.

Toss shiitake, champignon and garlic. Stir-fried for few minutes until the aroma releases. Add a pinch of salt at the end.

MAPO TOFU

00:20 | for 6-people meal 300 g soft tofu - diced into 2 cm cubes 500 g minced pork or beef 3 tbsp cooking oil 3 tbsp sesame oil 3 tsp Sichuan peppercorns 5 cloves of garlic - minced 10 g ginger - minced 3 tbsp soy sauce 3 tbsp broad bean paste 2 tsp fine sugar white pepper - freshly ground 300 ml water 1 tsp starch 2 scallions - finely diced

Mapo Tofu is a famed Sichuan dish originated in the Sichuan province of China and had developed its variant in Taiwan. 2 main components tofu and minced meat are flavoured with ginger, garlic, scallion, broad bean paste, white pepper and extracted Sichuan pepper oil. Mapo Tofu characterises its double layers of hotness: heating spiciness created by chillis and numbing spiciness by Sichuan peppercorns.

Add cooking oil and sesame oil to a pan. SautĂŠ Sichuan peppercorns over low heat for 3 to 5 minutes until the aroma releases. Remove the peppercorns while leaving the oil.

Turn to medium heat. Toss the minced meat and fry until medium well. Add garlic and ginger. Stir-fry until fragrant. Add soy sauce, broad bean paste, sugar and ground white pepper. Mix with the meat. Add 300 ml water.

When the water boils, turn to low heat. Gently add in tofu. Stir softly without breaking tofu. Cover up with a lid and let it simmer for 10 minutes.

Uncover the lid. Mix starch with about 50 ml water. Slowly add the starch water to the soup. Gently stir to mix. When the soup becomes thick, turn off the heat.

Sprinkle the scallions before serving.

RUNBING

01:00 | 10 portions batter for wrappers 130 g high-gluten flour 250 ml water a pinch of salt 1 tbsp cooking oil stuffing a half of a tipped cabbage julienned 2 carrots - peeled and julienned 2 stalks of celery - diced 2 pieces of dried tofu - sliced 2 eggs - whisked shrimps without shells 100 g egg noodles ground peanuts powdered sugar

Runbing is a style of spring rolls filled with diverse stuffing ingredients. As the traditional food for the Tomb-sweeping Day in Taiwan, runbing is often prepared by the elderly after the families visit the ancestor’s graveyards in the early morning. Plates of various ingredients and wrappers are set in the middle of the table. Family members place their favoured ingredients on the wrappers and fold into rolls. The stuffing for runbing varies from region to region. In the north of Taiwan, pork meat coloured by red yeast rice, boiled vegetables and ground peanuts play the significant tastes. The southern style appears to be more complex. Ingredients are stir-fried with oil and seasoned separately. Cabbage, carrot, celery, braised meat, sausage, shrimp, egg, noodles and dried tofu are all in the selection. In addition to peanuts, sugar is another fundamental condiment. This recipe introduces the traditional setting in the southern regions of Taiwan.

1. Mix the batter. Cover up with a lid and rest it for one hour.

2. Heat a pan over low heat. Apply a thin layer of oil on the surface.

3. Add about 3 tbsp batter. Whirl the batter with a spatula into 20 cm diameter round. The technique is similar to crepes.

4. When the bottom looses from the pan, carefully remove the wrapper. The wrapper should remain soft and thin.

5. Continue the same procedure for the rest batter. Cover up the wrappers with a sheet of plastic wrap and store in the fridge if they are for later use.

6. Prepare cabbage, carrots and celery separately but with the same method. Add a bit of oil to a pan and stir-fry until softened. Add a pinch of salt at the end.

7. Stir-fry dried tofu without oil until the aroma releases.

8. Add 2 tsp of cooking oil to the pan. Pour in the eggs and whirl it into the shape of disc. When the top side turns solid, remove the egg pancake and slice it into strips.

9. Boil a pot of water. Cook the shrimps in boiling water until pink. Remove and rinse under cold running water. Drain and set aside.

10. Cook the noodles in boiling water until softened. Drain and set aside.

11. Place all cooked ingredients on plates. Serve with ground peanuts and powdered sugar.

CITRUS SODA

00:05 | 1 l 150 g citrus - chopped into half a half of a lemon 2 tbsp honey 100 ml hot water 1 l sparkling water

Citrus-lemon juice as a traditional Taiwanese drink is believed to have the medical effect on curing coughing. Iced citrus-lemon juice is also a popular drink in summer. This revised recipe is inspired by German Schrole and applies sparkling water.

Squizz the citrus and lemon juice into a bottle. Toss in the citrus. Melt honey in hot water and add to the bottle. Add sparkling water.

A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

Eaters passed runbings to their neighbours and tasted.

Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph].

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DESSERT FEELING AT HOME Concept Feeling at Home as the last chapter of the banquet told the change of mental states from feeling alien to feeling at home of the Taiwanese in Germany. In the process of accepting new norms, adapting to new cultural perspectives and facing the internal conflict of worldviews, a Taiwanese sought for belongingness and consolation. The feeling of ‘home’ has many interpretations as feeling familiar, soothing, accepted or like the place one was raised, which might emerge through encounters with objects, people and events, or recalls of memories. Food as an embodiment of one’s association with home allowed both Taiwanese and Germans to find the commonness by empathising. This chapter revealed the meanings of food by asking why we eat (why to eat).

Setting One week before the banquet, every participant had received a task from the researcher to bring one dessert related to ‘home’. The definition of home was open to interpretation. No limitation of the food source and category was given, in other words, the dessert could be sweet or salty, solid or liquid, selfmade or purchased. Nevertheless, the participants might take the time factor into consideration since the dessert would be served after main courses.

Desserts brought by the participants were set in the middle of the tables.

Eaters pointed at the item they wished to taste and distributed around. In the meanwhile, the food bringer shared the correlation of the food to his or her feeling of home. Through story-telling and the taste of home, eaters discovered their similarity which connected between one another.

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Every participant brought one dessert to the banquet.

Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph].

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Discussion about impressions on dining table Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph]

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5.2 OBSERVATION AND FEEDBACK

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PARTICIPANTS

(From top left to bottom right) Yu Chun, Chih Hung, Chia En, Moritz, Thomas, Benjamin Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph].

The participating group consisted of 3 Taiwanese and 3 Germans. 3 Taiwanese were Yu Chun Chen-Kühnert, Chih Hung Lin and Chia En Lin. Yu Chun worked as a design freelancer in Germany. She lived near to Würzburg with her husband Moritz who also participated in the banquet. Yu Chun had met the researcher once in a Taiwanese meet-up event and been invited to the banquet. Both of them graduated from the same design college (Shih Chien University) in Taiwan but had no contact with each other before the meeting. Chih Hung was working on his PhD program in Erlangen. His major was neuroscience, focusing on the study of depression. Chia En as a PhD student in philosophy had lived in Würzburg for 5 years. Both of them learned the banquet from the researcher’s posts in online Taiwanese groups. All the Taiwanese including the researcher came from different cities in Taiwan. Yu Chun and Chia En were from Yunlin and Taipei, the northern cities, whereas the researcher and Chih Hung were from Tainan and Pingtung, the cities lying in the south.

3 Germans were Moritz Kühnert, Benjamin Hahn and Thomas Mühlbauer.

Moritz and Yu Chun were married couples. They met each other when Moritz studied international business as an exchange student at Shih Chien University. He was also the only German participant who had been to Taiwan.

Benjamin worked as a DJ in Würzburg. He lived in the Dencklerblock, same as the researcher. However, they had not known each other before the banquet. Thomas was the researcher’s flatmate. He was a college student in social work and had joined several eating events in the previous research. In his statement, he could not learn about ethnic culture through food, merely the style of eating. However, he requested to participate the banquet.

Except for Yu Chun and Moritz, the participants had had no personal relationship with one another.

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OBSERVATION

before the banquet The general ambience during the banquet was casual and natural. Before the banquet had started, the seated guests autonomously formed talking subjects while the researcher was preparing in the kitchen. When the host gave the introduction to the event, the participants had exchanged much information about personal backgrounds. The atmosphere was heated up by constant jokes and laughter. Participants familiarised with one another in a flash without any guidance. 3 snacks were consumed mainly by the Taiwanese and Moritz. The tea had not been touched until the host instructed the people to pour hot water into teacups. The reason might be because the tea set had been reassembled in accordance with the experience design. Tea leaves were distributed in individual cups instead of brew in the tea kettle, which appeared to be unusual to both parties. appetiser The instructions on the placemat papers caught the participants’ attention.

Participants read through it carefully and affirmed their understanding of the text with the neighbours. But not until the bowls and chopsticks were placed on the responding sites, the reading order of the instructions from right to left confused the Germans since they were used to read from left to right. Regarding the sentence ‘different people may have different methods (of holding chopsticks)’, the Taiwanese demonstrated their ways of holding chopsticks which were different from each other. Moritz, the only attending German who had been to Taiwan, shared his experience of learning to eat with chopsticks.

People were amazed by the setting on the serving boards. Ingredients were analysed through their appearance and smell. Many had assumed the jelly cubes were made out of konjac. When the researcher revealed its component of pigskin, aversion appeared on Moritz’s face. Nevertheless, after learning that pork skin jelly was necessary for creating the juice in Xiaolongbao, participants did not hesitate to taste it. Although most of them tried to abide by the instructions, many ended up making noodle soup in their sauce bowls.

Following up Benjamin’s curiosity of the stuffing which contained half lean meat and half fat, topics about the consuming habits of Germans were raised up. Animal parts which might revolt to Germans were considered as delicacies for the Taiwanese. The chewy texture of animal organs was what Moritz and Thomas found unpleasant.

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impressions The participants were requested to write down their impressions of their counterparts’ ethnicity on the note papers. People took time to structure their thoughts and sentences while continuing to chat and joke around. Yu Chun could not recall herself before coming to Germany. Moritz believed that at the time they met, the only thing she connected to Germany was the car brands.

The note papers were collected in a bowl. Participants drew a note paper each time and shared what was written.

Germans’ 3 impressions about Taiwan Thomas 1. It is an island 2. Taiwanese do not like China 3. Street food Thomas framed his impression of Taiwan from his contacts with the researcher and his flatmate. Taiwan-China relations were often the topic in the researcher’s talks about Taiwan, whereas its street food culture was frequently brought up by the flatmate after returning from his exchange study in Taiwan.

Benjamin 1. Great diversity but still structured 2. Ritualistic approach to everyday life 3. Island with economic power but political limitation Benjamin had studied Indian culture in college. The diverse culture in Indian society was borrowed by Benjamin to describe his general impression of Asia. He had noticed the merge of multiple cultures appeared in Asian food.

Benjamin derived his second point from his Indian experience as well. The acknowledgement of the economic and political state of Taiwan was derived from news media. Following Benjamin’s second and third points, discussions about the religion and belief system in Taiwan, as well as how the political isolation led to Taiwan’s unique economic body were stirred up. Moritz whose expertise was in international business took over to explain.

Moritz 1. Humble and happy 2. Kind and friendly 3. Naive Moritz’s descriptions of the Taiwanese were not discussed on the table due to the extension of other talking subjects and time restriction.

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Taiwanese impressions of Germany before and after arriving in Germany Yu Chun • Before: Cars. I have no idea!

• After: Germany is like my second home.

Coming to Germany had changed Yu Chun’s stereotypes of the people.

Punctuality as the virtue to describe Germans did not convince Yu Chun. She claimed that she had never encountered a German who was as punctual as her. Overall, she felt Germany was a friendly place for foreigners to live.

Because of the family bounded by her marriage and the effort Germans cultivated in their houses, Yu Chun gained the home feel during her stay.

‘Moritz’s family teaches me how to have a different definition in terms of home,’ said by Yu Chun.

She also brought up the bureaucracy and the complicated insurance system as the negative side of her experience. Since Yu Chun had started to work, she swam in anxiety for the money she had to invest in retiree life. Thomas agreed that the German insurance companies had an effective way to make people uneasy.

Chih Hung • Before: Germany has two famous car companies.

• After: Germany is kind to foreigners.

Chih Hung had known Mercedes-Benz and BMW before coming to Germany.

Except for these 2 brands, Audi, Volkswagen and Porsche known to him were not connected to Germany. Moreover, he had believed that Porsche was made in Italy. Chih Hung experienced his second statement through an accident. He gained helps from passersby when he fell from bicycle.

Chia En • Before: Germany has many great writers.

• After: Germany is a very versatile place with open-minded people.

Chia En had learned about Europe through literature, films and music. His acknowledgement of the European cultural heritage was altered by seeing the versatile facets of modern Germany after arriving.

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Thomas was curious about whether German figures were included in Taiwanese school education. In his experience, contrary to the knowledge Taiwanese had about historical characters and incidents in Europe, Germans had learned very little about Asia from their textbooks, whether in aspects of its history, culture, politics, economics or cross-national relations. Chia En suggested this phenomenon was in light of the dominance of western cultures over global matters in the 20th century, turning it into a key study in Asia.

The content of German history courses focused on the modern era from the 19th century to World War II, as the German participants introduced.

Benjamin perceived it as a process of searching for collective identity. The history provided the context to look into the arising extreme right-wings which, believed by Benjamin, stemmed from the identity crisis Germans were facing. Following up the topics, political conflicts between Taiwan and China were brought up. Moritz had spotted the drastic transformation of the political environment in Taiwan. The Sunflower Movement was considered as a breaking point for the rising of Taiwanese’ civic consciousness.

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main course Subjects were built upon the food whenever a new dish was served. When the first dish Braised Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens was served, the Hakka culture in Taiwan and the origin of the Hakka ethnicity were addressed by the Taiwanese. The pork belly drew out the discussion about the use of animal organs in cookery. The food style reminded the German participants of similar Bavarian dishes. Benjamin recalled his grandparents’ little farm and introduced the home-butcher tradition in the past time. Yu Chun mentioned that she would had never eaten the fat part of the pork belly in Taiwan, but she would consume everything because it was the taste of home. Moritz said that he had more rice than potatoes after marrying Yu Chun.

In the meanwhile, Thomas was murmuring that it was impossible to eat the pork slices with chopsticks. He also questioned why there were no individual plates. After learning that it was the conventional way to eat with chopsticks and bowls, Thomas stopped complaining and observed how others ate.

However, soon after, he gave up on chopsticks and brought a fork from the kitchen.

The concept of sharing food laying under the Taiwanese eating culture rarely appeared in Germany. By Benjamin, plates sharing was associated with poverty in German mindsets, while in Moritz’s explanation, Germans prefered to have individual plates without compromising their choices by sharing with others.

2 stir-fried dishes introduced the home-cooking style in Taiwan. German participants were amused by the Bratwurst in the dish. Taiwanese eating etiquette became the core subject on the table. Yu Chun and Chih Hung mentioned that eating often started when the elderly started to eat. There were no phrases to wish eaters good appetites.

2 spicy dishes, Stir-Fried Sausages with Scallions and Mapo Tofu showcased the distinct mouthfeels of spiciness. While chillies heated eaters’ mouths, Sichuan peppercorns numbed their tongues. The layers of spiciness interpreted by Benjamin as the different body reaction after consuming spicy food. Apart from the spiciness, tofu employed in whether meat dishes, vegetarian dishes, main meals or snacks in Taiwanese cuisine became a subject to introduce by the Taiwanese participants when Mapo Tofu was brought to the tables.

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In the session of folding runbings, most participants showed no clues while Chih Hung appeared to be skilful. Runbing as a conventional food for Tombsweeping Day is maintained in southern Taiwan where Chih Hung and the researcher’s hometowns situate at. Through Yu Chun, the researcher learned that this tradition had been lost in the northern areas. Instead, runbing was preserved in the form of street food prepared by vendors. Folding runbing as a linkage to southerners’ childhood memory of Tomb-sweeping Day was merely a street food option for the northerners. However, southern regions had developed into subgroups of own unique combination. Chih Hung indicated that some stuffing ingredients were unusual to him, suggesting that among southern regions, recipes for the same food varied. Except for Chih Hung, the participants struggled with the fragile wrappers. Behaviours of questioning, prying on and copying one another were suspended by the researcher before exchanging.

Runbing revealed the regional difference, whereas exchanging plates allowed eaters to learn their counterparts’ tastes and eating habits. Participants were shocked and burst into laughter when they found out the real aim of the dish. Some just noticed the seat arrangement was designed. The German participants joked about their runbings should be deep-fried to demonstrate the general Germans’ preference towards Asian food, which addressed their discussion at the previous time that Asian food in Germany failed to present its diversity. Thomas’ runbing was folded in half. By his words, it was inspired

by Maultaschen, a speciality in Swabia. Yu Chun receiving his runbing found it impossible to eat with hands. The stuffing was a mixture of shrimps, eggs, noodles and peanuts which claimed by Thomas might be the most appealing ingredients to the Germans. Others had applied a variety of vegetables and peanuts in their runbings, but only Chih Hung and Chia En flavoured with sugar. Chih Hung’s runbing following the southern style was given to Benjamin. The blending of salty and sweet flavours enlightened Benjamin which he had never experienced in German food.

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stereotypes Questions of stereotypes had drawn out discussions about China since Eastasians were often mistaken as Chinese in Germany. Yu Chun had many experiences that people greeted her assuming her as Chinese. If they did not receive responses, they switched the greeting words or gestures to Japanese or Thai. Moritz pointed out that several years ago, Germans mainly perceived Eastasian faces as Japanese, whereas today, an Eastasian face was more likely to be identified as Chinese. Chih Hung found this presumption on a firm base since, in Erlangen, his current place of living, 90 percent of the Eastasian residents were from China. By speaking of China, subjects about the Chinese mindsets and the surveillance network over speech and sensitive areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang blossomed.

The German participants agreed that stereotypes against Germans were not far away from the reality. However, representing the German identity with the cultural heritage derived from the Bavaria state was what irritated some Germans. Benjamin introduced how this identity was constructed by a former German king to advocate inland cohesion. It was, however, manipulated as an excuse for conservative policy-making of the present parties.

Inconvenience encountered in the daily life of the Taiwanese in Germany emerged from the friction of cultural perspectives, for instance, efficiency stood hand in hand with bureaucracy in the German context. Germans were rigid on following plans step by step while Taiwanese tended to reach their goals by pacing through the process swiftly. The German ‘efficiency’ for a Taiwanese was slow and inflexible. On the other hand, the Taiwanese ‘efficiency’ seemed to be rash leading to misuse of working hours and low-wedged labours. The incoherent definitions formed incomplete communication. Each side could not understand the other side before terms were defined.

Chia En shared a personal case indicating the prejudice he had encountered.

Chia En practised Taiji, an internal martial art that focused on the coordination of the body. Taiji stressed on defence instead of fight. The movements in Taiji appeared to be soft which contradicted to the image of kung fu introduced to the west. In his experience, Germans were curious about his practice but expressed less interest in the in-depth information.

Most of the encounters maintained their conceptions of martial art on a superficial level. In other words, they liked to know what they had already known. The German kung fu magazines seen by Chia En as ‘catering to the taste of the viewers’. However, Chia En believed it lay on the different mindsets shaped by individual’s cultural experience.

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The researcher brought up the last question to learn if participants could connect with other ethnic groups in their environment. She implied that it was hard for her to build relationships with the locals, which was agreed by Yu Chun even she married a German. Moritz was surprised by her statement.

In his observation, Taiwanese tended to carry their bond of home to wherever they travelled. That caused the difficulties to link with others outside the Taiwanese groups. The researcher believed that the division of the two ethnic groups originated from their distinct styles of living and mentality.

Socialisation and relationships in these two cultures took in different forms through different media, providing only a few common zones to correlate. dessert All desserts brought by the participants were the food related to their childhood memories and existing in their places of origin. Moritz, Thomas and Yu Chun made the desserts by themselves. Benjamin, Chia En and Chih Hung purchased the desserts from either local bakery or Asian shops. Through the desserts, participants shared their childhood memories and family traditions, as well as learned the popular snacks in their counterparts’ homelands. Even the food varied, it served as a vehicle transmitting the similar perceptions of home which could be empathised by every participant.

The banquet had already lasted for 5 hours when people had the desserts.

Many turned tired at the session of dessert. But not until the researcher mentioned the time, some seemed not aware that it had been late. auf wiedersehen Participants followed the researcher’s instruction to write their wishes in their native languages on sky lantern origamis and cover them on lit candles.

The researcher and the assistant also wrote down their wishes. Thomas did not want to share something personal. Therefore, he only wrote ‘Geld (money)‘. Others took more time to put on their thoughts. Moritz wished for a good life without stress. Chia En wished everything good. Chih Hung, Yu Chun and Benjamin filled the 4 sides of the lanterns. Chih Hung wished for health, happiness, a good relationship and graduating soon. Yu Chun prayed for health, peace, family and Taiwan. Benjamin wrote that he wished to get a ticket for a concert, spend more time with his loved one and tasted more Taiwanese food in the future.

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FEEDBACK

Chen-Kühnert, Y. (2018).

Feedback.

Lin, C. (2018). Feedback.

Lin, C. (2018). Feedback.

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Yu Chun: Sharing the living experience, history and culture from Taiwan is easier if you have some tasty local food as support aids. It was also very interesting to see the responses from the German guests who had ever tried ‘REAL’ Asian food first time in their lives, making me rethink about the food culture we have in Taiwan.

Chih Hung: Interesting. I learned some Taiwan images from Germans, even though they might implant the general Asia images (e.g. India) on Taiwan.

Chia En: The food is just great which brought us more memory than identity. In an eating event, we are inclined to see the common things among us rather than differences.

A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany

Thomas: My most important takeaway is how easy it becomes to have conversations and a good time with strangers if food is involved. It gives you a common basis for discussion, whether it is how hungry you are, what it tastes like, or where it comes from. Of course, the topic in a constellation like this will end up being Taiwan, but even with our ‘tasks’ it never felt forced. I don’t know if the food brought me any closer to Taiwanese culture, but the conversation that resulted because of it and the people in it certainly did.

Benjamin: I found the conversations with the other participants inspiring because there were some new topics and perspectives opened up. Not only to learn about Taiwanese history and cultural matters but also to look at your own history and politics in a different perspective while explaining it to a nongerman.

Moritz: Sharing food is always a good way to meet new people. However, this kind of framework is rare.

To sit with strangers and start conversations with food, a common topic everybody can contribute.

Most of the food was prepared by the host.

However, every person brought some memorable ingredients for this special dinner. The stories behind made the most sense and sometimes have been of personal quality, which made the group become from familiar to intimate fast.

Mühlbauer, T. (2018). Feedback.

Hahn, B. (2018). Feedback.

Kühnert, M. (2018). Feedback.

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5.3 SUMMARY

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Room for improvement 1. The guests arrived at the banquet starving. The appetiser with instructions seemed not a wise idea for the hungry people. However, it was somewhat of an icebreaker providing chances for the eaters to interact with their neighbours.

2. The banquet had lasted beyond the scheduled time due to the miscalculation of the workload and the researcher’s ability of multitasking.

The guests turned weary quickly after the main course. The duration could be controlled under 4 hours.

3. The participants were not restricted by any rule according to the idea that every occurrence in the eating process served as a potential channel of cross-cultural communication.

Cultural norms and values were uncovered through the designed settings, food, objects, words, behaviours and interaction between eaters. However, a minor rule kit might enhance the experience. Due to the limited working space and the insufficient assistance, whenever a participant entered the kitchen or requested additionally, it caused the situation chaotic due to the tight hands of both the host and the assistant. In the future conduct, a thorough guide of the interior facilities should be given before the eating starts. The guests should be prohibited to enter the working area.

Requests for things on the dining tables should be fulfilled by the host and the service instead of by the guests themselves..

4. Banquets in this format could get more helping hands. The researcher was overwhelmed by switching roles in cooking and hosting. A team of 4 including one chef, one host, one service and one photographer (if documentation is required) would maintain the process on track.

Therefore, the host would join the guests and react to the situations. On the other side, the banquet could take in another format which no host would be present, and guests would lead. Moritz had suggested in his feedback that ‘these events have the potential to become a business model in terms of helping people to meet others. The cultural diversity is the spicy ingredient, “das Salz in der Suppe”’, which he addressed to the meetups for singles.

Fruitful conversations The general atmosphere during the whole banquet was unwinding. Without any instruction from the host, the guests familiarised with each other swiftly by themselves. The room was filled with constant laughter. Eaters’ background opened up gates to learn the environment they were situated. It provided scope for both sides to retrieve insights of another cultural context. Talking subjects opened up around and upon the food served. Food and eating tools led the taste experience, while the composition of them drew out topics of the represented ethnic culture. Discussions about tradition, history, politics, economics and mindsets were stirred up. The session of impression and stereotype catalysed in-depth conversations.

The seat arrangement might play a crucial role in this eating design. Eaters had an overview to observe others as well as lent hands when their neighbours required guidance. Due to the familiarity with the eating formats, Taiwanese participants autonomously took the active positions instructing and explaining to their German counterparts. Conversations stayed concentrated among 6 guests. The group was only separately in the smoke break, which happened 3 Germans smoked and 3 Taiwanese were non-smokers. When the group divided, native languages were used in subgroup chats.

All 6 participants mentioned that food had driven them to attend the banquet. The fruitful results in terms of broadening visions for some were unexpected. Through the banquet and the previous research, the researcher discovered that the impact of extending or reshaping one’s worldview stressed on the German participants who had newly encountered Taiwanese cuisine. For Taiwanese and the Germans who had been in Taiwan, the food reinforced or awakened their memories. Moreover, the Taiwanese retrieved the connection with home through food. While a German might eat because of hunger, a Taiwanese in Germany consumed to obtain consolation from home tastes.

Overall, there is room for improvements regarding the organising aspect. Nevertheless, the eating experience design had no doubt established a model catalysing effective cross-cultural communication.

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Sky lantern origamis with written wishes were covered on candles.

Yau, L. (2018). A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany. [photograph]

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6.0 CONCLUSION

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Conclusion

From the previous research, the functions of food in communication has been thoroughly analysed in various aspects. Food is a language affecting how we think and behave. It further serves as a vehicle delivering who we are. Through the food we choose, we identify our places and our distance to others. In ethnic eating experience, ethnic food provides scope to look into the values and beliefs carried by the ethnicity. Eaters are capable of grasping the messages behind the food representations. Design of an eating experience catalyses empathy and understanding among different cultural groups. The following provides the collection of insights gained from this study.

Food as attention drawer Food serves as an easy entry allowing eaters to approach the issues and messages carried by it. The innate desire to have good food draws people’s interest in participating in experiments and accepting rules introduced in the eating context. When food becomes the eye-catcher, eaters tend to neglect uncomfortable factors, such as eating with strangers or applying unfamiliar tools to eat. As soon as the curiosity is raised, eaters step into the realm of communication which can be carried out in the process of preparation, cookery and consumption.

Food as creative tool Food can be utilised as a creative tool to express topics that are seen as taboos to discuss openly. In the project STIR UP!, participants transformed their stories related to sex and sexuality into dishes. The preparation and cooking process facilitated self-dialogues, whereas the presentation and eating led other eaters to acknowledge the stories of the food preparers. The messages can be conveyed through the design of sight, sound, smell, taste as well as touch of the food and consumption while eaters absorb the concepts through their sensory properties. Food as a language has the ability to utter the abstract perceptions which may be difficult to describe by words.

Food as conversation catalyser In many cultures, daily eating is associated with natural, unwinding atmosphere. The involvement of food reduces people’s anxiety and defence towards alien situations and companions. When encountering new food, talking subjects can be built effortlessly around and upon the food. In cultures where sharing food is a custom, eating becomes interactive and communicative. By considering the portion taken and left in common plates, eaters care for each other instead of focusing on their own plates.

The interaction between eaters becomes frequent on the dining table when sharing food is required. Every eye contact occurs during food picking provides chances for eaters to open a conversation. After the Taiwanese eating events, many German participants in their interviews mentioned that they had rarely eaten with strangers. However, eating together as well as sharing food shortened the distance and catalysed intimacy between eaters.

This result happened autonomously without guidance and force.

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Food as memory carrier Food is a responsible carrier of our memories. Memories associated with food experience are retained by the sensory properties in our bodies and brains. A familiar smell or taste triggers eaters’ emotions which awaken their linked moments in life. In the interviews with the Taiwanese in Germany, many retrieved the feelings of home or recalled the scenes with their loved ones through flavours that were used in Taiwanese food. For the German participants who had been to Taiwan, the food accelerated recollections of the scattered pieces in memories related to their journey in Taiwan.

Reversely, one could pursue the familiar feel by consuming a particular food or reconstruct a specific eating scenario.

Food as cross-cultural communication An ethnic eating experience visualises the ethnic culture. It has the capability to extend eaters’ worldviews and overturn their mindsets. In the observation of the 6 eating events and the outcome banquet, the researcher identified that the cultural implications of ethnic food could be grasped through elements in an eating experience. These elements include the food, the food presentation, the eating tools, the eating settings, the eating companions, the eating behaviours, the interaction between eaters and the conversations on the dining table. Eaters adjust their behaving according to the eating context.

Cultural mediators who have experienced or have knowledge about the two cultures that stand at the two ends of the cross-cultural communication process are capable of translating and delivering the meanings of behaviours, words and objects mutually towards the senders and the receivers’ side.

By mimicking and confirming their eating behaviours from each other, the cultural mediators and the cultural senders who represent the ethnicity of the food, eaters adopt the new eating protocols and gradually transform into cultural mediators themselves, assisting other eaters to adapt to the eating settings. Elements that overlap with eaters’ fields of experience, which can be the similar features of theirs and others’ ethnic cuisines, serve as a channel for cross-cultural communication, leading eaters to jump out from their cultural reference, from what they have known to the unknown.

Food as self-dialogue In ethnic eating, the communication process does not occur merely between 2 ethnicities but also in the eaters. By comparing the new food to the home food, eaters measure the distance and perceive the differences between theirs and the other cultures while acknowledging their standpoints. Eaters seek to explain the novel bodily perceptions. These explanations grow into individual meanings. New cultural experience takes in the form of food catalyses self-dialogues and self-learning. Encountering new food generates an internal communication process in the eaters, in other words, meanings to oneself.

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Eating experience design enhances communication Considering all the points mentioned, design of the elements in eating experience could enhance communication. Effective and in-depth conversations occur when abundant overlaps of eaters’ fields of experience are provided. An equal amount of eating attendants from 2 ethnicities, by proper seat arrangement, provided an overview for both parties to observe their counterparts’ behaviours and interaction. Learning about their eating companions’ background lead to the learning of another cultural context.

New eating tools may serve as an icebreaker that requires eaters to ask for help or lend a hand. The party of cultural senders representing the ethnicity of the food may actively jump into the hosting role, instruct the other side how to eat and feed them the relevant information. Talking subjects can be opened up around and upon the new food served. Exchanging individual plates allows eaters to acknowledge the individuals in groups through the different taste preferences, and further recognise the individual difference in one ethnicity.

Through food stories that connect to home, eaters can empathise their counterparts. Experiencing new things from another culture extends eaters’ worldviews. When explaining their cultures to the counterparts, eaters define their culture and identify their places of standing. Eating experience design can construct an environment that not only catalyses cross-cultural communication but meanings to oneself.

Food is a means of communication everyone can access, engage and offer. By properly designing the eating settings and environments, food can transmit messages and catalyse profound communication between eaters. This exchange through food happens between individuals, groups and in persons.

Realising the power of food communication uncovers a path towards intercultural understanding and empathy.

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AFTERWORD

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Afterword

After years in Germany, I hold a complex emotion towards this land. Germany provides me room to think, yet it also makes me realise the obstacles lying in between our thinkings. As a foreigner, I am continually reminded of my ethnicity and the identity confusion caused by the lasting controversy between Taiwan and China, which is a ghost never stops following every person born on the island of Formosa. The internal conflict evolves when I situate in an environment where I am seen more as a cultural representation than as a person. I often struggle to explain, at the same time, question my identification of ‘culture’. Culture is a dynamic form that no written or spoken languages can do the accurate translation. I find no definition of Taiwan as I never find words to describe Germany. However, food links me to the outside world. It visualises those stories of the people who prepare, cook and eat.

Following their steps of food, I transfer their minds into mine. Food opens a channel I perceive and utter. Therefore, I wish to deliver this acquisition to others.

I hereby express my gratitude to whom join me in this conversation, and my appreciation to Prof. Laubersheimer and Prof. Großhans, for your trust and support.

2018.6.19 Würzburg

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Appendix

APPENDIX

Descriptions Pizza non Pizza Simona Mihăilă (Pizza Romania) Luca Tóth (Pizza Hungary) Lesia Nahorniak (Pizza Ukraine) Dominik Hezinger (Pizza Germany) Ziad Bou Assi (Pizza Lebanon) Xiao Fei Wang (Pizza China) Yen Ju Chen (Pizza Taiwan) Louise Chih Yan Yau (Pizza Hong Kong) Jonas Bonas (Pizza Nepal) Helene Niederfeilner (Pizza Bolivia) Participants STIR UP! KISD FoodLab Herbert Heitmann Arraes Miguel Lobato Rebecca Bäumer Rui Han Santiago Echeverry Gonzalez Shi Qui Zhang STIR UP! Freiraum Würzburg Charlotte Sänger Edward Garcia Inès Hinze Garscia Jonas Lengsfeld Käthe Hirsch Lisa Gerolt Mona Weichenrieder Sarah Merker Saraina Weigand Eating 1: Hot Fry Dominik Hezinger Thomas Mühlbauer Eating 2: Vegetarianism Alba Hipp Dominik Hezinger Jonas Bonas Lisa Raimund Thomas Mühlbauer Eating 3: Fish and Seafood Dominik Hezinger Franziska Jannsen Jonas Bittner Thomas Mühlbauer Eating 4: Breakfast Dominik Hezinger Johanna Rafalski

Philipp Hoffmann Thomas Mühlbauer Eating 5: Noodles Dominik Hezinger Johanna Westermann Patrycja Flia Saraina Weigand Eating 6: Hot Pot Antonia Heinrich Charlotte Sänger Dominik Hezinger Helene Niederfeilner Noemi Böcker A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany Benjamin Hahn Chia En Lin Chih Hung Lin Moritz Kühnert Thomas Mühlbauer Yun Chun Chen-Kühnert Interviews Taiwan to Germans (2017) Thomas Mühlbauer (Eating 1-Pre: 6.2, Ref: 6.30.

Eating 2-7.10) Dominik Hezinger (Pre: 6.4, Ref: 6.26) Lisa Raimund (Pre: 7.3, Ref: 7.5) Jonas Bonas (Pre: 7.4, Ref: 7.5) Alba Hipp (7.7) Jonas Bittner (Pre: 7.4, Ref: 8.4) Johanna Rafalski (7.16) Saraina Weigand (Pre: 7.18, Ref: 7.19) Charlotte Sänger (Pre: 7.27, Ref: 7.29) Antonia Heinrich (Pre: 7.27, Ref: 7.29) Helene Niederfeilner (Pre: 7.27, Ref: 8.8) Noemi Böcker (7.29) Patrycja Fila (8.2) Franziska Jannsen (8.9) Germany to Taiwanese (2017) Yu Min Tsai (8.23) Yue Fu (8.24, 9.6) Po Chiao Fang (9.4) Photographers Hsun Hung Yu Yang (STIR UP! KISD FoodLab) Dominik Hezinger (STIR UP! Freiraum Würzburg) Louise Chih Yan Yau (A Food Journey from Taiwan to Germany) Yen Ju Chen (Recipes) 303