The lunisolar calendar does not care about your schedule. It marks time by what the earth is doing, not by what you have planned, and the Chinese culinary tradition that follows it treats each season’s foods as medicine, celebration, and instruction in a single bite.
Megan Zhang grew up in the US eating her parents’ home-cooked meals without understanding the system behind them. It was only later, as a journalist travelling across China — from the fiery kitchens of Chongqing to the soothing broths of Guangdong — that she recognised her childhood dinners as part of an intricate philosophy of seasonal eating rooted in traditional Chinese medicine.
Eating with the Sun braids memoir, cultural history, and nutritional philosophy into something that reads like Fuchsia Dunlop’s sense of place married to Tamar Adler’s sense of rhythm. The heart of the book is the pandemic homecoming — cooking alongside her parents again, this time seeing the calendar in the food.
A book for the long turn from winter into spring, when you can feel the season shifting and want to eat accordingly but cannot quite articulate why.
