The Foodways of Monsoon Asia

“Food is a mirror that reflects culture,” wrote the anthropologist Naomichi Ishige. What we eat carries the climate and the history of a place, and the values of the people living in it. Eating is not simply the taking in of nutrients; it is a distillation of the knowledge a species built up in order to survive where it found itself.

The stage for Tea Gong Academy is monsoon Asia — the wide belt running from India in the west to Japan in the east, from the Tibetan plateau in the north to Indonesia in the south. Nearly all of the world’s major tea-producing areas lie inside it.

These five lessons lay down four layers in turn: the shifting forms of agriculture, the rules of eating imposed by states and religions, the idea of food as medicine, and the cooking techniques handed down since antiquity.