Taiwan's food culture

Comment on "Taiwan's food culture"

July 21, 2011

Taiwan has diversified and complex food culture which rooted in its history and geography. Because of the ethnic variety, there are many different cultures in Taiwan. Even though I have lived in Taiwan more than two years, I have never look at its food culture in this way before. I haven’t thought that complexity of Taiwanese history and cultural diversity is correlated each other.

I have often told my friends that I love “Taiwanese food” because they are all so delicious. However, I have never thought about the origins of each one of them. When I looked back the days when I was still in Taiwan, I remembered that many of my favorite restaurants had some names of places such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, Hainan, Jiangsu, Yunnan, Shanghai and also HongKong. They were all similar for me, but some dishes were different from foods that I have eaten near my house in Taiwan, which were mostly in some restaurants in Shida night market area.

Based on the idea of diversity, I realized that foods in Taiwan are truly influenced from other countries such as Thai, Vietnam, Spain, France, Japan, Mexico etc. However, as for Japanese food, (because I cannot tell any differences between the down-to-earth foods in those countries and in Taiwan’s, I’m going to only talk about Japanese food in Taiwan.) I could tell that the taste of Japanese foods in Taiwan was most the time, not exactly like Japan’s. Most of the Taiwanese-Japanese foods were relatively sweeter than Japanese ones. Yet, they were all still very good. I thought that Taiwanese people are very good at imitating the skill of cooking and taking in the good part of each dish from different countries and cooking it into delicious Taiwanese-like taste.

There are many different kinds of restaurant in Taiwan. This mixture of culture also made the food culture of Taiwan more attractive. Because of the complex history, Taiwanese people are generous to different cultures and people from different places. Even though some people said that Taiwan doesn’t have its own unique culture, I think this diversity is the “Taiwanese culture” and it is very unique.