5 ideas
Culinary nostalgia is a longing for the foods of a real or imagined past or native place. Shanghai residents used it to judge their present, not just to remember. Praising what had been lost gave them a vocabulary for criticizing what the city was becoming.
Shanghai's famed honey nectar peach, grown in orchards on the city's edge, came to stand for local identity. As urban growth swallowed the orchards and the peach became scarce, writers mourned it as a symbol of an authentic Shanghai eroded by commercial expansion. The lament turned a fruit into a marker of what modernization cost.
Shanghai was a city of sojourners who kept strong ties to their native places. Restaurants serving Ningbo, Suzhou, Cantonese, Anhui, or Sichuan food let migrants recreate home and signal who they were. By eating together at these places, they came to feel they belonged in the city itself.
Shanghai's culinary identity did not come from one indigenous style. It came from the city's ability to gather and rank many regional cuisines in one place. On this view, cosmopolitan urban identity is an act of curating others' traditions, not owning a single tradition.
A distinct 'Shanghai cuisine' emerged only after regional cuisines had long defined the city's dining. Restaurateurs, guidebook writers, and later state planners codified it. Claims of authentic local food are often retrospective inventions shaped by commerce and politics.