From Flavor to Behavior: Some Chinese Texts on Taste

In both Chinese and in Western languages, the meaning of taste both as flavor and as knowledge of what is good, right, beautiful, proper stems from the original gastronomic taste. However, while this dichotomy of meaning, flavor/ behavior, inhabit the same signifier, taste/wei, in both China and the West, each of these cultures seems to have come to this semantic cohabitation independent of mutual contact and by quite different routes. The routes they have followed, starting from the important differences in social and intellectual role that food itself has played in the West and in China, are perhaps an even more significant factor than the flavor/ behavior semantic cohabitation in the languages of both these cultures. In China the relationship between food and behavior takes on an absolute moral and ethical significance, while in the West it is principally a class determiner within an ultimately arbitrary social construct.