China is in the middle of a food fight.

Earlier this month, influencer Luo Yonghao wrote, after eating at one of chain restaurant Xibei’s many locations, that, “Almost all of the dishes were pre-made, and still so expensive.” Xibei founder Jia Guolong responded, saying, “According to national regulations, none of our dishes are pre-made.”

But after journalists and social media users revealed that some of the company’s dishes use frozen ingredients with long shelf lives, Xibei admitted defeat and issued a public apology, promising to shift from a “central kitchen” process to having more food be prepared on site.

What complicates this conflict is the ambiguous legal definition of “pre-made food.” State news agency Xinhua said last year that the method of using central kitchens and cold-chain logistics — which many restaurant chains use to make sure their dishes taste the same across their outlets — does not fall under the term.

Less complicated is the Chinese public’s response. On social media, Jia’s comments rekindled frustrations about subpar food products being sold under false pretenses. Everyone inside the restaurant industry knows that being labeled as a restaurant with “pre-made food” will mean customers start thinking of your food as lacking in taste, value, quality, and safety.

Chinese consumers are wary of, and even resistant toward, pre-made food. Western consumers don’t mind the convenience of a frozen pizza, and Japanese convenience stores sell countless pre-made meals. So why China’s reticence?

The reason lies in Chinese food culture, in which freshness is a core tenet. It equals immediacy, with the time between field and table measured in minutes, not days — let alone months. For example, Cantonese restaurants and supermarkets that serve and sell seafood will often have an array of water tanks from which customers can pick a fish, and then have it killed on the spot.

In the past, wet markets would often have poultry slaughter areas to satisfy customers’ desire for freshly killed chicken or duck. When Hong Kong, after SARS and COVID-19, decided to close such areas and switch to selling cooled chicken, citizens were so upset that these markets saw their business crater. Some had to close.

In southern China, consumers have a preference for “warm pork” — pork that was never chilled or frozen, but instead shipped directly from the slaughterhouse to the market. Chilling lowers freshly slaughtered meat’s acidity and prevents bacterial growth. But when it comes to culinary culture, science is not the priority.

When I did field research on China’s southern island province of Hainan, I found that at 6 a.m., lines would already have formed for stalls selling pork that was still warm to the touch. Customers would consider this a sign of freshness, and prefer such meat over the chilled pork found in supermarkets.

What people in the West might know by the Japanese word umami — the fifth basic taste alongside sour, sweet, bitter, and salty — is in China called xianwei, or “freshness flavor.” It is a light flavor that whets the appetite, found especially in such foods as tomatoes, spinach, and Japanese miso seasoning.

In Chinese food culture, only timeliness can ensure xianwei. Scientifically, beef needs to deacidify for 12 hours before it reaches the right tenderness. The people of Chaoshan, in southern China’s Guangdong province, disagree. To them, only beef so freshly slaughtered that it still has muscles that are throbbing is considered fresh.

The wildly popular food documentary series “A Bite of China” explained the country’s high regard for freshness best: “The highest quality ingredients often require only the simplest cooking methods.”

Whereas Chinese notions around freshness emphasize eating food that was prepared as soon after harvesting or slaughtering as possible, pre-made food warps time and space. Xibei customers ordering their “Fresh Steamed Sea Bass” dish might expect to eat a fish that had been alive just hours prior. Instead, it had spent up to 18 months lying in a freezer.

When people hear about the lengthy shelf lives of such frozen ingredients, as well as jokes such as “the food was made before the child was born,” they will naturally become anxious. Science might show that food, when sterilized, can have a long shelf life and not lose much of its nutrients or flavor, but to consumers, the contradiction between “technological preservation” and “served fresh” remains a hard circle to square. Only natural, authentic food can be fresh, and faraway expiration dates indicate the opposite.

On my social media feeds, friends who live in parts of China where fresh food is considered especially important show the most disdain for pre-made meals. A friend from Hainan said such food would never be accepted in her hometown. Pigs are customarily slaughtered in the morning, and locals value freshness so much that they will refuse to buy pork in the afternoon. A Chaoshan native said that, if pre-made meals were to become the norm where she lived, she’d rather move back to her isolated island and do groceries twice a day. A person from Yunnan, a province in China’s southwest, said that going to small eateries where they will make your food right after you order it is central to Yunnanese daily life.

At its core, the reaction Chinese consumers showed toward pre-made food is a reaction toward the rapid industrialization of the food industry. Until not too long ago, the relationship between people and their food was simple and direct: gathering, hunting, harvesting, self-sufficient. It gave a sense of security.

Traditional Chinese medicine, which continues to be influential in China, also emphasizes that medicine and food have the same origin, that humans and nature are one, and that people should eat a diet of fresh ingredients that follows the seasons. Fresh food creates a close relationship between humans and nature, and is more easily believed to be nutritious and healthy.

However, pre-made food severs this direct relationship, replacing it with a distribution chain that is a series of black boxes. This lack of transparency breeds suspicion. Given the absence of clear regulations, each additional step in the food production chain becomes another opportunity for preservatives and other technologies to intervene.

In the past, when restaurants served fresh ingredients, people could rely on their own experience to judge their quality. But pre-made meals’ expiration dates don’t reflect whether food has gone bad, and their ingredients don’t tell the whole story of how they were made. A list of additives might be clearly spelled out, but still hard to decipher. The result is that perhaps only food experts can enjoy a good restaurant meal with their minds at ease. In short: the one additive we’re lacking is trust.

Pre-made food is an irreversible trend, a facet of our highly efficient, McDonaldized society. There are some measures that can instill consumers with greater trust: strong oversight, clear traceability, and third-party certification. Of course, the most important measure is companies managing expectations by clearly explaining how their food is made, allowing consumers to understand and to verify.

Nevertheless, pre-made meals struggle to convince the Chinese palate. Some dishes lose their flavor when they are made far in advance, just as certain wild mushrooms resist being farmed. I personally cannot stand pre-made fish treated with water-retaining preservatives. It tastes like glue to me.

We cherish food that is local, seasonal, and fresh. For truly good food, you will have to visit a lively wet market, or a hole-in-the-wall restaurant where you can pick your own ingredients. China’s cities are still full of places to eat that are both delicious and affordable.

Fans of fresh can rest assured that there will always be flavors that cannot be pre-made.

(Header image: VCG)