How Did Taiwan Become an Eaters’ Paradise?

Born in Keelung, a city known for its snacks, Tsao says that he gets just as much joy from eating at streetside stalls as from dining in fancy restaurants.

Snacks aren’t necessarily “home-style” cooking, but they are straightforward, homey, and soothing to the soul. Near and dear to the hearts of Taiwanese, these foods also impress visitors to our island.

The role of immigration

The CNN Travel website recommends some 40 Taiwanese foods and drinks, and is amazed by the number of Taiwanese food options, while Singapore’s Lianhe Zaobao describes Taiwanese snacks as an extension of Taiwan’s soft power.

Many classic Taiwanese dishes can be traced back to early immigrants from Fujian and Guang­dong. Others of our ancestors supported their families by serving China’s best-known foods, with the result that dishes from all over China can be found here in Taiwan.

Recognizing that crowds mean money, food vendors prioritized siting their businesses in places where people gather—on a street, in a market, or by a station or port. Keelung’s Miaokou Night Market is a case in point. Established in front of the Dianji Temple in the 1870s, it has grown steadily to its present-day size.

Just like many Keelungers, Tsao has dealt with the myriad of options on offer by building up a list of favorites. On top of that, his work has enabled him to visit so many vendors that he knows the origins and history of each stand in the market like the back of his own hand.

Where tourists see simply a food-filled wonderland, Tsao sees the confluence of different ethnicities and cultures. People of many different backgrounds have passed through Keelung over the centuries. After all, it was a major shipping hub during the Age of Discovery and the gateway to Taiwan during the period of Japanese rule. Though only Han Chinese have remained over the long term, traces of those other peoples are still evident in the city’s food.

Culture writer Tsao Ming-chung is equally adept with pan and pen.

Taiwanese snacks are representative of the island’s cuisine and are usually found in busy areas: in markets, near temples and by harbors.

Immigrants plus local products

As with the population of Keelung, most of the Miaokou Night Market’s food offerings have roots that go back to the Chinese cities of Fuzhou, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, but there are also influences from Japan, the United States, and other nations.

Tsao says, “Keelung’s food is a product of the intersection of immigrant ethnic groups and local products.” He offers Keelung’s “red ­vinasse” dishes, which originated in Fuzhou cuisine, as an example. Bright red and possessed of a hint of sweetness from red kōji (Monascus purpureus), red vinasse is frequently used as a flavoring and natural food dye in Fuzhou. In Taiwan, street vendors often mistakenly refer to its addition as “red braising.” You’ll find Taiwanese-­style red-vinasse eel in the Miaokou Night Market, as well as another Taiwanese innovation—bawan with red vinasse added to the minced-pork filling for a bit of color.

Another Miaokou stall sells rice bean (Vigna umbellata) stew, a dish that originated in Quanzhou’s Anxi County. Tsao says that whereas Anxi vendors make the dish by cooking rice beans with sponge gourd, Miaokou vendors have adapted it to take advantage of Keelung’s coastal location by adding oysters, shrimp, and cuttlefish.

Keelung’s renowned “nutritious sandwich” is another case in point. Buns made from bread flour are deep fried, split open, filled with ham, soy egg, tomato, and other ingredients, and then topped with mayonnaise. Developed by a business owner of the older generation, the nostalgic treat was based on a description in a Japanese magazine, draws inspiration from American submarine sandwiches and Japanese fried bread, and is dressed with Taiwanese-style mayonnaise. (Taiwanese mayonnaise is made from a combination of egg yolks and egg whites, as well as a large amount of sugar, unlike French mayonnaise, which uses only the yolks.) The sandwich is an example of Taiwan’s skill at borrowing from other cultures to cook up something delicious and new.

Taiwan has localized Fuzhou’s red vinasse cuisine. Shown here are red vinasse eel, bawan, pork, and beef noodle soup.

A flavorful history

Keelung’s rich array of snacks and dishes ultimately inspired Tsao to start writing food history. He has always taken great pleasure in shopping for food and cooking, and after he left his job of more than 20 years as a cultural reporter, he threw himself into researching and writing about Taiwanese food history.

Tsao and Ang Kaim, an adjunct research fellow in the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, published The History of Eating in Taiwan, a book exploring Taiwan’s food culture, in 2021. Deeply familiar with Taiwan’s food scene, Tsao led the project and handled the actual writing. Ang played a supporting role, providing historical materials and docu­ments, and using his language expertise in Taiwanese, Japanese, Dutch and English to dig information related to the evolution of Taiwan’s food culture out of those materials.

People from other lands have been passing through Keelung and Taiwan more generally for centuries, the cultural and ethnic makeup of these visitors changing with the era. But The History of Eating in Taiwan doesn’t focus on particular ­ethnicities or cuisines. Instead, it tracks the local history of individual ingredients, dishes and beverages.

Tsao says that the book avoids an overemphasis on ethnicities and such an approach’s inherent limitations. Instead, it makes use of Tsao Yung-ho’s concept of “Taiwan island history” by focusing on Taiwan’s geographic place in the world.

The so-called “nutritious sandwich” draws on American, Japanese and Taiwanese influences.

The Taiwanese palate

The book’s opening states: “Taiwan’s unique geology, topography and geographic location have provided it with a diversity both of living things and of cultures. An island with an abundance of terrestrial and marine products, it has a rich food culture.” However, counterposed to this natural and cultural abundance is traditional Chinese culture’s view of food as a triviality, which has resulted in a relative lack of written records on the subject. More, the confluence of various ethnicities and political regimes ­throughout our history has left behind many culinary enigmas for which we know the whats but not the whys.

“There are too many things that even Taiwanese don’t know about our history,” says Ang with some regret. Why is Taiwan the land of snacks? Why does Taiwan have so many vegetarians? Why don’t Taiwanese eat spicy foods? What enabled Taiwanese to invent braised pork rice and boba tea?

At the heart of such questions is the question of how the Taiwanese palate took shape.

Though there are few remaining historical materials from the period before Japanese colonial rule, Ang argues that Taiwan wasn’t isolated. From the standpoint of historical “structure,” it was the locus of a centuries-long interplay between the Zhangzhou–Quanzhou–Chaozhou cultural sphere and the Austronesian cultural sphere.

By comparing materials, documents and cultural phenomena from other countries and utilizing etymological research methods, the authors have come up with plausible explanations for many local food phenomena.

Rice-bean stew featuring Keelung’s fresh seafood.

Tradition within innovation

Tsao and Ang agree that food-culture formation is a long process. It takes more than just one person or restaurant to bring such a culture into existence.

Even the invention of something as “simple” as boba tea involved more than someone just adding tapioca pearls and milk to black tea. Other elements, such as the 1980s development of cold “bubble tea,” and the even earlier popularity in Taiwan of tapioca pearls as a snack, had to be in place before that could happen.

For all that Chinese people have been drinking tea for centuries, that tea has generally been hot. It wasn’t until our ancestors came to tropical Taiwan that they came up with the idea of drinking it cold. Meanwhile, Taiwan developed tapioca pearls in reaction to Southeast-Asian culinary influences, and even that has its own backstory: the Chinese begin importing sago to Taiwan during the Dutch colonial period. In the 18th century, Taiwanese people began replacing the sago in the “pearls” used in desserts, first with cheaper sweet potato flour and then with tapioca flour.

The history of most dishes runs similarly deep, whether generally known or not, and none have an “immaculate conception.” “Food is the culmination of long-term structures,” says Ang. “Rather than claim that a particular person invented a particular dish, it’s more accurate to say that a long succession of unnamed heroes brought it into being.”

Looking over the whole field of Taiwanese cuisine, Tsao says: “Taiwan’s food culture is a ‘creative tradition.’” Taiwanese cuisine draws from all kinds of influences, vitalizing it and producing surprising innovations. All of this has made Taiwan into the eater’s paradise it has become.

Though Taiwanese food seemingly lacks a signature feature, Ang argues that “this malleability is itself a defining characteristic.” He believes that Taiwan’s food culture is still developing, continually mulling, integrating and shaping elements drawn from its hundreds of years of history.

Keelung’s rich food culture retains elements of many cultures that have passed through the city.

Taiwan’s ubiquitous, delicious and inexpensive snacks highlight its immigrant history.