***TICKETS ARE FREE BUT PLEASE REGISTER WITH THIS LINK*** https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfG2rwLSYnZI_Mtqhq4oY_bzf9y57jQTdL5dPCMO9oMaB_zjg/viewform Suffering long periods of hunger in his youth and thinking deeply on matters of food, Zhao Rongguang embarked on a career of academic research in food studies. He was the first scholar in China to define "food culture" (yinshi wenhua 饮食文化) as the observation, description, and analysis of the production of human food, of its consumption, and of all cultural things related to food. Meanwhile, "food studies" (shixue 食学), as he defines it, is research on the laws, methodologies, and theories of people’s foodways. This [talk] introduces three fundamental theories of Chinese food studies: food-culture spheres (yinshi wenhua quan 饮食文化圈), food-culture settings (yinshi wenhua chang 饮食文化场), and food-culture hierarchy (yinshi wenhua ceng 饮食文化层). Summarizing the author's research methodology in food studies, which consists of analysis of historical literature, fieldwork data, and experiments in cross-cultural, comparative perspective, [this talk] furthermore presents and explains three topics that have been intensely debated in contemporary food-studies circles: the invention and use of alcoholic beverages, genealogies of Chinese noodles, and the invention and evolution of Chinese chopsticks.