The Food of a Proud Island Nation with Clarissa Wei

Welcome back to the Lecker Book Club. Every month I’ll pick a newly released food related book and talk to the author about the process of writing it. I’ll also be writing about it on Substack and Patreon. Join me there as well!

In Made in Taiwan, Taipei based journalist Clarissa Wei beautifully captures the food and spirit of this proud island nation, and brings it to life on the page. The book is stunning - you’ll hear more about the thought and consideration that Clarissa and her team put into how it looks as well as what it says later in this interview -and it examines the current state of Taiwanese food in incredible breadth and depth. For me, someone completely new to the food of the country, it’s a beautiful and rich education.

It was such a pleasure to meet Clarissa via video chat and talk about this book, which involved an astonishing amount of research and recipe development on the ground. I’m a big fan of her work as a journalist - the podcast series she made with Whetstone Radio Collective, Climate Cuisine, is one of my all time favourite listens - and it was so interesting to hear how she approached this book, the subject of which is something hugely personal to her but one which she wanted to approach journalistically, and write as an act of documentation. We talked about how missing home through food sometimes takes unexpected, shifting forms, her culinary collaborator on the book Ivy Chen, and why it was crucial that Made In Taiwan moved away from its original proposal as a “cosy” cookbook and became something deeply political.


Made In Taiwan is out now, published by Simon and Schuster. Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list.

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Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.