Taitung Eats: Personal Explorations in Southeastern Taiwan

Limited first print of 100 copies.

A rare English language look at food in Taitung, the rural county on Taiwan’s southeastern coast, this modest volume documents not a cuisine but a set of encounters. Books devoted to cooking within Taiwan are uncommon; a focused exploration of a single region, shaped by its Indigenous communities, is rarer still.

Jess Eng, known for her reporting on Chinese American food in outlets such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, arrives as an outsider and makes that position explicit. Each of the ten chapters centers on a dish and people who prepares it, from Mama Huang’s Three Generations soup built on fresh, lightly aged, and long fermented daikon to millet dishes and millet wine shared by members of several of Taitung’s seven Indigenous tribes. The emphasis is on listening and observation rather than authority.

There are no recipes and no attempt at systematic coverage. At 112 pages and issued in a first printing of just 100 copies, the book reads as a document of personal discovery and will appeal to readers interested in regional food culture, contemporary narrative food writing, and culinary traditions that remain largely undocumented outside Taiwan.

Paperback. Color photographs throughout.