Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Fortune, Dog Meat, and Cosmic Accounting: The Vietnamese Feast of Bad Luck
Food Rules and Rituals - Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023 - Mark McWilliams
Khanh-Linh Trinh [+]
Khanh-Linh Trinh is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan's Department of Asian
Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on Vietnamese Culinary Traditions.
Description
Vietnamese believe food is an intermediary between a person’s livelihood and fate. Eating, in other words, isn’t necessarily about sustenance so much as it is a set of quasi-ritual actions that have cosmic effects. Often accompanied by alcohol, friends or families feast on dishes commonly considered to induce misfortune at the end of the lunar month. By consuming ‘bad luck’, they believe their fortune will reset for the new month, bringing prosperity. This paper examines the feast of bad luck and how it has been villainised in Modern Vietnam.