Enriching and sustaining New Zealand’s global relationships will require a collective shift in perceptions, from unfamiliar and insular, to familiar. My strategy is to gently encouraging non-official points of contact in order to enhance our friendship with, and understanding of China by providing a gateway into a rarely discussed topic. This book and its contents have been designed to introduce and educate my audience through establishing a confident, shared understanding of food and its embedded cultural etiquette. In the near future I would like to find my book positioned, as one of many, in a diverse series detailing the multicultural way of life in New Zealand.

 

While there are many gateways into an unfamiliar culture, etiquette and table manners are identified as “…essential for the foundation and survival of every human society without exception” (Visser, 2008). Food is inherent to the existence of table manners. However, the cuisine aspect of food is an extensively covered subject, making this project so worthwhile. It is recognised as one of few nonacademic sources of information concerning a culture’s own way of stimulating and regulating the sharing of food (Visser, 2008).
 

In New Zealand there are many introduced cuisines, however, the connections to their cultural roots are often disregarded. How can design be used to reduce this disconnection? This project will focus on exploring and translating some of those disregarded cultural practices  - etiquette and table manners - into a decipherable language that will challenge the commercialisation and standardisation of foreign food culture. It will aim to encourage more respect and appreciation for the practices and philosophies of unfamiliar ethnicities by recontextualising dominant discourses surrounding etiquette and table manners and will also question dominant expectations of assimilation often aimed towards the immigrants of New Zealand. As a result, this project strives to actively promote and sustain cross-cultural relationships by providing an insight as unbiased as possible. Additional key elements of this project are: the preservation and cultivation of cultural identity and expression; and the celebration of cultural diversity.

 

 

Officially, New Zealand is a bicultural nation and yet our everyday landscapes are almost completely devoid of our Maori heritage. This visually confirms the current cultural practices that are inhibiting indigenous and immigrating diversity, and consequently, a profound sense of symbiotic cultural richness. The 2013 census indicates, 15% of all New Zealanders identify themselves as Maori, 11.2% with two or more ethnic groups and over one quarter of the population are immigrants. Despite these numbers, and a growing national desire to learn more about unfamiliar practices, there is not enough being done to address the lack of everyday information that should be readily available for New Zealanders to engage with and learn from.

 

The search for high quality information led me to the multitude of poorly presented and poorly articulated websites on Chinese table manners. I also found that the majority of thorough, well-designed information regarded business specific etiquette only. The significant resources on business-orientated manners compelled me to focus on collating and redesigning the poorly presented, of questionable credibility and often bias information that was scattered across the web. Some of the information I have covered is from firsthand experiential research and family knowledge for example, the ‘Responsibilities and Expectations’ section.

 

Further supporting the validity of this project and its aims is an executive summary released in 2007 by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs titled ‘Our Future with Asia’. In it four challenges are outlined. The challenge that most resonated with this project is becoming more ‘Asia literate’: