Chinese Food Discourse Community

 Discourse community is a group of people who share ways to claim, organize, communicate and evaluate meanings. Certainly, Chinese food culture has its own discourse community. To some extent, all Chinese people belong to this discourse community. But I also find two online discourse communities about Chinese food and Chinese food culture in Reddit and Youtube. I think most members in these two discourse community are ethnic Chinese and overseas Chinese like Chinese Americans. It also includes many other people like overseas students and foreigners who are interested in Chinese food. There are also chefs who can cook Chinese food to share their cooking experiences and methods. In general, this community has all kinds of people, different races from all over the world, and their jobs include students, office workers, chefs, even housewives and food bloggers. The age range is from teenagers in their 20s to seniors in their 60s. It is because food is the eternal theme of human beings, everyone needs to cook every day.

In Reddit, the discourse community is just called Chinese food. There are 59.9 thousands of members in it. Here is the link to the discourse community. https://www.reddit.com/r/chinesefood/ Their value is to honor Chinese food in all its glory. The rules of this community say that every member is welcome to ask questions about Chinese food or Chinese food culture, and everyone is welcome to upload recipes and discuss cooking methods. In addition, the founder hopes that everyone will not upload Asian food. That is to say, he hopes that everyone can distinguish between Asian food and Chinese food. I don't think the language of this community is very difficult to learn or understand, most of it is just an abbreviation of a long word. If there is anything special about the language, it is that many of the dish names are actually literal translations from Chinese pinyin. So the members here may need to know some Chinese. Here is an example to demonstrate the conjecture. https://www.reddit.com/r/chinesefood/comments/10lelp3/chinese_sauces_made_from_yellow_soy_beans_soy/ One of the member was confused about how to make the Chinese sauces and what were the difference between them. She mentioned Lee Kum Kee, a Chinese food company and abbreviate the name as LKK. Immediately afterwards, another member commented directly below this thread and answered the question. This is the way the members communicate with each other. I have looked through many posts and I do not think there are a lot of conflicts here, most people are communicating kindly. If there is a conflict, I think the administrators and creators of the community should have the right to mediate the conflict or delete the controversial post.

 

I think if the discourse community on Reddit pays more attention to Chinese food cooking method and food itself, the Chinese food community on YouTube focuses more on the Chinese food culture. In the Youtube Chinese Food discourse community, one of the famous youtubuers is called Liziqi. She has 17.3 millions followers.  The way the members communicate with each is also different from those in Reddit. Youtuber will post a video, and then people will comment and express their opinions under the video. Here is a link about Liziqi and one Chinese food she made.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgEgOi32CE0