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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how social relationships and values are embodied by Hui Muslim cuisine in current digitised China. We explore how the employing of social media in promoting halal food invokes discussion and negotiation of dietary taboos, ethnic relations amongst urban Hui Muslims and beyond.

Paper long abstract:

This paper, by feat of an analysis of Ramen, Steak and Lamb Soup—three representative food in Xi’an Hui Fang Jamaat, examines the relationships between Hui Muslim migrants, local Hui Muslims and younger Muslim generations have conflicted and negotiated. The intense relations amongst them have been expressed through food-taste, preparation and promotion for sale, while pointing to deeper regional and religious tensions. For example, how Muslim migrants have been excluded due to their unstable incomes and disadvantaged social status; and how young Muslim generation, in choosing ingredients, making and selling new (western) forms of food—steak or pizza, have been censured for neglecting the religious and ethical imperative of making Halal food. Furthermore, when local young generation attempts to break the inherited routines of food sales—passive, petty family-run catering business in tourist sites, resorting to internet, social media and other social networking Sites (SNS) to redefine and reproduce local cuisine in this digital era, the gradually neglected traditional cuisine of Hui Fang Jamaat—such as lamb soup—which have been representing by the older generations of the 1960s and the earlier,  begin to face with a more serious problem of survival. We then demonstrate how those social issues have borne social, cultural and political significance, and how a variety of values have been brought to those discussion and practices within Muslim population.