HONG KONG’S FOOD CULTURE

May 25, 2016

GCIT1006 Section 00001

Group xx

Group members:

Chan Tai Man (xxxxxxxx)

Wong Siu Ming (xxxxxxxx)

Chan Man Ching (xxxxxxxx)

Ng Hon Chung (xxxxxxxx)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 1
Hong Kong’s festival food ......................................................................................................................... 2
A. Mid-Autumn Festival .................................................................................................................... 2
B. Dragon BOAT festival or Tuen Ng Festival .................................................................................... 2
C. Chinese New Year ......................................................................................................................... 3
Factors affecting Hong Kong’s Food Culture ............................................................................................ 4
A. Intensive market competition ...................................................................................................... 4
B. Higher living conditions ................................................................................................................ 4
C. Grow up of new age group ........................................................................................................... 4
Data collection methods .......................................................................................................................... 5
A. Web search................................................................................................................................... 5
B. Library resources .......................................................................................................................... 6
C. Online survey ................................................................................................................................ 7
Results of data analysis ............................................................................................................................ 8
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 11
References .............................................................................................................................................. 12
Applied IT tools ....................................................................................................................................... 13
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HONG KONG’S FOOD CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

China’s economy grows rapidly in recent years, this makes more and more foreigners interested in
Chinese culture, especially Chinese food culture. This report is focusing on introducing the festival food
in Hong Kong in order to explore Hong Kong’s Food Culture and to visualize the continuous trend of
Hong Kong’s food culture. Firstly, we want to find out some representative festival food in Hong Kong
based on special cultural meaning and to show how Hong Kong’s Food Culture is different from other
cities. Besides, we want to approach the relationship between creative and traditional of Hong Kong’s
food culture from summarizing festival food culture of Hong Kong.

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HONG KONG’S FESTIVAL FOOD

A. MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL
Moon Cake is the representation food of Mid-Autumn Festival. Almost everyone will eat and use it as
gifts during this festival. It is a traditional food for many centuries and keeps until now. Traditional moon
cakes are made with Chinese pastries with salted duck egg yolks and lotus seed paste. As the traditional
moon cakes give oily and unhealthy feeling to
people so Tai Pan has invented Snowy Mooncake
which is fresh in taste. Snowy Mooncake was
firstly introduced by Tai Pan of Hong Kong in
1989. It added a creative idea into traditional
festival culture. Thereafter, ice-cream moon
cakes from Haagen-Dazs, chocolate moon cakes,
jelly moon cakes, vegetarian moon cake etc appear
gradually. All of them contain some creative
thinking based on traditional object. [1]

Besides, fillings become a competitive object between different bakeries. In this field, we could also see
that international element is infiltrated into our food culture. For example: tiramisu from Italy, green
tea from Japan, cream cheese, coffee from the western country.

In recent year, as more and more people search for

healthy, “healthy” becomes a considerable things when
putting fillings inside the moon cakes. Low fat or fat-
free, high fiber and low sugar moon cakes appear
gradually and some of them use vegetable oil instead of
lard, and contain no egg yolks etc.

Actually, all of them are considered to suit Hong Kong

people’s taste.

B. DRAGON BOAT FESTIVAL OR TUEN NG FESTIVAL 1

In Tuen Ng Festival, the celebration food is zongzi, which
are large rice wrap. It is also known as rice dumpling or
sticky rice dumpling. It is a traditional Chinese food made
of glutinous rice stuffed with different fillings and
wrapped in bamboo leaves. Today, many zongzi made of
red rice, purple rice occurred as people want to eat more
healthily. The fillings are also more diversified including
date purée, bean paste, abalone, shark’s fin, sea
cucumber etc. There are sweet or salty zongzi for people
to choose.

1
“Tuen Ng Festival” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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However, the bamboo leaves cannot be replaced since different kind of leaf imparts its own unique
smell and flavor to the rice.

We have found a video for teaching how to wrap zongzi in youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE6GHOyyN5I

There are some common ingredients for traditional rice dumpling:

pork belly glutinous rice

dried chestnuts dried Chinese mushrooms
Chinese sausage salted duck eggs
Table 1: Common ingredients for making zongzi

C. CHINESE NEW YEAR

In Chinese New year, there are some common festival foods [2]:

 Chinese Dumplings - generally consist of minced meat

and finely-chopped vegetables wrapped into a thin
and elastic piece of dough skin.
 Nian Gao (Glutinous Rice Cake): Nian Gao sounds like
"getting higher year by year". For businessmen, it
means the more prosperous your business is. The
main ingredients for niangao are sticky rice, sugar,
Chinese dates, chestnuts etc.
 Spring Roll: Spring rolls are a Cantonese dim sum dish
of cylindrical shape. The fillings include vegetables,
meat and wrapped in spring roll wrappers. You can fry the
spring rolls until they turn to golden yellow color.
Dragon Boat Festival is
 another name of Tuen Ng
Festival

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FACTORS AFFECTING HONG KONG’S FOOD CULTURE

Food Culture describes the ways in which humans use food including selecting, obtaining, preparing,
serving and eating the food. This process is complex as it is affected by many factors like environment
and geographical location, economic and religious factors etc. Here, we summarize three factors
affecting Hong Kong Festival Food Culture.

A. INTENSIVE MARKET COMPETITION

The overall festival food culture is full of creativity and with influence of market competition. The
companies had to create some newly elements based on traditional items to attract people in order to
survive and to maximize their profit. The saturated market is being week to accept too much regular
traditional food and thus some brand may be eliminated through selection. As a result, intensive market
competitions directly affect the trend of food culture to be more creative.

B. HIGHER LIVING CONDITIONS

In Hong Kong, the living condition has been improved throughout the past few years. People would like
to find some foods that are safe to eat, delicious, good looking and healthy. They can afford more
expensive and special festival foods with beautiful wrapping because they have more purchasing power
to try something new and spend more on festival foods. For example, some special mooncakes like the
Dark chocolate mooncakes from agnés b and Truffle mooncakes from Harlan’s cost over HKD $300. It
seems that the creativity for Hong Kong’s festival food is necessary in order to suit people’s need.

C. GROW UP OF NEW AGE GROUP

The growing up of teenagers brings a new blood to the
festival food market. It affects the food culture in Hong
Kong. The new age group is always full of curious. They
want to search for new things. As a result, they would
innovate some newly elements or the market would
provide them. For example, there are some new kinds of
moon cakes e.g. ice cream moon cakes, Naliang Moon Cake,
Seafood moon cakes etc. It makes a trend for traditional
food to change their fillings.

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DATA COLLECTION METHODS

A. WEB SEARCH
Firstly, I used search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, to get some general information about Hong
Kong’s festival food culture. I need to find some representative Hong Kong festival food and their
characteristics. Hong Kong’s Food Culture is a component of international culture and how Hong Kong’s
food culture is trendy and creative in the view of Festival Food. These are all second-hand data that I
can get from books, news and web pages. Here are the search strategies:

Search Result 1
Keywords with operators: mooncake site:gov.hk
Search engine used: Google
No. of results found: 1160
One relevant URL: http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/waste/eco_respo
nsibility/files/Mooncake_Packaging_Guideline.pdf
Web page Title: Guidelines on Environmental Mooncake Packaging Design
Description: This webpage describes the Voluntary Agreement on Management of
Mooncake Packaging. Every year, millions of boxes of mooncake are
consumed, to help mooncake manufacturers to introduce environmental
considerations in the packaging design, the Environmental Protection
Department has issued the "Environmental Guidelines on Mooncake
Packaging Design"

Search Result 2
Keywords with operators: mooncakes cnn -recipe
Search engine used: Google
No. of results found: 39300
One relevant URL: http://travel.cnn.com/hong-kong/eat/whats-big-deal-about-mooncakes-
516751
Web page Title: What's the big deal about mooncakes?
Description: Mooncake business has exploded in mainland China, since Mid-Autumn
Festival has a unique gift-giving culture. Corporate mooncake exchange is
seen as wasteful and ostentatious. [3]

Search Result 3
Keywords with operators: zongzi site:org
Search engine used: Google
No. of results found: 6740
One relevant URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zongzi
Web page Title: “Zongzi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”
Description: I found some useful information about zongzi and Tuen Ng festival in
Wikipeida. I can get the history and different regions taste of zongzi.
However, as everyone can edit the content on Wikipedia, the information
there may not be correct and trustworthy. As a result, I need to double
check the trustworthiness of the data there by support of other search
engines. But in short, it gives me an overall and detail understanding on
the subject I focus on. [4]

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B. LIBRARY RESOURCES
For the library resources, I used One search to find one journal article about my topic.

Search Result
Search strategy: chinese “food culture”
Tool: One Search
No. of articles found 1649
before refining your
search:
No. of articles found after 387
refining your search to
journal only:
Article Title: Functionalism Theory Applied in C-E Translation of Chinese Food Culture
Text[5]

Journal Title: Theory and Practice in Language Studies

Volume/Issue No: 3/1
Year: 2013
Page: 61-68
Description of the article: It analyzes the data from a variety of Chinese food culture text and Western
food culture text, the research comes up with a contrastive summary to
characteristics of each food culture text in terms of content composition,
sentence structure and lexis function.[5]

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C. ONLINE SURVEY
Besides, I need to get some public opinion to support my point of view in order to have a macro-
analysis.

I used the e-survey system to help my collect some public opinions. I published a questionnaire on
http://www.qualtrics.com to obtain the survey data.

The objectives of my questionnaire is to find out how Hong Kong people think about the importance of
Hong Kong festival food, and thus to find out how the impression of Hong Kong’s festival food given to
the public. Besides, I would like to show that Hong Kong’s food culture is diverse and creative with a
backup on traditional elements.

Survey link: https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4HJsWpOJwjyEXoE

Survey result link: https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/CP/Report.php?RP=RP_516fzpG0pEM7Phj

No. of responses collected: 30

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RESULTS OF DATA ANALYSIS

The survey results are shown below:

Would you spend money on buying festival

food?
Yes No

14%

86%

Figure 1 Number of family are willing to spend on buying Festival Food

Most people are willing to spend money on buying festival food. (Fig. 1)

It can visualize how Hong Kong people think about the importance of festival and festival food. Hong
Kong people would buy festival food or even receive them as gifts, especially in Lunar Chinese New
Year. They usually celebrate this festival with family and eat festival food such as nian gao at home. It
is believed that eating nian gao can bring them good luck, because ‘Nian Gao’ is a homonym for “higher
year”, thus symbolises promotions, prosperity or simply for kids: growing taller. And there is no
significant difference in the percentage of spending money on buying festival food for different gender.

Next, we would like to know how much money people spend on festival food.

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How much would you spend on festival

food?
Above $500 $301 - $500 $101 - $300 Below $100

21%
42%

37%

0%

Figure 2 How much do Hong Kong people spend on Festival Food?

More than 40% of the respondents will spend more than $500 on festival food. (Fig. 2)

It can be seen that the respondents are willing to spend money on festival food. They spend much
because there are many different festivals in a year and the festival foods are very diverse. The
respondents may have more purchasing power and living condition. The higher the income, the more
they spend on buying festival food.

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What elements would you consider the most when you

are buying festival food? (you can select more than 3)
18
18
16
14
12
10
8
6 6
6 5

4 3

2 1

0
Outlook Taste Food safety Price Brand name Cultural
meanings

Figure 3 People's purchasing pattern about Festival Food

Most respondents suggested that “Taste” is the element they consider most important. Besides,
outlook and brand name are also significant factors. (Fig. 3)

It can be seen that their spending may be affected by a number of factors. These results could also be
observed in our festival food market and even the whole food culture. A number of new and innovative
products with better tastes have been introduced by different food producers to attract consumers. In
addition, you can see a price competition appeared at specific periods of the year.

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CONCLUSION

Food culture of festival food in Hong Kong is very diverse. The culture is a component of tradition and
modern. The overall food culture is full of creativity and with influence of market competition.

In the future, as a marketing competition of even though the requirement of food quality of Hong Kong
people increase, more and more creative items would be added in the following years.

However, there is an opportunity that in a specific period, the food culture of Hong Kong would search
for and back to extremely traditional way as people would have a want to taste for the past.

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REFERENCES

[1] Wikipedia contributors. "Mid-Autumn Festival." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The
Free Encyclopedia, 27 Apr. 2013. Web. 14 May. 2013.
[2] "Chinese New Year Food, Spring Festival Food." ChinaHighlights. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Dec. 2013.
<http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/chinese-food/chinese-new-year-food.htm>.
[3] Li, Zoe. "What's the big deal about mooncakes?" CNN Travel. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 May 2013.
[4] Wikipedia contributors. "Zongzi." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia, 13 May. 2013. Web. 14 May. 2013
[5] Yue, S. (2013). Functionalism theory applied in C-E translation of chinese food culture text. Theory
and Practice in Language Studies, 3(1), 61-68

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APPLIED IT TOOLS
IMC Stage IT tools Functions/features used

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