Could we start a school for "Taiwanese Taste"? ft. Wes Kuo

It’s delicious—but then what?

When a dish is served, "delicious" is often the most immediate and easily communicated conclusion. A camera captures an enticing shot, a reaction after the first bite, and a few sharp comments—that’s all it takes to create effective food content. Yet, the terroir, techniques, and cultural context behind the food can vanish the moment the camera cuts away.

Food can certainly be just a sensory pleasure; not every meal needs to be a cultural study. However, if discussions about food stop at "is it worth eating" or "is it good," the conditions of the origin, the choices made by artisans, and the history of the cuisine remain difficult to understand, let alone accumulate and pass on as knowledge.

Does Taiwan need a platform dedicated to food culture? T/ABLE’s answer is a resounding yes. The point isn't to burden every dish with heavy footnotes, but to establish a methodology—one that allows flavors to be experienced, questioned, verified, and explained.

In the fourth episode of T/ABLE TALK, we invite Wes Kuo, chef and founder of EMBERS, to converse with food culture researcher Hsu Chung. Hsu transitioned from food science to the study of food culture, while Kuo started in vocational training and night market stalls before venturing into agriculture and fieldwork. Two paths—one starting from theory, the other from the kitchen—both lead to the same question: How can Taiwan build a method to understand its own food?

A Delayed Awakening: When Vocational Education Meets a Cultural Gap

The two begin by focusing on the void in food education.

During their formative years, Taiwan’s food science and culinary education had distinct goals: the former focused on quantifying nutrition and principles through science, while the latter emphasized technique, employment, and market operations. However, when the question turned to how food connects to the land, history, and daily life, the institutional answers were relatively limited.

Over twenty years ago, Hsu Chung specialized in food nutrition and became a licensed nutritionist, receiving rigorous scientific training. When he tried to trace ingredients further, he found that Taiwan lacked a systematic discourse on food culture, forcing him to rely on foreign sources. Seeing how Le Cordon Bleu promoted French culinary aesthetics and how Thailand’s Blue Elephant established a national flavor system, he began to wonder: with its rich food resources, could Taiwan also develop a way to understand itself? This question eventually led him to the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy.

Wes Kuo, like many chefs, began in the vocational culinary system. In his student days, vocational education was often seen as a secondary choice outside the academic track, with curricula centered on business management and profit. Genuine hands-on cooking was limited, and ingredient sourcing and cultural context rarely made it into the classroom.

It was only after entering the industry that he realized, through day-to-day practice, the knowledge gap beyond mere technique. Over a decade ago, while running a fried food stall at Shilin Night Market, Kuo visited three or four traditional markets every day to source ingredients. Once, he saw a basket of round, green chilies with a unique herbal aroma and asked the vendor, "Where do these come from?" No one in the market could give a definitive answer, and at the time, it was difficult to verify through online research.

This basket of chilies became the catalyst for him to rethink the framework of culinary knowledge. To uncover the origins of his ingredients, he closed his shop and began long-term fieldwork: starting with agricultural basics, he visited farmers, artisans, and researchers, gradually accumulating knowledge in nutrition, botany, geography, history, and culture.

Hsu Chung sought to build a food culture discourse through value systems and research methods; Wes Kuo left the kitchen to walk the fields. These two seemingly opposite learning journeys point to the same difficulty that Taiwanese culinary professionals have faced in finding knowledge over the past few decades.

What was missing back then was not necessarily the knowledge itself. Farmers who understood crop habits, vendors who mastered market shifts, chefs who knew how to translate flavors, and elders who remembered local ways of life—each held a piece of the puzzle. The real gap was the lack of a mechanism to connect, organize, and publicly share these scattered experiences.

From Information Scarcity to an Overload of Answers: How Do We Identify Culinary Knowledge?

Today, the situation is almost reversed. Search engines and generative AI have significantly lowered the barrier to accessing information. The problem facing contemporary learners is often not that they cannot find answers, but that the answers arrive too quickly.

Kuo Ting-wei has observed firsthand that many young chefs are accustomed to obtaining vast amounts of information curated by AI in a short time. When answers are readily available, people are more likely to skip the processes of building foundations, checking sources, and verifying information themselves, which may actually lead to a decline in their ability to ask questions.

Faced with the evolution of learning media from print and search engines to AI, Hsu Chung emphasizes the importance of "critical thinking." He believes that while AI is adept at systematic organization, it can also incorporate outdated or incorrect concepts. Hsu once visited the Hsin Ho Chun soy sauce factory in Shetou, Changhua, and recorded on social media that it was "the only soy sauce factory in Taiwan using dry fermentation." It wasn't until his fieldwork expanded to eighty soy sauce factories that he realized his earlier conclusion was too hasty. Years later, he saw the same erroneous statement cited directly in a monograph on soy sauce published by someone else.

Misinformation did not emerge in the AI era. What AI has changed is the speed at which information is spliced, copied, and disseminated. If one relies too heavily on single conclusions provided by authorities or technological tools, professional expertise can become rigid. Food culture is inherently a dynamic result of people continuously thinking, engaging in dialogue, and adapting to the times and their lives. What matters is not obtaining a standard answer quickly, but comparing perspectives, identifying evidence, and being willing to revise one's views.

Doubt is not about denying everything; it is a necessary path toward understanding. People follow in the footsteps of their predecessors to explore the past, but they must also consider its relationship to contemporary life to unlock future possibilities. This critical thinking ability cannot be cultivated solely through classrooms and books; production sites, restaurants, and public platforms can all become places for rediscovering food.

When Restaurants Become Classrooms: Multiple Paths for Food Education

When it comes to sensory enlightenment, many people think of Japan. School lunches, food and agriculture courses, and local industries are interconnected, integrating food into children's education and making it a part of daily life. However, Hsu Chung reminds us that Japan's system is built on specific social conditions; Taiwan's lifestyle, industrial structure, and ethnic experiences are different, so copying the system does not guarantee the same results.

The purpose of looking abroad is to broaden our imagination, not to find ready-made answers for Taiwan. While we can learn from other systems, our methods must still start from our own land and lives.

There have always been different paths for food education around the world: MIT in the United States analyzes cooking through science; design schools in Milan place food within social and humanistic discussions; the elBulli Foundation in Spain organizes the techniques and theories accumulated in high-end kitchens; and Noma in Denmark uses the restaurant as a base to experiment with flavors and perspectives. Furthermore, MAD, the non-profit organization founded by chef René Redzepi, brings culinary knowledge into broader public discourse through forums, courses, and publications.

These cases are independent, yet they collectively illustrate that food education can involve various divisions of labor: schools lay the foundation, research and public organizations organize and disseminate knowledge, and restaurants can serve as the front line for experimentation and translation.

Kuo Ting-wei spoke of a small dish he had at Noma: a "leaf sandwich" filled with a tangy spread. Upon tasting it, a familiar herbal aroma emerged, reminding him of Mexican mint (Coleus amboinicus), commonly found in Taiwanese neighborhoods and historically used for topical applications. A scent associated with injury in Taiwan was transformed in Northern Europe into a flavor experience that leads culinary trends.

Practices like foraging for wild herbs, eating insects, and making fermented sauces at Noma can also be found in the daily lives of local and indigenous communities in Taiwan. Hsu Chung believes that Noma's influence comes not only from the cuisine itself but also from their ability to name and organize their experiences, form clear narratives, and make the world listen.

Kuo Ting-wei focuses on how restaurants create impact through practice, seeing the potential for restaurants to participate in cultural construction; Hsu Chung, meanwhile, reflects on where this influence comes from, reminding us that innovation must still be tested against history and the land. International acclaim can bring attention, but it cannot prove that any single approach is the only answer for a culture.

"Taiwanese Flavor Studies," Starting with an Index

In recent years, there has been no shortage of young chefs who have studied in Japan or Europe. However, Kuo Ting-wei has observed on the front lines of the kitchen that some young people who are proficient in international techniques often find themselves at a loss when discussing the agricultural background of local ingredients, the context of ethnic diets, or even the ceramic craftsmanship on the dining table. The problem is not a lack of passion, but "not knowing where to start."

In addition to fragmented information, the changes in Taiwanese food are very rapid. Once new flavors like egg tarts or donuts become popular, they can sweep the market in a short time. Hsu Chung reminds us that trends are not the same as culture; high sales primarily reflect commercial trends. Only by placing flavor back into the relationships between time, place, and people can we see the context in which it was formed and left behind.

Kuo Ting-wei therefore proposes "tracing back from flavor." Starting from the acidity, sweetness, aroma, and texture of a dish, one can trace back to the variety, origin, and farming methods, and then connect them to ethnic memories and daily customs. Flavor then ceases to be a conclusion that ends with the meal, but becomes an index for opening up cultural exploration.

To allow this index to form a clear structure, T/ABLE organizes its analytical perspective into three fluid coordinates:

Time is the scale of dietary change. From three meals a day, seasonal produce, and festivals to historical shifts, time allows people to see how flavors are formed, disappear, and return to life in new forms.

Place, encompassing the natural environment, geographical location, local produce, and social life. It serves as a reminder that food is ultimately rooted in specific landscapes, yet it also finds new footing through migration and exchange.

People, focusing on who is producing, cooking, and eating, and how different ethnic groups, generations, and migration experiences continuously reshape food culture. Flavor is not a static heritage to be preserved, but a series of choices people make in their daily lives.

This approach embraces the complexity and flexibility of Taiwanese cuisine. The index does not aim to dictate what is "authentic," but rather to clarify the origins of different narratives, allowing future generations to compare, verify, and contribute, ensuring that fragmented experiences are no longer isolated from one another.

Wes Kuo describes Taiwanese flavor as "diverse and non-exclusive," highlighting a quality that makes it worth cherishing. T/ABLE does not seek to establish a definitive standard that excludes dissenting views, but rather to build a knowledge platform that sparks curiosity, provides pathways, and encourages critical thinking.

In an era where algorithms constantly provide instant answers, we start with time, place, and people, stepping into markets and restaurants to maintain curiosity about our daily meals. When people begin to ask where food comes from, how it is formed, and whose lives it connects to, a simple "this is delicious" is no longer just an end point, but a starting point for understanding Taiwanese flavor.

Your keywords for Taiwanese flavor? — Wes Kuo‍

"Diversity"

"In the past, people were accustomed to using 'fusion' to describe the complexity of Taiwanese cuisine. However, the topographical shifts from mountains to the ocean, combined with the intersection of diverse ethnic groups, give the Taiwanese plate a high capacity for integration. If viewed through the logic of botany, 'diversity is non-exclusive.' The flavors of this island are not only rich but also demonstrate an inclusiveness and vitality that does not reject external elements."