ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the term ‘alternative nostalgia’ to describe the entanglement between literary representations of food and sentiments of nostalgia in Taiwan from 2000–16. Taiwanese people’s food nostalgia used to designate their longing to return to mainland China, from which the Kuomintang (KMT) government relocated to Taiwan in 1949. The ‘nostalgic anti-communist literature’ of the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, was a cultural production directly addressing people’s wish to return home (Chi 2000, 61). After the lifting of martial law in 1987, people could revisit their hometowns but discovered that these homes were not the same as they imagined. Since then, Taiwanese nostalgia for hometown dishes has become a debatable concept.
