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Eat Bitter

byLydia Pang

A Story About Guts and Food

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A beautiful, fearless, dynamic exploration of food and feelings from a distinctive new voice – for fans of CRYING IN H MART, BUTTER and MIDNIGHT CHICKEN.

Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness’. For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors – a Chinese ethnic group subjected to forced migrations whose ingenuity produced a distinct food culture based around fermenting and foraging.

Pang develops the philosophy of eating bitter as a tool to reframe the most challenging moments of her life, from burning out and pushing her marriage to the brink to struggles with fertility and caring for a parent. As she plates up eight favourite recipes for us, we taste the char siu pork her Gunggung cooked on Sundays, the silly eggy noodles her father made when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while desperately homesick, and the courgettes grown in her new home in rural Wales as a means of marital reconnection.


Lydia Pang's unique aesthetic has attracted a cult following and these pages are filled with her misfit creative energy. Bold, tender and witty in all the right places, Eat Bitter is a life-altering lesson in the power of food as a medium to process emotions.

About Lydia Pang

Lydia Pang (She/Her) is a Frankenstein, misfit Creative Director with a decade of experience in brand building. Lydia is the Co-Founder of MØRNING, a London based, creative strategy and cultural foresight studio, working with clients like Nike, LVMH, Margiela, YSL. Previous creative leadership roles include her most recent at Nike HQ in Portland. Prior to that, she was the Group Creative Director of Refinery29 in New York. She judged Clio Awards, D&AD and was a Cannes Lions delegate. She’s worked at advertising agencies in New York (Anomaly) and London (M&CSAATCHI), always in hybrid creative roles honing her passion for digital storytelling and culture trend mapping. She has given talks on ethical commissioning at Instagram and NYTimes, and written articles for Refinery29, Riposte, Vogue, Elle, and Dazed.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781529966459
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Price: £9.99
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