Eating with the Sun

From a senior editor at America’s Test Kitchen and the former writer and presenter for Travelogue: Exploring Hidden China comes a luminous memoir that weaves together the immigrant experience, the ancestral ties that guide us, and the deeply rooted Chinese philosophy of seasonal eating.
As a child raised in the US by immigrant parents, Megan’s earliest connection to her Chinese heritage came through home-cooked meals. Years later, as a journalist traveling across China, she discovered that the dishes of her childhood were part of a greater culinary framework: an intricate, time-honored system of seasonal eating. From the fiery foods of Chongqing in China’s center to the soothing broths of Guangdong on the southeastern coast, food revealed itself as more than just sustenance. Megan grew to see these regional specialties as vital parts of a dynamic dialogue with nature—one grounded in principles of traditional Chinese medicine and an intuitive understanding of how the seasons impact physical and spiritual well-being.
When the pandemic unexpectedly brought her back to the US, Megan found herself cooking alongside her parents again—this time with fresh eyes and renewed curiosity. What began as a short homecoming became a full-circle journey into the ancestral wisdom behind Chinese traditions and the enduring resilience of diasporic identity.
Deeply personal and thoroughly reported, Eating with the Sun braids together memoir, cultural history, and nutritional philosophy to bring readers on a journey through the phases of the lunisolar calendar, unveiling the ways in which its rhythms guide cooking, agriculture, celebration, and more. Megan reveals how Chinese cuisine—often misunderstood in the West—offers a timeless model of nourishment rooted in mindfulness and the cycles of the universe. Megan invites us to see tradition not as a relic of the past, but a path forward, capable of connecting us more meaningfully with our bodies and the natural world around us.

Megan Zhang