Eating with the Sun

From a former editor for America's Test Kitchen and Saveur and former host of the docuseries Travelogue comes a luminous food 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 Zhang’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 hot pots of Chongqing to the soothing broths of Guangdong to the delicate greens of Jiangnan, 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 COVID-19 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 an excavation of the ancestral wisdom behind Chinese food 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 Chinese 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 approach to seasonal eating. Tradition, she shows us, is not a relic of the past but a living practice and a path forward, capable of reconnecting us with our bodies and the natural world around us.