Zhang explores how the pleasure produced by the art of fine cuisine, rather than cooking for sustenance, is intertwined with the pleasure of non-procreative sex. The romance between Aida and the narrator begins with Aida’s love of food and reveals her equally insatiable hunger for sex. However, the dynamic between them is complicated by the fact that Aida is the daughter of the narrator’s employer, putting her in a tenuous position of authority; the fact that the narrator must pretend to be Aida’s mother as part of her job; and the fact that the narrator is weighed down by recollections of her mother’s negative opinions about lavish foods and the excesses of fine dining.

The narrator creates expensive dishes that please not only Aida but also the major donors who live on the mountain. Although she believes that “cooking [i]s an art neither frivolous nor selfish” (7), her food is used to manipulate the residents into contributing more and more money to Aida’s father’s project. The food’s rarity and richness are part of the sell. The mountain community could survive on the gray mung-bean flour that most of the world eats—developed by Aida and other scientists—but the narrator’s employer exploits their desire for pleasure beyond survival: He “kn[ows] the gradations of pleasure because he kn[ows], like [the narrator], the calculus of its loss” (99).