The Seven Necessities

The gas ran out without warning yesterday. A meager puff, and all those eggplants, oil, ginger, garlic, and black beans were left to sigh in the pan.

The "seven basic necessities" (kāimén qījiànshì) is the traditional term for the foundations of the Chinese home. While the collective phrase dates back to roughly the tenth century, these elements surely reach deep into the roots of Chinese culture.

The charm of these specific needs—fuel, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea—lies in how they fold within themselves layers of meaning, history, and reciprocal relations. They are so simple that they bypass the intellect entirely, speaking instead to the gut and the heart.

For what is a food system if not a tangled web of ecology, knowledge, transport, market forces, and the hand of the sovereign? Yet, after several millennia of increasingly complex food systems—particularly the modern one, with all its benefits and ailments—nothing is simpler, more fundamental, or more energy-dense than that bowl of rice, with certainty and security at its base. Our sages have already expounded on the relationship between flour and Torah, and indeed, between sustenance and everything under heaven.

As a barbarian in the Middle Kingdom, my own seven necessities are actually composed of eggs, tomatoes, tahini, olive oil, coffee, tea, and milk. But as one half of a semi-Chinese household and a devotee of the magnificent local cooking traditions, I have more or less learned the proper rhythm of things. From the laws of cleaning a high-pressure Chinese stove and selecting sea fish and lotus root, to the timing of the morning soy milk, and of course, the proper frying of eggplants and the unbearably fine art of serving tea to a guest—these are surely familiar to every Khitan and Persian, Jesuit and loquacious Jew who has suddenly found themselves embraced by the silk cage of the Middle Land.

Perhaps the primary lesson of these seven necessities is the inconceivable connectivity of everything. Between the firewood from the mountain (or the gas that just ran out) and all those consumer goods from near and far, things are sown, harvested, fermented, boiled, transported, supervised, and taxed by a sovereign whose eye is always open.

Remove one link from the chain, and a draft blows from the cold wok. Neglect the simple daily labor, and the law departs from the land.

Perhaps the simplest and most intuitive truth at the heart of this vast, invisible network uniting the world and the individual, from minister to pauper, is that nothing is more necessary or fragile than a home—whether its essence rests on soy or on milk.

And so: a short phone call, a heavy click of heels up the stairs, a fresh canister of gas from the desert, without which there is no sovereign and no thing.

Let the oil boil, the eggplant brown; the scent of garlic, soy, vinegar, and ginger.

And a great light bursts from the stove.