IT IS 1996 and droll, erudite Australian broadcaster and author Clive James is reporting from a Hong Kong trudging reluctantly towards a long-arranged marriage – or is it towards a sacrificial altar?

     No one knows what will become of the well-endowed bride (or votive offering) when the boys from Beijing, already massing at the gates, come to town to claim their inheritance, but on the wretched streets of Tsim Sha Tsui the ever-perceptive James is acting the playfully disdainful foreigner perplexed by the sensory overload of bright lights, big city. The stimulatory excess extends to what he orders for dinner as he sits roadside at a dai pai dong.

     “Usually I prefer my Chinese food in a metal foil box with a cardboard lid and a plastic spoon,” intones James in voiceover to shots of live, trussed crabs. “Here it looked a bit too fresh for my taste; any fresher and you’d have to fight it for your life. It all looked a bit X-Files, but I was ready to give it a try,” he declares, as our courageous pseudo-tourist occupies a table near which an inquisitive crowd has assembled to gawk. “When my main dish came something in it was blowing bubbles, so I decided to put it off until never,” he admits, intimidated by the worrying weirdness of it all.

     Later, James sets off for a wander through Western District. Here he discovers “the actual, original Chinese Hong Kong” of small businesses, be they dried-goods or bloody butchers’ concerns. He strolls awhile and announces: “A bit further on things started getting really Oriental. At first I thought they were rattan beer coasters,” he says sniffily, peering at the contents of ranks of cardboard boxes. “They were dried coiled snakes. Python pizza. Dried beetle bar nibbles are something I must try sometime, perhaps after an atomic war.”

     James made Postcard from Hong Kong as part of a series for British television in which he hammed up the part of the avuncular tourist guide to everywhere from Berlin to Bombay. But his cultural clowning, which in its Hong Kong rendition reached its apotheosis whenever such bizarre (to Western tastes) comestibles made an appearance, speaks to the outsider in us all about how alienated we may feel when facing a defining characteristic of a society not our own: its attitude to its food, what it eats and how it consumes it; what it means and how and why it features in its festivities.

     Global travel is a natural part of billions of modern lives and some travellers venture abroad specifically for the joy of eating foreign food. To what extent might the rest of us be flummoxed by the ingredients of a dish cooked for a moveable feast whose significance passes us by?

     Our intrepid foodies will enjoy their Shrove Tuesday pancakes in the knowledge that their rich ingredients traditionally represented the last chance for gastronomic indulgence before the month-long Christian fast of Lent, which precedes Easter. Tucking into turkey at Thanksgiving, they might reflect on the fact that they could just as easily be eating pheasant, duck or goose: turkey’s precise role in the original, days-long celebratory dinner party thrown by the revered pilgrims – who blundered into Massachusetts while looking for Virginia – remains hazy. As Edward Winslow, who was to become Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote in a letter: “Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week.”

     While celebrating New Year in Japan, said foodies will be informed enough to know that their osechi ryori, presented in lacquer boxes called jubako, are likely to include, among much else, simmered kombu rolls, mashed sweet potato with sweet chestnuts, dried sardines and burdock, because each dish is invested with meaning and is supposedly evocative of prosperity, health, happiness, a bountiful harvest and so on.

     And in Hong Kong, our dauntless food frontiersmen will be clued up on the significance of mooncakes, eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Another harvest thanksgiving, which takes place in the eighth month of the Chinese calendar, the feast also celebrates the first moon landing, accomplished 3,500 years ago by a woman named Chang-O. (Sorry Neil.) The epicurean adventurers will be au fait with the Cheung Chau Bun Festival, which is held in late April or early May. This Taoist shindig, said to commemorate the miraculous lifting of a plague that once afflicted the Hong Kong island, culminates in a race to the top of a 14-metre “bun tower”, in which athletes who would pass for semi-professional rock climbers scale a conical structure studded with thousands of buns, grabbing the uppermost confections first and collecting as many as they can on the way down. That today’s buns are plastic, to avoid potential injuries promoted by the mushiness of genuine foodstuff accidentally violated during the raucous competition, seems to dilute the enthusiasm for the ceremony not a jot.

     So much for the cultural confusion and historical niceties that lurk behind the significance of food. The Asia Literary Review also has weightier reason for turning its attention, for most of this issue, to something none of us can live without. Acclaimed writers from Ernest Hemingway to Junichiro Tanizaki, Margaret Atwood to Maxine Hong Kingston, have used food and the rituals surrounding it to portray conflict, status, mood and even ethnicity. For ourselves, with Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s astute assessment of the historical impact foods have had on societies around the globe; Fuchsia Dunlop’s ode to the sweet and sour pork balls of her youth; Jennifer 8. Lee’s assertion of autonomy manifested through her struggle to create a particularly elusive pasta sauce; Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s memories of a childhood haunted by the spectre of starvation; and Bernard Cohen’s tale of marital discord toxic enough to poison an entire restaurant, we hope to augment in some small way the literature of food. Numerous other courses follow, all of which we hope will prove satisfying too.

     But a crunch is coming, if reports are to be believed, to the food industry and to how and what we eat. The tale now cooking, albeit on the back burner, is a story seemingly shrouded from public view by phone-hacking newspapers, urban riots, Irene, royal weddings, plummeting markets, tsunamis and football. The food crisis professedly about to descend on Asia and perhaps the world is not a story on everyone’s lips, although it is surely as potent a predicament as global warming.

     Chandran Nair’s analysis of Asia’s inability to feed itself (page 99) warns of stark difficulties in catering to burgeoning populations. Mix increasing numbers of people with iniquitous trade regulations, the growing of corn for biofuel instead of dinner, inflationary food prices, climatic upheaval and the neglect of rural economies and the dish produced is foul tasting.

     The China Daily recently quoted Li Zhengdong, China’s representative in the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, warning of continued global grain price rises coupled with grain yields achieving slower growth than in the previous decade.

     As the expanding middle classes of China and India come to demand an increasingly varied diet, and that irrepressible bugbear the price of oil maintains its steady march skywards, food prices will also continue climbing, repeating the spikes of 2006, 2007 and 2008 and putting staple foods beyond the reach of millions of Asians already afflicted by poverty. In a time of food insecurity, what price political stability? Remember that the touchpaper of the Egyptian revolution (and the riots in Cairo and elsewhere in 2008) was a leap in the cost of bread, or more specifically wheat, of which Egypt is the world’s largest importer.

     Consider too the likely impact of changing weather patterns. In Nepal, for example, reports the BBC, Himalayan farmers, echoing the cries of their brethren around the world, complain that their land is drying up by the season. “If there is rainfall,” said one farmer in May, “we can grow a little bit, but it’s hard. Even if we work all year round we can only grow enough to feed us for three months.”

     And they are not alone in worrying about water, but for different reasons. A water war between China and India is threatening to erupt because of Chinese plans to divert the flow of the Tsandpo-Brahmaputra River that rises in Tibet and eventually flows into Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. Countless Indian (and Bangladeshi) farmers depend on the river for their livelihoods; but to China the Tsandpo-Brahmaputra is a potential source of hydroelectric power, the solution to the problem of infertility in the drought-scarred northeast of the country and the answer to continued silting in the Three Gorges area. The proposed monumental project could realise thousands of miles of canals, pipes, tunnels and dams – and a shooting war with India the moment Beijing turns off the tap.

     In a special report in February, The Economist set out to answer what it called “the nine billion-people question”. Nine billion people by 2050 is the projected world population, up from today’s seven billion. The conclusion was that it should be feasible to put food on everybody’s plates, despite land constraints, water shortages, diminishing returns on fertiliser use and growing demand for meat, especially in the newly rich parts of Asia (corn is fed to cows, to fatten them, in tons by the million).

     Our saviours, the report suggested, will be advances in plant genetics; a “livestock revolution” requiring more eugenics wand waving; augmentation of yields; and the reduction of harvest waste in African countries particularly – although the Horn of Africa is currently experiencing another famine and web initiatives like The Hunger Site continue to plead for clicks and donations.

     Writing in The Jakarta Post in June, however, Professor Richard Fielding, of the Hong Kong University School of Public Health, argued that technological wizardry was unlikely to prove a magic bullet capable of shooting down shortfalls in food supply and other systemic agribusiness failings: “Supply shortages are not the sole, or even most important, reason for present food scarcities,” he stressed. “Monopolies and subsidies distort the economics of production in favour of multinationals: supermarket chains like Tesco pay paltry rates to producers, which discourages production and drives small farmers out of business, yet charge a premium to shoppers in their energy-hungry urban retail outlets. Rural populations and urban slum dwellers don’t get a look in.

     “These problems must be addressed before adopting high-technology approaches that move us even further down the road to corporate-controlled food dependence that excludes the wretched of the Earth.”

   Fielding’s assertions hint at a secondary debate concerning the nature of the highly industrialised, intensively mechanised operation that feeds much of the world: is it wise to allow food production to be the preserve of a handful of politically powerful multinational corporations that control what we are permitted to eat and even what we’re licensed to say about it?

     Food, Inc., Robert Kenner’s 2009 film about “big food”, is a startling exposé of the practices underpinning the mass production of what America consumes and the often dangerous methods, for people and animals, employed to make towering profits for a few Hydra-headed companies.

     Along the way the film explains how bacteria such as E. coli find their way onto our plates and why junk food is much cheaper than beneficial foods such as broccoli – ensuring that poor families remain wedded to burgers and fries and are ultimately obliged to face the medical music. The production techniques in food factories in other developed countries are the same and we are what we eat – even though much of it seems to be bad for us.

   Nor do genetically modified crops appear to be the panacea they were once considered. Pathological problems associated with the consumption of genetically altered plants are reportedly beginning to emerge – hardly what Dr Norman Borlaug envisaged when his “green revolution” brought what he called “a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation”.

     For the moment, this remains the age of the celebrity chef, be he ever so humble, or condescending and obnoxious, with culinary tourism firmly cemented in place as a pillar of programming. It doesn’t take much cable-TV channel flipping to find a connoisseur of the repugnant trusting to his consumption of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, scorpion broth, Asian hornet larvae, green tree ants or raw-blood soup to procure him a job with a network that has a real office and a staff of more than two. So I wonder, from these times of terrible television, drought, mad cow disease, factory farming and starvation amid abundance, what brand of food-flavoured literature will emerge – and come to think of it, what calibre of cinema might be spawned by food-centric books. A Saturday matinee featuring the updated likes of Babette’s Feast, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Delicatessen and Tampopo would take some topping.

      Shall we have literary feast or famine? Perhaps a new Proust, with madeleines made for the 21st century, will arise; or a Shakespeare for the age. In Antony and Cleopatra the sultry Egyptian queen, lamenting her youthful tryst with Julius Caesar, evokes what she calls “My salad days, when I was green in judgment.” This remark, of course, doesn’t even constitute food imagery – but that didn’t stop an old classmate of mine, every time he heard it, thinking of lettuce.