作者通过从“食”和“色”两方面入手，审视了当代中国人“欲望”的变迁，挑战了“食色，性也”的论断，揭示了“快乐”的政治和历史本质。作者探讨了从对饥饿的记忆到经济发展时代的美食，从传统中药的香气到对古典文献的挖掘，从对集体身份的颂赞到对个人经历的关注诸方面，认为这些在当代中国被体现的存在都必然创造并存留于对个人和国家生活的公众反映之中。本书运用人类学、文化研究和文学批评的方法，对当代中国生活进行了全方位解读，她的解读不仅包括科学研究和社会理论领域的关注对象——家庭，也涵盖了当代中国日常生活的方方面面。

Chinese society and culture changed dramatically with the end of Maoist socialism in the early 1980s. So did the everyday life of Chinese bodies. In Appetites Judith Farquhar shows how new forms of desire, pleasure, anxiety and curiosity emerged as capitalist reforms advanced. Though many have suggested that after decades of socialist collectivism people simply returned to their natural human inclinations toward food and sex, Farquhar argues instead that novel needs and experiences of private life came into existence after the end of the Maoist period. The mundane activity of eating well in improving economic times is linked to historical memories of the late 1950s famine. The systematic understanding of flavours in traditional Chinese medicine connects to a modern self-consciousness about life of the body. Even the self who can indulge private sexual passions, and the sexuality that can be assesses by social psychologists, must be invented and sustained in on-going public reflections about personal and national life. Ranging over a variety of cultural terrains - fiction, medical texts, film and television, journalism and observations of clinics and urban daily life in Beijing - Appetites sympathetically analyses modern Chinese reflections in a changing world. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account will appeal to China scholars, medical anthropologists, ethnographers in many fields and specialists in cultural studies.