Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts and Food

A beautiful and fearless exploration of food and feelings – with bite – for fans of Crying in H Mart and Midnight Chicken.

‘Touching, absorbing and unflinching… shows you how to stomach life’s shit, celebrate the ugly, and keep going' Angela Hui

Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.’ For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a persecuted Chinese ethnic group whose ingenuity shaped a food culture rooted in fermenting and foraging.

Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine: the silly egg noodles her father cooked when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while homesick and courgettes grown in rural Wales as a gesture of reconnection.