Abstract: With the development of agri-tourism in China’s southern minority villages, some unique local diet customs (the so-called “unusual” cuisine such as wild, raw and stinky food) become a heated topic in media and among common people. The unusual cuisine, widely recorded and commented by Chinese scholars in history, has been taken as the label of minorities’ alienness and primitiveness. From the perspective of escape culture, this paper argues that such cuisine had important cultural functions in helping minority peoples escape from the state control. The “savage” food reduced the importance of staple food (i.e., rice), avoided the accumulation of surplus food and served as markers of boundaries between minorities and plain states.

Key words: “unusual&rdquo, cuisine, escape culture, China’s southern minorities