Abstract:

In an era of increasingly industrialized and scientific food production, the emotional appeal of Chinese consumers' pursuit of unprocessed and "back-to-basics" food is particularly noteworthy. This paper examines the development history of Sanmen mud crab(scylla serrata), designated as a national geographical indication (GI) as well as an agricultural GI brand, through three distinct phases. First, in its pre-industrial production period, the "natural" endowment attributed to local crabs by Sanmen people laid an unspoken foundational consensus for its subsequent industrialization. Second, the making of "Sanmen mud crab" brand both inherits and reconstructs the "natural" quality from its pre-industrial phase. However, as its brand value and market share grew, tensions emerged between local and out-of-town crabs, between formula and natural feeding, and the pursuit of size versus freshness/sweetness, putting its "natural" endowment at risk. In the third phase, returning university graduates moved beyond the dualistic imagination of science and nature, employing scientific methods to rebuild aquaculture environments and practices, thereby, to a certain extent, managed to overcome the "natural endowment" crisis.The growth history of the Sanmen mud crab reveals that the Chinese fascination with natural food is rooted in a profound emotional structure connecting to "nature". This emotional structure, cultivated by a long agricultural civilization, is universal to humanity, yet it is further developed and reinforced by Daoist philosophy, and Daoist and Chinese traditional medicinal practices, as exemplified by the Chineses understanding of "soil"(土), which is unique to Chinese civilisation. Modernity, by distancing itself from nature and highlighting food risks and human mobility, has activated this emotional structure, leading Chinese people, even amidst industrial civilization, to seek sustenance from the agricultural past. This phenomenon is encapsulated by the phrase: "the more modern, the more 'natural'". Unearthing the specific forms of emotional structures underlying human production and consumption behaviors is an attempt to explore the emotional underpinnings of the meaning of human life, raising the possibility of sociology as a "study of life".

Key words: agricultural geographical indication, Sanmen mud crab, emotional structure, nature complex, study of life