Tomorrow I’m going to Chengdu, Sichuan, to teach for three weeks. You can find it on a map of China if you look inland, to the southwest. Heading west from Shanghai – far west – it’s the last big city, after that it’s mountains all the way to India. Simona, Leonardo and I were there four years ago. Before we left on that trip, I prepared by reading Fuchsia Dunlop’s Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper, a memoir of her time as a cooking student in that city. Which is to say I was reading about food, which is one excellent reason to go there. On return to London I bought three of her cookbooks, (Land of Plenty [Sichuan], Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook [Hunan], and Every Grain of Rice), and they’ve been good investments.