Description
Pre-order a signed and personalised copy of Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts and Food, signed by Lydia at Backstory. Dispatches May 2026
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.
Eat Bitter is a beautiful and fearless exploration of food and feelings – with bite – for fans of Crying in H Mart, Butter and Midnight Chicken.