The Cultural Revolution Cookbook
timeoutbeijing.com - 
In 1969, aged just nine years old, Sasha Gong was forced to leave her home in Guangzhou to live with a family in a small village in Hunan Province. Gong, who now heads the China branch of news service Voice of America, was one of 17 million youths displaced during the Cultural Revolution years. After a ‘reeducation’ period spent working in the fields, she learnt to cook peasant food and make do with the few ingredients still available.
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Very interesting I always wondered how many recipes and dishes and traditional cooking itself got lost during the Cultural Revolution.
"They learned to prepare remarkably tasty and healthy dishes with the fresh, wholesome foods in season, to conserve scarce fuel and to improvise when ingredients were unavailable. They used locally grown produce because there wasn't anything else. And they mastered the art of getting peak flavors and maximum nourishment out of unprocessed, low-calorie foods, devoid of artificial preservatives, fresh from the fields, ponds and streams."
Sounds a bit of a rationalization to me. But frugal lifestyle is probably the future in China and the rest of the world anyways...
Story from NPR: http://www.npr.org/2012/01/22/145468366/cultural-revolution-cookbook-a-t...
"A new book combines the memories and culinary skills of one Chinese political dissident who lived through that time. The Cultural Revolution Cookbook was written by Sasha Gong and her friend Scott Seligman, a Washington, D.C., writer who lived for several years in China."