A close look at monastic kitchens reveals much about food culture in monastic life. As a traditional female activity, cooking is a means for Taiwanese nuns to gain economic, social, and cultural capital. In addition, cooking shapes the spatial arrangement and temporal schedule of daily life at a monastery. It is in this institutional scheme that contemporary Taiwanese nuns form their identity. This food culture grounds itself in the gender politics of Buddhist institutions underlying the process of food preparation at monastic kitchens. This paper focuses on the discipline and community identity of Taiwanese Buddhist nuns, which can be fully illuminated only by using "gender" as a category of historical analysis. Like general social expectations about gender, nuns are assigned in Taiwanese monastic administration the task of cooking, an alleged feminine practice in the distribution of religious labor. Thus, monastic kitchens constitute a very significant "female sphere" for nuns. The paper is organized to answer in turn four questions. Firstly, why is food considered a significant component of the monastic life? Secondly, how do Taiwanese nuns formulate their religious experience and community identity through cooking? Thirdly, what is the relationship between the distribution of labor and gender identity in Taiwanese Buddhism? And fourthly, how do contemporary Taiwanese nuns redefine the meaning of cooking through an expended social network?
