Abstract: In the middle and later periods of the Ming Dynasty, great changes in attitude, living environment and value ideas had attracted more and more attention of Chinese literati to food living style. Li Yu, a famous scholar at that time, had been thought a master of food writing. He inherited and innovated previous thoughts of gourmets, and developed his own unique food writing system. A lot of later writers were largely influenced, such as Yuan Mei and so on. It is worth noting that Li’s writing is multi-faceted given his complex identity into consideration. Li, a scholar as well as a civilian, had demonstrated complex and even contradicting thoughts in his writing.

Key words: food writing, cook’s books, contradiction, sensory description