General Tso’s chicken to bento bowls: A food guide to Taiwan politics

"I wanted to find out who I am through food," says Taiwanese chef Aeles as she stuffs pork into millet dumplings, before wrapping them in two kinds of local leaves.

Millet dumplings, locally known as abai, are a sacred staple for Aeles' tribe, the Rukai, who have lived in these mountains of south-eastern Taiwan for generations.

When the 61-year-old was growing up, the food of Taiwan's indigenous tribes was almost impossible to find outside of the communities.

But that has been changing as Taiwan's identity takes shape, often in defiance of Chinese claims. And indigenous chefs like Aeles want to make sure their food is also on the plate.

With an election looming, Taiwan's "roots" are under the scanner again. China sees the democratic island as territory that it will eventually take back. But polls suggest that many Taiwanese see themselves as distinct.

The island is home to descendants of Chinese Nationalists who fled Mao Zedong's Communist troops in 1949. But they were not the first to arrive.

Every wave of people that came brought their own fare, forever changing the Taiwanese table and creating iconic, wildly popular dishes. General Tso's chicken, now an American hit, was invented in Taiwan.

Today, the island's scrumptiously rich cuisine is an ideal guide to its thorny politics.

Aeles was the only indigenous person in her high school in Taipei.

She hated it because she was often picked on by the other students, who were mostly of Chinese ethnicity, for her dark skin. "They called me 'black beauty'," she says.

She says Taiwan's Japanese colonisers forced her ancestors to leave the mountains to cultivate land. And under the authoritarian rule of China's Nationalists, which lasted into the 1980s, they were not allowed to