Culinary cultures vary greatly even within one country. What is acceptable in one community could be gravely offensive to another. Building consensus may be futile, but mutual respect could be attained by taking a step away from confrontation, writes Raymond Zhou.

In the heat of summer, most people want to cool off. But not those in Yulin. Residents of this city of six million in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region prefer to counter heat with heat. They celebrate the hottest day of the year by eating dog meat, which, in traditional Chinese thinking, is supposed to generate "heat".

News of this local holiday has been generating another kind of heat - protests from pet lovers and animal rights defenders.