Chaoshan people have a long-standing habit of eating porridge, mainly for several reasons. First, because Chaoshan is located in the subtropical zone, the climate is hot and humid, people sweat a lot and lose appetite. Eating rice porridge can nourish the stomach, promote fluid production and quench thirst, and also preserve health and benefit the stomach. Second, historically, Chaoshan area was dominated by rice cultivation. At that time, people's living standards were low, with a large population and little food, and porridge cooking was more economical.

There are many common sayings about porridge in Chaoshan area, such as "pickles are exhausted", "chyme fills the stomach", "shoes are sold, rice is exchanged for sweet potatoes" and so on. There is a story about "white rice for sweet potato". In other words, people used to think that sweet potatoes are easier to fill their stomachs than rice, so they exchanged rice for sweet potatoes with the same weight, but they didn't know that the price of white rice was higher than that of sweet potatoes. This sentence is also often used to describe a person who originally intended to save money, but ended up losing more.