At that time, the Qing government was in danger, and Cixi was still eating lavishly. As we all know, an ordinary person doesn't need so many dishes to eat, and he doesn't need many people to serve him. He saves as much as he can, but he doesn't waste a drop of food when eating, because if he wasted food at that time, he ate the last meal and didn't have the next.
But Cixi doesn't think so. Cixi thinks that she can eat as much as she can when eating. What I'm talking about here is not the number of meals, but the number of meals. The more kinds of food, the more delicious food he can taste and the more money he can spend. At that time, as a person who would enjoy it very much, these were her daily necessities.
However, in addition to inviting her own court chefs to cook, Cixi also recruited some chefs from outside, because these chefs can cook dishes that are not available locally, which will make the food varied and never repeat. Cixi would let them cook their own lunch, and in every lunch, they would spend a lot of ingredients to cook, which was not a small expense in the Qing government at that time.
In fact, if you eat all these dishes, it is still better, because ladies-in-waiting and eunuchs can eat these dishes, but Empress Dowager Cixi did not treat them like this. Not only did she not eat a few mouthfuls of these dishes, but others wanted to eat them, and she was not qualified to eat them. The rest would be thrown away.
It can be seen that Cixi's eating style is indeed extravagant. Compared with ordinary civilian families, she is simply extravagant and wasteful.