December 8th of the lunar calendar is Laba Festival in China, and people have the habit of eating Laba porridge. Laba porridge is also called eight-treasure porridge. It is said that Laba Festival is the day when the Tathagata "becomes a Taoist". Buddhist temples should follow the short story of a herdess offering minced meat and take eight kinds of fragrant cereals and fruits to make porridge for the Buddha, so it is called eight-treasure porridge. Laba porridge is simple to make, rich in nutrition and sweet in taste. By the Song Dynasty, people were competing to imitate it, which was widely known and became a special food popular with the masses.

The eighth day of the twelfth lunar month is regarded as the day of Buddha's enlightenment by the Buddhist community. Monks and nuns in the temple often cook "eight-treasure porridge" with eight kinds of ingredients, such as preserved rice, white sesame seeds, coix seed, longan, jujube, oyster mushrooms and lotus seeds, and invite the surrounding villagers to join hands in holy communion and give them to the people's families to eat together, in order to show their sacrifice to the Buddha. Later, it gradually became a folk self-cooked eight-treasure porridge (called Laba porridge). The custom of eate Laba porridge came into being.

On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, in ancient times, temples cooked porridge with fragrant grains and fruits to worship Buddha, and people followed the example of cooking porridge like that on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month to avoid disasters and illnesses. In the Song Dynasty, the folk Laba porridge in Hangzhou was cooked with "golden pomelo, pine seed, milk mushroom, persimmon and chestnut" and rice. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Laba porridge was popular all over the country.

Laba porridge should be filled with eight kinds of raw materials in name, but it is also rigid, ranging from four or five kinds to more than a dozen kinds. In some areas, Laba porridge is cooked with steamed rice, old brown sugar, 18 kinds of nuts and soybeans, which is very solemn. With lotus seeds, ginkgo trees, peanut kernels, Chinese dates, pine nuts and ginger and cinnamon, rice is mixed to cook Laba porridge, which has the functions of warming hands and feet, nourishing and keeping healthy. It is also effective for laba porridge cooked by beans, gold needles, black fungus, tofu, mushrooms, etc. This kind is "fine laba".

Laba porridge eaten by ordinary families is boiled with vegetables, soybeans, cowpeas, tofu, carrots and water chestnuts, which means "coarse Laba" in plain English. In some areas in northern China that produce little or no rice, people don't eat Laba porridge, but just Laba noodles. The next day, make minced meat with all kinds of fruits and vegetables, roll out fresh noodles, and eat Laba noodles in the morning of the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month.

There are some mountainous areas where corn is produced. When it comes to Laba, corn is used instead of rice to make "Laba Mairener". The custom of farm house is that every Laba day, you need to cook Laba porridge. Laba porridge is to do everything in the house, but any delicious and edible food can be cooked in a pot in a proper place, such as soybeans, black beans, beans, lentils, hard eggs, taro, carrots and flour, corn flour, sorghum flour, barley flour, etc. It is often said that if you eat all, you will look all.

The twelfth lunar month is a year. You must eat all the whole grains and vegetables all the year round, so that you can have all-round nutrients. This is also a prayer for good health and prosperity of the whole family! Followed by eating all, harvesting all, after the twelfth lunar month, we will arrive in the new year. When eating Laba porridge, we will eat all the grains and vegetables that grew in the field at the beginning, and we will not abandon anything, which shows that the farm house loves everything it feels in the field and expects that all crops will look good and get a bumper harvest in the new year.