Having lived five years in China, these “exotic” ingredients are pretty uncommon. Sure, they’re available at places that specialize in weird shit, but the vast majority of the population get their meals as restaurants and grocery stores with fairly normal ingredients. The strangest thing you’re likely to find in a Chinese grocery store are live frogs. (On the good side, most aquatic things can be purchased live.)
Roasted scorpions? That’s a tourist thing. Not just western tourists, but Chinese tourists, too. They’ll go to a night market in Beijing where they’ve heard of roasted scorpion, and they’ll try it. That’s definitely not an everyday thing.
I’ve had some strange shit in China, e.g., ocular muscles and sheep testicles, but you run of the mill restaurant is going to serve pork with vegetables, seafood with vegetables, chicken with vegetables, and sometimes beef with vegetables. Lots of rice in the central and south; lots of wheat in the north. Noodles from various starches everywhere. And dog, but only if you’re in a dog region, and only if you specifically look for it.
Chinese are less disgusted by certain things than we are. Viscera is a lot more common, for example. I told a guide once that some ducks looked delicious, and he told me I was like typical Chinese thinking about how I might consume anything. But in general, viscera aside, most Chinese food you will ever encounter is made from pretty standard ingredients.
My post was about how white Americans vampire off of other cultures and obsess about authenticity. In response, he brought up two black artists for some reason, kind of proving my point.
I have to say that since returning to the US and Hawaii, I’ve grown very fond of the Panda Express chain.
Hell, I’ve known plenty of Americans who have never heard of any of these either.
They are. I called them Vienna sausages because that’s what they resembled, but they don’t come from a can and are really quite tasty. I enjoyed the occasional plate of American fried rice myself. It may not resemble anything found in the US, but that didn’t stop it being tasty. But many’s the time I would order it, and I felt the waitress was giving me a knowing look, like sure, the American is ordering his national dish.
I went to a Szechwan restaurant in SF’s Chinatown some years ago with a pair of exchange students (and their host family).
They didn’t look at the menu and directed a torrent of Mandarin at the waitress.
We got a lot of weird stuff I have never seen before or since. Some was really strange, some was good, and I have no idea what it was or how to order it again.
He’s a dumbass making generalized statements and labeling food “Chinese” and then grading it. Look at the size of China and then you’ll understand that there isn’t anything for the clown to label “Chinese”.
One thing about Chinese food in the US is that a lot of the dishes were actually invented in the US – that’s always been the case. Part of the problem is that if you are going to be using fresh ingredients, you have to make do with whatever is actually available in your locale. Substitutions and experiments are going to happen. It’s not about having a dish that is completely authentic, as much as it is being authentic in style.
As a parallel to this, when I was in Taiwan, they had, basically 3 or 4 standard flavors of ice cream. We visited a university cafeteria, and the only available choices that I can recall were (literally) Red bean, White Bean or Black bean. As I said, people make do with whatever ingredients are available. If you are out in Taipei, on the street, there will be lots of vendors selling shaved ice, with one of those beans as a topping.
Another thing about my trip to Taiwan – unless you go into a more expensive restaurant, dishes tend to be very plain and simple – a bowl with rice or noodles, with one protein on top. We never saw anything that in any way resembled what passes here in New York for Cantonese or Szechuan or Hunan style food. We did have one meal with lots of the in-laws where there was some dim sum. But that was more of an expensive banquet, not a meal at a regular restaurant.
Can’t get authentic Australian Chinese Food here anymore. If you really want it, I’d really recommend going interstate to some holiday region where old people who don’t normally go to restaurants eat out, and want traditional fare. I don’t think young people in Melbourne would even recognize traditional authentic Australian Chinese Food if it was served to them. (“Is this a regional cuisine? Or just crap?”}
In Melbourne, there are just so many Chinese speaking people who don’t like authentic Australian Chinese Food, that it’s completely revolutionized the business.
Whateves. The thing I hate most about the decline of shopping malls in America, is I can no longer get those Cajun/Asian food dishes. Oh how I long for that stir fry bourbon chicken!!
Next Zimmerman’s going to scream at us that spaghetti & meatballs isn’t authentic Italian. And I’m sure in a couple years we’ll be hearing from him that Tex-Mex is doing Mexican all wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to experiment with different cuisines. That’s how fusion dishes come about. Bourdain always said he found the best foods on the border lines where different cultures butted into each other. I remember him loving taco rice in Okinawa.
Zimmern’s looking down his nose at American Chinese food - it’s just such a weird take from the, “If it looks good, eat it!” guy.
I’d love to follow her when she comes to the US, starts casting about looking for some genuine American fried rice, and gets these blank looks.
In a similar vein, when I was a teenager and the chain was more popular, I’d imagine an Austrian tourist stopping at Der Wienerschnitzel for a taste of home and being keenly disappointed.
Your last sentence reads like it is the same Americans giving them shit and demanding the shit. If it isn’t, the sentence doesn’t have much of a point. It’s not hypocritical for someone to have opinions that differ from their peers.
I originally didn’t actually notice your emphisis on WHITE Americans, but speaking as a decidedly, distinctly NON WHITE American, one who has spent time in well over 25 different countries (15 in just the past 3 years alone) in my 48 years here on Earth, to claim that America, “WHITE” or otherwise, has created no original “culture” (however one might choose to define that) is laughably, unbelievably ignorant.
Whether or not they are cultures you or I might choose to personally identify with or claim as your own, from the Bluegrass & Bourbon culture of rural Appalachia to the California Surfers of the 1950’s & 60’s or the Summer of Love hippies, American (and yes, my 3 examples are primarily of WHITE American origin) these are all well known and both celebrated and imitated (for better or worse) worldwide, and to claim otherwise shows a lack of knowlege about both American culture and the things billions of non-Americans associate with the USA.
I’ve had Chinese food all over Asia and all of it had melded with local cuisine and the only people who worried about whether it was authentic or not were white Americans;
I proposed (somewhat jokingly) that the reason white Americans obsess over whether some cultural artifact (in this case Chinese food) is authentic is because their own culture is bland, so they feed off other cultures; and
White America often then takes ownership of the new cultural artifact (bringing it back to the subject of the OP).
You see? I made a small joke about the Gap and Jay Leno being the pinnacle of white American culture (two very boring and bland things) and then tied it back to why a very white chef in very white Minnesota felt empowered to tell Chinese restaurateurs they are doing it wrong. Then you clearly jumped in without reading the earlier posts and how my comments fit in to them so that you could be outraged by your misunderstanding.
No, when you specifically claim that WHITE AMERICA doesn’t have “…any culture of our own, so we vampire off of other cultures to make ourselves less boring…” it tells me your opinion is from ignorance and very likely a deep-seated cultural insecurity, (not uncommon in Americans who have lived abroad for a short period of time who upon returning to live in the U.S. are desperate to show everyone their newfound worldly “sophistication”) and so it should be given no serious consideration.
My mistake was to waste time pointing out your obvious error.
http://www.menusoftexas.com/phatkyrestaurant_dinner_menu.html
That said, what I think he’s trying to say is that a lot of people conceive of Pei Wei/PF Changs as authentic Chinese food, and think of Panda Express and lesser restaurants as Americanized, when in fact, all of them are Americanized to a drastic degree.
The thing is, America does have its own culture, but it’s a fusion culture. You know why the food in New Orleans is so good? Because it has influences from the French, the Spanish, the English, the natives from at least two completely different parts of the continent, the Caribbean, and Africa. We steal everything we can from every culture we can find, not because we don’t have our own culture, but because we do, and that’s how our own culture is formed.
No one would argue against the obvious fact that culture diffuses from place to place, that is not remotely controversial, and everyone has been trapped a party and heard the self-impressed cultural connoisseur blather on about “Did you know that pizza isn’t even originally, authentically Italian, tomatoes weren’t even introduced to Italy until after George Washington discovered America!” but to say that America, even more specifically “White America” has created NO freestanding culture of note is simply, factually, 100% wrong.
I guess the reason I didn’t think of it earlier was because I personally, despite being born & raised in Heartland America in the 1970’s, have zero connection with the whole Super Hero/Comic Book culture that is so omnipresent today, but despite the fact that it is all based on original work from overwhelmingly “white” Americans back in the 1940’s and 50’s, almost anywhere on Earth that you go in today’s 2019, from Sydney to Sao Paulo, from Santiago to Stockholm to Stuttgart, you see children, teens, 20 and 30-somethings as well as people in their 50’s and 60’s wearing shirts, hats and bags emblazoned (in English) with likenesses of their favorite superhero characters. It is simply everywhere, and it is (for better or worse) 100% All American, and at least originally created by white Americans, although why that part is apparently important to some is lost on this decidedly non-white American, who hasn’t set foot back in the U.S. for a few years now.
