# Never tried Mexican or Chinese food ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 6, 2010, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525 "2010-03-06T14:13:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/61 "2010-03-09T01:04:54Z")
> [@tdn](#): > > Some people just don’t have the foodie gene. I don’t get it, but I accept it. > > I knew of a guy (related to the people in post 51) who was strictly a meat and potatoes man. Literally. Pasta was not food, and rice was downright weird to him. He wouldn’t even try pizza! Our roomie does not consider pizza dinner. She can pack away 5 slices and sit there and ask what is going to be for dinner. Not that she has an immense appetite, but because she considers it a bar/snack food and not a sit down dinner. back in 1969 we had thanksgiving dinner at Saito East [a japanese place in Manhattan] when we were meeting my dad for his retirement ceremony. I was the only person in my entire school other than some of the teachers who had ever eaten japanese food. Small town in the hinterlands of western NY state. The town population was 99% white [mostly WASP with some polish and italian millworkers thrown in, and that year we had a _gasp_ black family move into town] ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/62 "2010-03-09T01:09:22Z")
> [@devilsknew](#): > > So, ya leave them out… or you can substitute things that you do like. It’s a strifry, go wild. Then that wouldn’t be the recipe you posted. You said anyone would like it, someone said they didn’t like it, and you got all shocked. Well, there are ingredients in your recipe that some people dislike. I don’t know why **amarinth** didn’t like the look of the recipe, but she was objecting to this particular dish. She didn’t say anything about stir-fry as a class. ---
**Author:** ![amarinth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3be4f8/32.png) [@amarinth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amarinth)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/63 "2010-03-09T01:17:09Z")
> [@devilsknew](#): > > Really, you would never make a stir fry… your kids living in modern 21st. Century would never have any stirfry dish? Hell, they’d probably get it at a school or in a frozen dinner. You probably make something in your repetoire that could be considered a stirfry… you just don’t know it. Or maybe you just don’t like snowpeas? What exactluy is objectionable aboout the recipe… It probably takes all of twenty minutes to prepare and cook, is about 30 cents a serving, and tastes great? I’m not arguing that the recipe is exotic or uncommon, but your words were “that I bet any would enojy[sic]” Well, i wouldn’t enjoy it. I read the recipe, that isn’t a flavor profile that I like. To me, that does not “taste great” and it doesn’t even belong in the same paragraph as “delicious.” I would certainly not make it when there are plenty of other meals that I do like that are just as cheap, healthy, and easy to make. If I did have kids, they wouldn’t be eating that _at home_ because that’s simply not something I’d cook. Had your assertion been “stirfry isn’t strange,” I’d agree with you. These same hypothetical kids would probably be able to find not just stirfry, but that exact dish easily outside of the house (school, friends). And yes, thank you for telling me what I probably cook, but am too stupid to realize. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![devilsknew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@devilsknew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/devilsknew)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/64 "2010-03-09T01:52:56Z")
> [@amarinth](#): > > I’m not arguing that the recipe is exotic or uncommon, but your words were “that I bet any would enojy[sic]”: Hey, it’s an expression, it’s not some all encompassing truth. In its context, I thought, “Hey, I bet even the pickiest eater or someone who has never had chinese would like this dish. It’s got the sweet crispy fresh snow peas, chicken and the bare minimum holy trinity of Chinese cuisine- soy, garlic, and ginger… what’s not to like. Perfect starter stirfry?” Apparently the dish isn’t something you would like because you have such sophisticated tastes… :rolleyes: I’m sorry, but you werent my target audience. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/65 "2010-03-09T02:39:51Z")
even sven writes: \> Yeah, but 1960 was fifty freaking years ago. What have you been doing since? \> In the 1960s you also couldn’t find Doritos, Subway, Cup’o’Noodles or grocery \> store multi-grain bread. Somehow, we’ve managed to incorporate these (and \> thousands of other) once-exotic things into our diet. How the heck did people \> miss Mexican and Chinese food? Are you bothering to read my posts carefully at all? I was talking about what experience I had up to the point when I graduated from high school in 1970. At that point I had very little experience with ethnic food because I lived out in the middle of nowhere with no ethnic restaurants anywhere remotely close, because my parents knew almost nothing about ethnic foods, and because we were just scraping by economically. Since then I’ve worked very hard to try a wide a variety of ethnic cuisines as possible. In fact, much (and perhaps most) of my meals these days are from various types of ethnic cuisines. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/66 "2010-03-09T02:51:29Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Are you bothering to read my posts carefully at all? I was talking about what experience I had up to the point when I graduated from high school in 1970. At that point I had very little experience with ethnic food because I lived out in the middle of nowhere with no ethnic restaurants anywhere remotely close, because my parents knew almost nothing about ethnic foods, and because we were just scraping by economically. Since then I’ve worked very hard to try a wide a variety of ethnic cuisines as possible. In fact, much (and perhaps most) of my meals these days are from various types of ethnic cuisines. Sorry, that was meant at people in general, not you specifically. So many of these “I’ve never had ethnic food before” people trace it back to where they grew up, and that just doesn’t make sense to me. ---
**Author:** ![devilsknew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@devilsknew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/devilsknew)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/67 "2010-03-09T05:17:37Z")
> [@Disgruntled\_Penguin](#): > > Bingo for me and the amount of time I’d spend picking those bad boys off would kill the fun of eating the meal otherwise. I despise peas snow or otherwise. I always have even though it’s more of a psychological thing nowadays. When I accidentally eat them I can get my taste buds to maybe admit they’re not that hideous but my brain can still taste all the yuckiness that made me hate them in the first place. I can’t make myself overcome that so I end up picking them out a lot when I forget that people put them in everything. Luckily, my local Chinese delivery joint has gotten to know me well enough that if I forget to tell them to hold the peas they’ll ask if I’m sure that I want the peas this time. I really love that joint. Ya see, to me [peas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peas) and [snowpeas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_pea) (aka mangetout) are practically different vegetables. Snowpeas are just fresh, crisp, sweet little crunchy pods that, flavor and texture wise, taste nothing like peas from the pod. ---
**Author:** ![Disgruntled\_Penguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a8b319/32.png) [@Disgruntled\_Penguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Disgruntled_Penguin)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/68 "2010-03-09T06:56:22Z")
> [@devilsknew](#): > > Ya see, to me [peas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peas) and [snowpeas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_pea) (aka mangetout) are practically different vegetables. Snowpeas are just fresh, crisp, sweet little crunchy pods that, flavor and texture wise, taste nothing like peas from the pod. I can kinda see that but I end up picking them out nonetheless. I just never acquired a taste for them and they are called peas. I’ve revisited them off and on but don’t really like them. ---
**Author:** ![CrazyCatLady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dfb087/32.png) [@CrazyCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrazyCatLady)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/69 "2010-03-09T17:42:08Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Sorry, that was meant at people in general, not you specifically. So many of these “I’ve never had ethnic food before” people trace it back to where they grew up, and that just doesn’t make sense to me. That’s your cultural chauvinism showing. However many places in the world you’ve traveled, you still just. don’t. get. that there are large swathes of the US that _aren’t like where and when you grew up._ You’re looking at the issue having always lived in places with various large ethnic populations. When the food revolution of the '60’s hit those places, it hit them hard and fast because there was already infrastructure there for an explosion of ethnic restaurants. They were plentiful, and typically good and inexpensive because of competition, so people who live in those places eat there regularly and their kids get heavy exposure to the cuisine. But there are other places where there wasn’t, and still isn’t, a significant population of any ethnicity beyond that of the original settlers. The further inland you go, and the smaller the town, the smaller the ethnic community tends to be because there are fewer and fewer reasons for people to move there. The primary reason for minorities to move to such places is to open a restaurant. Things change much more slowly, too, so you can’t expect the same sort of changes to have happened in the intervening 40 years that have happened along the coasts and southern border. When I was in grade school, there was a whopping _one_ Asian family in the whole county, and no Hispanics at all. There were no ethnic restaurants because there were no ethnic people to open them. There were a few Chinese places in the larger town 30 miles away, but even there I don’t remember us having an actual Mexican restaurant beyond Taco Bell until I was in middle school or so. The town where I went to school got the Chinese place when I was in high school and a little Mexican place sometime after I got married. For reference, I’m 34, so we’re talking about the Chinese place going in in the early 1990’s and the Mexican place sometime within the past 7 years. This is not an unusual situation in small towns. So if you have a town like that, where the nearest ethnic food is a long drive away, and your parents don’t like it well enough to make the drive worth it, you simply don’t go there, and where else are you going to eat that cuisine? Even if your grocery store carries prepackaged processed stuff, which isn’t a sure bet, your parents aren’t likely to buy it because they’re just not that into the cuisine. And if you have one ethnic restaurant in town but your parents don’t like it, you don’t eat at that place growing up and again, where else are you going to get that cuisine? If your parents don’t like the food, they’re sure as hell not going to cook it at home. ---
**Author:** ![McGeek](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f4b2a3/32.png) [@McGeek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/McGeek)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2010, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/70 "2010-03-09T18:53:40Z")
Most of my 60s childhood was in a large city, and the rest in a college town. So sure, there was a variety of restaurants. And my parents definitely qualify as the liberal/intellectual elite and are interested in other cultures. But they were also children of the Depression. Eating at any restaurant was viewed as a luxury. My mom had been trained to work within a food budget, to plan meals, etc. Also my dad was a Methodist minister so when we did go to a restaurant, it would be a “family” restaurant that did not serve any alcohol. (He’s not personally judgmental about alcohol, but some in the church are, so he tends to avoid raising eyebrows.) In fact, in my childhood the phrase “eating out” meant going to the house of another family in our church, because it was customary to invite the minister’s family to dinner. Meanwhile, my parents considered me a terribly picky eater because I was reluctant to dig into mystery casseroles containing who knows what. My mom is a good cook and knows tons of recipes, but they are mostly in that same vein which I don’t like. So they assumed I would not like “exotic” foods at ethnic restaurants, and never even tried to take me. In college I fell in love with Chinese food. It’s SO funny that the OP of the thread that inspired this one thinks Chinese food resembles leftovers/scrapings from plates, since for me its appeal is that it seems just the opposite. To me it’s all that “american” food like meatloaf and casseroles and jello salads that seem like scrapings. because let’s face it, they ARE. That was part of the way my mom learned to stretch her food dollar: make the leftovers into a casserole, etc. I loved going to a Chinese restaurant where things were so fresh, chopped up only hours ago and only lightly stir-fried. You could look at your plate and identify everything in the dish; the vegetables actually look like vegetables and the meat is not overcooked (I don’t do the deep-fried ones like sweet-n-sour pork or general tso’s chicken). The sauce is light compared to heavy cream and cheese sauces used in some food I’d grown up with. I also eat other ethnic foods now, but can’t claim to be super-adventurous. For example, I dislike feta so when friends are discussing what kind of food we’re in the mood for, I never vote for Greek. So I understand if someone dislkes or is sensitive to ginger or garlic, they will not like Chincese food. I still don’t like a lot of stiff my folks love. They still think I am picky, and also extravagant with my food dollars. Mom still thinks of me as someone who “can’t cook”. Anyway, to me this all means you needn’t worry or try too hard to expose your kids to different types of food. After all, it wasn’t at all true that I stayed stuck in the only kinds of food I’d ever known. Just the opposite - I got away from that the first chance I got. You can’t make people like food, and if you try, you will probably make them dislike it, even hate it. My 7-yr-old actually eats more healthfully at home, but at restaurants feels reluctant to try new things and just wants chicken nuggets and french fries. We aren’t thrilled about that, but are trying not to be too pushy. We are slowly making progress. ---
**Author:** ![Martini\_Enfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/martini_enfield/32/11123_2.png) [@Martini\_Enfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martini_Enfield)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 7:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/71 "2010-03-10T07:03:29Z")
> [@CrazyCatLady](#): > > That’s your cultural chauvinism showing. However many places in the world you’ve traveled, you still just. don’t. get. that there are large swathes of the US that _aren’t like where and when you grew up._ > > […] > > So if you have a town like that, where the nearest ethnic food is a long drive away, and your parents don’t like it well enough to make the drive worth it, you simply don’t go there, and where else are you going to eat that cuisine? Even if your grocery store carries prepackaged processed stuff, which isn’t a sure bet, your parents aren’t likely to buy it because they’re just not that into the cuisine. And if you have one ethnic restaurant in town but your parents don’t like it, you don’t eat at that place growing up and again, where else are you going to get that cuisine? If your parents don’t like the food, they’re sure as hell not going to cook it at home. I don’t think anyone’s disputing that people are unlikely to have tried cuisine as kids that was either not available or their parents hated (Like I said, no Mexican food where I grew up, for example). But eventually people grow up and start doing their own thing, and I don’t think it’s out of line to be really surprised and raise eyebrows at people who’ve gotten well into their 20s or through University before trying something as ubiquitous as Chinese (or Mexican, depending where you are) food. ---
**Author:** ![CrazyCatLady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dfb087/32.png) [@CrazyCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrazyCatLady)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/72 "2010-03-10T16:42:25Z")
Well, if you’ve always been told something is greasy, or nasty, or too spicy or otherwise icky…it can take a while for some people to decide “hey, I want to drive across town to try that greasy, nasty, too spicy food for myself.” I know a lot of people I went to school with who, if the places right there in town hadn’t opened, would probably never eat Mexican or Chinese. I’m sure they’d have eventually tried it about as much as the OP of the inspiration thread had tried Chinese, but not enough to be able to really say they knew anything about Chinese/Mexican food. These are people who didn’t go to college, and still live within 5 miles of the house they grew up in and quite frankly don’t want to be bothered driving 30 miles to another town unless they truly need to do so. And then you have college situations like mine–no car, truly lousy public transport, and no Chinese restaurants within walking distance of campus. One of the cafeterias did have Chinese, but I can see people not wanting to eat that, because it smelled bad and looked worse. So if you didn’t eat at that cafeteria, or didn’t want to try something that looked and smelled that bad, and none of your friends with cars wanted to go eat Chinese…well, I guess you could have hunted out a place near the bus line and then dealt with the huge pain in the ass that was the bus system, but you’d have to be fairly dedicated to go through all that just for a meal. ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2010, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/73 "2010-03-10T22:05:57Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > When I was a freshman in college, one of my professors was in the habit of bribing his classes with food so we’d give good evaluations. We made field trips into the city for food, and our “final exam” was at a local Italian restaurant. One of my classmates decided that he’d be adventurous and order something exotic he’d never tried before… > > Spaghetti and meatballs. > > Apparently, for the entire time up until he went to college, his family never ate anything whatsoever but pizza, burgers, and cheesesteaks. Did he like it? > [@wolfman](#): > > One of my married friends has a kid about 12 years old. They are cool people, but very trendy and appearance concerned. They are always on the latest food trend, and have pulled the kid along with them. > Anyway about 2 years ago he was talking to Grandma, and she asked how he was eating. He told grandma in a whisper that a couple days ago he had been over at a friends house and had his favorite meal ever, **noodles and balls.** When the very Italian Grandma finally figured out the kid didn’t even know what to call Spaghetti and meatballs, because he had never seen them before, she was about ready to call child services for neglect. 🙂 Noodles and balls? 😛 Sounds like a euphemism for something else! Are you sure she wasn’t about to call child services for something else? 😃 > [@devilsknew](#): > > C’mon, for an extra $40 or $50 dollars- $100 dollars I could make any Chinese Buffet/carryout positively gourmet for the day. It seems like a positive willingness to keep their food subquality. Some foods are supposed to be that way. Stinky Tofu is a dish traditionally made with near rotten tofu. It was very good when I had it in Taiwan. Quite different with America’s health food codes, the artificial rottenness just didn’t taste the same. Though it might all be in my head, I still eat it ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2010, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/74 "2010-03-11T00:12:27Z")
> [@CrazyCatLady](#): > > When I was in grade school, there was a whopping _one_ Asian family in the whole county, and no Hispanics at all. Where is that? I thought Mexicans were everywhere, just like Black and White people. I’m routinely amazed to hear people say that they grew up in all-\ towns. It just doesn’t quite compute with my experience at all. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2010, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/75 "2010-03-11T03:05:03Z")
When I was growing up, I never met a black until I entered college (in 1970). (By “met” in what I’m saying here, I’m not talking about just passing on the street. I’m talking about some sort of significant interaction.) In my senior year in high school, when I went to the sectional wrestling tournament, a rare occasion in my high school experience when I might interact with other students from as far as seventy or eighty miles away where I grew up, I briefly met someone from whose name I could deduce that he was Jewish. This was the only time in high school I met a Jew. There were occasionally a few Mexican-Americans in my school district. None of them (nor their families) lived there permanently. Their parents worked for people who did truck farming, and they were migrant laborers who spent part of the year in Ohio and the rest in Texas. I recall there being only one Catholic in my grade year in high school, although there may have been a few others. This was not because I lived in a rich suburb where all the above lived in some other poorer part of the area. As I have said, I grew up on a farm outside a hick town in northwest Ohio. Some of the students at my school came from even poorer families than mine. After all, at least my father had a solid factory job, although it had to stretch over a family of ten. Nor was there any obvious prejudice at my school. Had you uttered any racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, or anti-Hispanic comments in public at my school, I suspect you would have been sent to the principal. There wasn’t much prejudice because most of the people I grew up with almost never met anyone who wasn’t a Protestant of northern European ancestry (and probably were from a family who had lived in that general area for generations). My father had more opportunity to meet a diverse group at his job at the factory than I did at school. The workers at the factory were partly drawn from families who had lived in the surrounding rural areas for generations, partly drawn from whites who had moved north recently from Appalachia, and partly drawn from blacks who had moved north recently from the South. He would sometimes talk about how he liked working with the blacks and the hillbillies. And he meant it. My father has always gotten along with other people well, and it didn’t bother him that some of his workers were relatively recent immigrants to the area. My family was actually more cosmopolitan than average for the area. My parents took us on vacations various places in the eastern U.S. I recall visiting New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and various places in Florida. Some people I grew up with had traveled much less than this. I didn’t leave the U.S. east of the Mississippi River until almost the end of my senior year in college, when I visited Austin, Texas to talk with people in the graduate department where I would be studying. I didn’t leave the U.S. until I passed through parts of Canada on a bus trip while I was a grad student. I was never outside of North America until I moved to England when I was 35. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2010, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525/76 "2010-03-11T03:28:02Z")
I forgot to mention that I also never met anyone of Asian descent or American Indian descent until I graduated from high school. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/never-tried-mexican-or-chinese-food/531525.md?page=3)