You are correct. I do not understand either of them
I guess my intellect is slipping. 
I meant to say “I do not understand a lack of either of them”.
I think that one thing people should understand is that there was a food revolution in the U.S. during the 1960’s, and those of us who grew up before it had spread to the entire country didn’t feel the effects of it until after we were adults. For me, that meant that it didn’t affect me until after I graduated from high school in 1970. I’m not kidding in the least when I talk about how limited our family’s food choices were when I was a kid. This was partly because we lived way out in the sticks and partly because we were barely scraping by.
The food revolution encompassed a lot of things. Partly it was the publication of Julia Child’s cookbooks starting in the early 1960’s. Partly it was because it slowly became acceptable to eat cuisines that you didn’t grow up with. I’m told that there was a Chinese restaurant in New York City that in 1969 became the first one in the U.S. to translate its Chinese menu and offer it to non-Chinese. In the 1960’s, the nearest Chinese restaurant to where I grew up was probably about 55 miles away. Now there’s one about 6 miles away.
I have a friend who was born in New York City in about 1942. He tells me that in the 1950’s you still had to go to certain neighborhoods to find pizza parlors. So this food revolution was going on everywhere in the U.S. It hit big cities first and slowly moved outwards to the rest of the U.S. So, yes, really, it was hard to find ethnic cuisines in the U.S. in the 1960’s.
Go to China, and you’ll see lots of “Western Restaurants” designed for Chinese appetites- these will bear little to no resemblance to anything Westerners actually eat (unless you like to crack a fried egg on top of your steak.) Is the West holding out on them? Of course not. Chinese “Western food” is a cuisine of it’s own right, and it seems like Chinese people prefer it to actual Western food. Indeed, most Chinese people express a strong dislike of Western food- especially our great specialty, cheese. In bigger cities, you can find actual Western restaurants with regional focuses and (for China) exotic ingredients- just like with Chinese food in the west. People sell what there is a market for.
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?
My parents grew up in the 50s and 60s, in small suburban houses with lots of children. Their ethnic food was Slovak, because their grandmas were Slovak. But they only really got to eat Slovak food when they visited their grandmas because they had the time and patience to make it. Mom and dad’s moms were unavailable as cooks so there was a lot of bland convenience food being served (canned tuna, white bread, casseroles).
Dad did go to Vietnam but he preferred MREs to local food. Dry, bland food was comfort food to him.
So when I was a kid, it turns out we were poor too. We ate what our two Boomer parents grew up eating when they were poor. That was fine with dad because that’s what he wanted to eat. Meatloaf, casseroles, hash. He prefers iceberg lettuce and Campbell’s soup. We did have spaghetti, tho, because it is cheap and easy. Our exciting dinner out was McDonald’s.
So, even tho the 60s were fifty years ago, people who grew up then cooked for the people who grew up in the 80s and the cycle continues on. Hell, my grandpa grew up in the 20s and he loved bland food and that influenced my dad who influenced us.
If you line us up by picky-ness, you’ve got grandpa as the worst, then my dad, then me and my brother. Three generations and nobody’s palates grew because they were influenced by picky old white guys.
Visiting Olive Garden with grandpa is truly a sight to behold. Dad, too. Next to them, I’m a world-travelling gourmand
You’d bet wrong.
If I ever have kids, that’s one of many dishes they probably won’t get at home.
I find it amusing that there are so many mentions of “chicken feet” as being weird or strange (and only Chinese food?).
While I am picky enough to not actually eat them (but have used them in soups and stews) I can’t possibly be the only one with Southern (US) roots and a southern grandma who cooked them on a regular basis. I know they are pretty easy to find in almost any grocery store back home too (that would be South Carolina) even if they have fallen out of favor. I always think of chicken feet as “poor people food” as opposed to weird or strange.
I guess it’s about how you view food and eating.
If food is only fuel that we eat to keep ourselves going, then I suppose it doesn’t matter what you eat.
But for many of us, food is more than that. Many people take great pleasure from discovering new flavors and dishes. Some people even consider cooking an art form.
In that context, a parent who does not allow their child access to cuisines as ubiquitous as Mexican and Chinese seems a little parochial.
Are we talking about nowadays, or when we were kids?
When I was a kid ethnic restaurants were definitely not ubiquitous. This was the 60s and early 70s.
Nobody in my family knew how to cook anything except the recipes they had brought with them from the old world: Hungarian Jewish.
Certainly nowadays, but to a certain extent whenever. Ethnic restaurants weren’t as common as they are now, but they certainly weren’t non-existent. I grew up in the 60s and 70s too, (in a small town in Western Kentucky) but managed to try Chinese, Italian and Mexican foods long before I graduated from HS.
I’m not criticizing anyone for not trying something that isn’t available to them. But there’s a wonderful world of food out there to be experienced. The comment I responded to struck me as not very different from saying something like, “My kids can read People magazine. It keeps them literate and up to date on today’s culture. Why should I care if that’s all they read?”
Never having tried Chinese food strikes me as very odd. But I think that’s partly because I’ve been culinarily curious since around age 12, and I tend to befriend like-minded people. And, while there was a culinary revolution in the 60s, Chinise restaurants have been in the US since, what, the 1840s? It’s not like it’s a new thing. Never having tried pho I can see, but never having tried an eggroll?
I’m not judging here, but it’s just really far out of my reality. EVERYONE likes Chinese food!
I do remember going to a Chinese place with some people years ago. They normally loved it, but they had only been to one Chinese restaurant their entire lives. They were not terribly well-travelled people. To them Chinese food was take-out chow mein sandwiches. This was a dish that they were sure was served in every Chinese restaurant. I somehow talked them into going - gasp - somewhere else!
It was a shock to them. They had never heard of exotic things like shrimp in lobster sauce, lo mein, or egg foo yong. They were also surprised that they couldn’t get chow mein sandwiches. When I mentioned that I was getting the mu shi, they all recoiled in horror. How could I possibly eat something called mushy? It SOUNDS gross!
I was able to guide them through the menu, and they all ended getting something they liked. I opened up a new world for them that night.
I always found it weird, too. I mean, hell, I was four when I came to this country, and hated everything there was to eat for years. I came from eating flatbreads and spicy lentils and veggies and now you want me to eat this bland unappetizing thing called a burger? And yet my parents somehow taught me to eat this strange white people food and now I could kill for a really good steak. Mmm, dead cow, I am such a bad Hindu, yadda, yadda.
I’m not saying people should always try EVERYTHING but I don’t understand why people limit themselves, either. I don’t care if you don’t like X food - be it Indian, or Chinese. What I hate is when people don’t like ANY foods except for their comfort foods. Friendships end really fast but when it’s coworkers it sucks.
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!
The poster who inspired this thread actually had tried eggrolls before, as well as fried rice and some other unspecified basic Chinese dishes. She clarified in the other thread that while she’d never had Chinese food growing up (her mother didn’t like it), she had been exposed to some Chinese food, presumably cheap take-out, while she was in college.
Ah, got it. I guess I didn’t get that far into that thread. (Or I forgot that.)
Thinking about my own history with Chinese food, I didn’t get much growing up either. We’d sometimes go to a Polynesian restaurant, but I identified that as Polynesian. And sometimes we’d have La Choy chow mein with those crispy noodles. To me that was what Chinese food was. (Yuck!) I was out of college before I had the more typical foods.
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?
The point of my recipe was really addressing John Mace’s ridiculous assertion that ethnic foods are somehow “exotic”, expensive, time consuming, or outside of the average American’s ability. Hate to break it to you but stirfry is pretty much as American at this point as Pizza, Tacos, Hot Dogs, Hamburgers and Apple Pie.
Most kitchens have the ingredients in them, the two “exotic” ingredients are ginger and snowpeas, and even I can walk into the nearest Walmart or Grocery store out here in BFE and get a bag of frozen snowpeas and some ginger for around three bucks.
That recipe sounds tasty enough to me, but I’ve known several people who hated either garlic or ginger.
So, ya leave them out… or you can substitute things that you do like. It’s a strifry, go wild.
Wow… I never really realized until I was an adult just how lucky I had it growing up in southwest Houston (Alief).
We had a enourmous number of Mexican and Tex-Mex joints, both expensive and cheap, lots of Chinese and Vietnamese places, some Mediterranean places, and some Italian-ish places, as well as the usual American-style places, BBQ joints and seafood places.
What I didn’t have until I was an adult or at least in college was Thai food, Indian food and some types of S. American food, mostly because those restaurants weren’t common in Alief until after I was in college.
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.
Lima beans have been relegated to a worse status as I literally haven’t eaten them since I was a preteen and I never intend to again ( I’ve made peace with most other beans and have developed a liking for a lot of them ), if given an ultimatum between them and peas I’m eating the lima beans. I hate peas that much and I think the fact that I find them everywhere as opposed to having to order them fuels my hatred of them.