Never tried Mexican or Chinese food ?

Cafe Society
61

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]

62

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.

63

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:

64

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.

65

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.

66

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.

67

Ya see, to me peas and snowpeas (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.

68

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.

69

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.

70

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.

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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.

72

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.

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Did he like it?

Noodles and balls? :stuck_out_tongue: Sounds like a euphemism for something else! Are you sure she wasn’t about to call child services for something else? :smiley:

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

74

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-<insert ethnicity> towns. It just doesn’t quite compute with my experience at all.

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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.

76

I forgot to mention that I also never met anyone of Asian descent or American Indian descent until I graduated from high school.