We went overseas a few years ago to visit my (Chinese) wife’s parents. Her mother likes to cook Chinese food, naturally.
“Mmm. I love Chinese food. Can’t wait to finally eat some authentic stuff that your mother makes.”
So I ate “authentic” Chinese food for most of the three weeks we were there. It was visually unappetizing tasted disgusting. 
I didn’t know what the hell I was eating most of the time.
Did I mention it was visually unappetizing and tasted disgusting?
I worked with a woman from China and she had some things she liked and some she didn’t. Pizza was okay as long as it wasn’t too extremely cheesy. Hot dogs and hamburgers and bagels were fine.
She didn’t really care for desserts though. She would politely nibble a bit of someone’s birthday cake and ice cream, but she really thought they were too sweet.
SOme of my fave menu items from places I saw in China:
Soup with hog intestine
Fat of SNow Toad soup
Yu Jelly with silver fungus
Pidgen (sp?) in many forms
Snake soup
Bird’s Nest Soup
Beef Lung soup
A Chinese guy once told me that Chinese will eat anything with wings except an airplane, and anything with legs except the table.
I once saw “Cock Testicle Soup” on a menu in a Chinese restaurant. I think they meant cock as in chicken.
I have also been to China—to many different parts of it, in fact: Hong Kong (pre-changeover), Guangzhou (also known as Canton), Beijing, Xi’an, Chongqing (known to Americans as Chunking), Chengdu, and Leshan.
The only thing that the food really has in common from one part of China to another is that it’s generally small enough to be eaten with chopsticks, and if not, cohesive enough to eat with the fingers. The food we had in Xi’an was very, very hot; the food in Leshan was very colorful. (I admit I chickened out a few times and went to a western-style hotel to get a plate of spaghetti or a glass of cold unsweetened milk.)
Think of the size of China and then imagine what “American” cooking might be called, ranging from BBQ ribs to clam chowder to deep-fried turkey to baked salmon, from collard greens and okra gumbo to grilled halibut and ostrich steak. We don’t have a nationwide American food except that which everybody agrees is fatty, unhealthy, and substandard: McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell. Chinese cooking seemed to me to be very wide-ranging as well, but barbarians that we are, we ignore regional boundaries and call it all “Chinese.”
I’m not sure it can be proven that the Chinese are more or less adventurous in what they eat than the average American, or the average Briton or German. However, I will say that it surprised me to learn upon arriving in Thailand that our tour guide wanted to know if we liked Chinese food—but nowhere in China were we ever offered anything else.
Yet they balk at eating cheese?
It’s not lactose intolerance. It’s cultural bias. I’ve had several (American) friends and coworkers marry Chinese immigrants and nearly all of them describe their wives finding cheese unappetizing.
I think that in any population, you are going to find a large number of unadventurous eaters, enough of a proportion to make it seem like “all of them” are picky eaters. They were brought up eating Jellied Frog Lungs and Pickled Whale Penis, and that’s what they find appetizing. Put a gob of aged, curdled milk pressed between two starchy planes lubricated with pure milkfat and then seared (a grilled cheese sandwich) in front of them and they are going to not perceive it as food.
Similarly, in a population brought up eating grilled cheese and tomato soup, you’re not going to find many who are going to arrive in Asia and take immediately to Kim Chi and Tofu. So it will seem like all Americans are picky eaters even if there are a lot of us will try and even like local dishes.
It’s not the same word, and the word is not German, it’s Turkish. Note the long standing relationship/tension between Turks and Greeks, it extends to food. Each has a different version of a “spinning” meat dish. They are similar but not quite the same. To me, the Greek version (which I grew up with) is tastier. The meat is more moist and there is more sauce. The Turkish version is a bit drier but they have more different toppings. And most Doenerkebap places also have several other Turkish dishes, while most Greek takeouts near me have Gyros, maybe souvlaki, and then American things like hoagies or hamburgers. Doener is very common throughout Germany and I also ate at a few in Amsterdam. IIRC my Turkish friend said the word means to rotate (think of the Greek “gyro”, as in gyrate or gyroscope).
There’s a bit of a reason for this. In Thailand it’s very “upscale” to be Chinese. Chinese food is ridiculously expensive, and is pretty bland (think what we might call “Cantonese” in the USA). For comparison a Filipino colleague (of Chinese heritage) and I ate in a Chinese restaurant one night. It was about $50 per person. No alcohol, but several course and we were stuffed. For the same $50 I could feed 5-10 people in a nice Thai restaurant (also without alcohol). And it’s not as if the ingredients are particulary hard to come by, like Italian or American food, it’s just a status thing. Almost all Thai people will tell you that they are Chinese. And it’s partially true for most of them, but not as much for some as others. On the other hand none will admit to being Isaarn or Laos, even though a good number of people in Bangkok are, since that is not a high status thing.
There has been a number of threads on this topic, and several posters provided cites showing that a very high number of asians are indeed lactose-intolerant (or rather that an unusualy high number of people of european descent are lactose-tolerant, while mammals normally become lactose-intolerant after weaning, IIRC).
Take milk, wait until it kind of curdles, sometimes let mold grow in it, let it get hard, leave it around for a few years.
Now if you didn’t grow up eating cheese, how appetizing would you find it?
Purely anecdotal data point: I worked with a middle aged (mainland) Chinese woman who had been here in the US for 15 years or so. She was quite fond of Mexican food.
What kind of meat is in those things? Not soylent green, I hope.
Aesiron when I worked at the donair shop the couple I work for said it was ground beef and spices pressed tightly onto this tube thing. The tube was then slipped onto the machine cooking it evenly as it went (like a rotisserie only upright).
According to what I’ve heard the difference between gyros and donairs are that gyros are lamb and donairs are beef, though more and more often I hear gyro and donair being used interchangably. I think I might get one for lunch tomorrow.
thinks this thread amusing… one group talking donairs, one chinese food
Purely anecdotal:
The couple who run the mom&pop shop in my apt. building are mainland Chinese and arrived here as adults. I once asked them which was, in their opinion, the best chinese place in town. I hoped they could give me heads up about some obscure place that I hadn’t found. She admitted she didn’t know, because they only went to western restaurants when going out for a meal “we eat Chinese at home all the time, why should we go to a restaurant to eat it.”
I frequently see her eating ham and cheese sandwiches, btw.
The local donner kebab place here offers chicken, lamb or beef.
I almost exculsively lived on donner kebabs at two seperate times in my life. Once as a drunken 17/18 yr old in Sydney (well they were the only place open at 3am!) and once during a drunken 6 mths stay on Crete as a 19 yr old (well they were cheap!..bacon and eggs was a once a week luxuary). Donner kebabs are all good, all the food groups in one deal, cheap and open all hours! Who could ask for more?
I have a donner kebab at least once month now to celebrate all those times I know were good but that I can’t quite remember :D. Yum yum.
I remember around 15 years ago or so, here in Hong Kong, package tours overseas (Paris/Rome/London in 1 week sort of deal) were advertised with promises of ‘no foreign food’. Such was people’s dread of potatoes, steak and boiled cabbage. Can’t say I blame them. Going back around 2 decades or so, people in the UK would gag at the idea of European food - ‘greasy with loads of garlic’.
Things are changing. As mentioned above, this is a common cultural trait. Nowadays the Chinese - at least the trendy middle class - are into wine and cheese, and you can buy coriander and squid in British supermarkets. I even got my mother to eat sushi last time she was here - had to pull out the Browning 9mm semi auto and press it to her head, but at least she did it.
Well, it is all about expanding one’s horizons. Good for Mom! (and you). 
(Laughing Lagomorph, who can’t picture his mother ever eating sushi)
You left out my personal favorite: Three Penis Soup (Sheep, Ox and Pig, if you’re wondering). This was in a small sidewalk place in Guangzhou.
P.S. Eating in China is interesting for me. I tell them I don’t eat meat–and they say “Oh, this doesn’t have any meat, just intestines, liver…” It does give me an out on the 3 penis soup, since I can say “I don’t eat any part of an animal” without appearing culinarily unadventerous.
It seems clear to me why there aren’t German, Italian or French places in China. In the US, we have a huge immigrant population, from peole that moved here last year to people that emigrated before we had a country. They bring their food with them. Because of this, they open resturants that serve their foods. And then, people from different places also patronize them. And all of a sudden, you have a half Irish, half German guy that wants real Mexican food and a thirteenth generation American of English extraction that really wants to go for Thai food. There simply aren’t enough westerns there to open up places to cater to themselves in ghettoized communities. Are there any, communities of westerns that is, in China. A Germantown in Hong Kong, a Little France in Bejing?