Chinese Food

Ni Hao! So I’ve been a bit tardy on writing anything about my China trip for the blog. When people ask about me about the trip, most ask about the food first.

The food was interesting and generally not too bad and sometimes very good. At the dinners various dishes were served family style on a turntable and it’s a long ordeal with everyone just taking small portions at a time. As the turntable was spun I thought of this as “The Wheel of Fortune”, or at times “The Wheel of Misfortune.” The misfortunate part was that if the Chinese saw that you weren’t trying a certain item, guess where they positioned the dish with the next spin? And sometimes they would take the additional step of jumping up out of their chair to serve you up one of their favorites like, say, chicken feet. The Chinese were mostly very polite, and at meals they watch and wait for you to take your food first so you feel obligated to dig in so they can get on with their meal.  That didn't leave me a lot of time to try and determine what exactly I was dealing with.

I’m not proficient with chopsticks so I would also get regular silverware at dinner. One night the waitress (fu wu yuan) brought me out a nice king size meat fork. Most of the meat dishes had lots of bones mixed in, this doesn’t slow them down much as it’s acceptable to just hock the bone out and spit it out on your plate and move on. This practice came in handy a few times when I tasted something I didn’t like, and even if the item (such as a vegetable) didn’t have bones I took advantage of the setting to go ahead and spit the landmine out. Also, at the nicer dinners the staff would constantly be replacing the plates, so it provided a good opportunity to leave stuff behind without it accumulating too much. No need to hide it in the napkin!

On the positive side, most things I tried were fine and tasted very fresh. Sometimes a vegetable or piece of meat was maybe a little sketchy looking but the mystery Chinese spices often made up for the shortcomings. For the first week I frequently asked what certain dishes were, but that became largely pointless because they would answer in generic terms such as “seafood” or “vegetable.” They also used the term “steak” very liberally, any part of the cow was basically called steak. Some of the better things I had included: lobster, crocodile soup, glass noodles, bamboo, various pickled vegetables and dumplings with unknown filling (one exception, the green dumplings of chewing gum consistency were nasty).

I did eat Western style food about 25% of the time including KFC and Pizza Hut, both of which are very popular in the bigger cities of China. We walked through a grocery store and the meat dept was interesting with a selection of live toads, turtles, eels and lots of unpackaged butchered meat sitting out in the open. The craziest food sights were at the open markets (I passed on the duck heads). On one occasion while walking by a food booth I smelled something so disgusting it nearly made me ill. I had no idea what it was and didn’t want to look back and investigate any further.

Anyways, if I ever go back to China I won’t be as concerned about the food – the traffic and risk of accidents is a much bigger problem and I’ll make a separate posting about that. All the Chinese food I had was very different than American style Chinese with much less in the way of sweet tastes, but more in the way of different seasonings and broths. Dessert was usually fruit and I drank more green tea in two weeks than I had in my lifetime. All of the tea was served loose, so I imagine more than once I opened my mouth to talk with green sprigs or mini flowers stuck to my teeth. I have to say that the worst food I experienced the entire trip was actually on the airplane – United’s food is terrible!