Im on a letter writing streak. REgarding cooking shows

[Lilitu]

OK i been doing some googling, its true that Chinese food has a bad reputation in the uk, with fatty meat and heavy rice dishes, yet in china "calories" isn't a word as food is seen only as nourishment and real Chinese food is very good for you. What do you make of this?

I think the problem with Chinese food that caters to western tastes is that it's not actually anything...

mainly because, just like how people say "I can speak Chinese", "I can cook Chinese" doesn't mean anything. 'Chinese' isn't really a cuisine, and neither is 'Chinese' an actual spoken language - you don't speak chinese, you speak Mandarin, or Cantonese or Hokkien etc.

Imagine if somebody said "I cook European food." That tells you nothing. Chinese restaurants that Chinese people go to, or Chinese restaurants in China are all regional cuisine: of which there are countless varieties (I won't list them all. There are main categories, which roughly correspond to the linguistic regions: chuang, yue, hui, Lu, Min, Su, Xiang, Zhe. And those are just the ethnically Han regions, that doesn't even count Western Muslim cuisine, Tibetan, Mongolian or Inland Koreans, Hmong, among others.)

Anyway... if you want to have actually good Chinese food, it'll cost you first of all... Good chinese restaurants tend to be very expensive and only suit large dinner parties. And the good dishes tend to scare away many people, because they'll have things like tendon stew, and pig's ear, or stuff like that.

I've not had takeaway chinese food in a long time... it's just really horrible.

As for health... well, again it's varied. There is a specific cuisine in the South and South East that's based on Chinese Medicine, that's supposed to make you healthy, but it's all very medicinal tasting, and people don't eat it for taste.



HAVING SAID ALL THIS... In China, Western food is actually greatly stereotyped and perverted xD. But it tastes a lot better than Westernised Chinese food, I'll tell you that.