A Rat in the Kitchen

In the New York Times, food writer Fred Ferretti writes about the corruption of Chinese food in America:

Let’s start at the beginning. Virtually all of today’s so-called Chinese cooking in the United States can best be described as undistinguished, served in restaurants generally indistinguishable one from another.

The how of this is easy. The Chinese who sailed to the Golden Mountain of America to lay the ties and tracks of the transcontinental railroad were all men. In this womanless society, these workers ate a food of survival; unfamiliar ingredients were cooked in rudimentary Chinese fashion. This coarsened cookery is what evolved into the Chinese-American genre. It is bastardized food, prepared first to feed a worker and then to please an American palate that dotes upon overcooked vegetables and sauces thickened with cornstarch and sugar.

The why is more complex. Chinese-American food is regarded unquestionably as Chinese by an American public that consumes it by the ton.

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