sqbr | What on earth is General Tso's chicken?

Wow thanks for that link and your thoughts on this. My family joke about "Australian Chinese" and "Proper Chinese" restaraunts. Any place where the sweet and sour is toxic bright pink is a bad sign...

Everybody is talking about this before I have a chance! ;oP

I have for some time now really really wanted to read Jennifer 8.Lee's book. I recently finished reading another book, China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West, which was very emphatic about the fact that there exists Chinese-XYZ styles.

I agree with your thoughts on there not being anything wrong with people eating "Chinese" food. Experimentation with food and food styles creates deliciousness, and although I've often scoffed at the idea of fusion food, being Chinese-Malaysian means that a lot of the food I think of as home food is already fusion food. It's Chinese food with all these changes, extra spices due to the Indian influence and changes in noodle styles thanks to Malay influence and it's all grand, and so the fact that there exists Chinese-Australian (or Chinese-American or Chinese-French) food isn't inherantly bad, so long as we can recognise these things for what they are. In some instances of course they are demonstrations of cultural imperialism - the China to Chinatown book suggests that the creation of Chinese-American food like chop suey was to make people like Chinese food better, and therefore like Chinese people better.

I agree, there is nothing wrong with eating 'inauthentic' food, it is just the ignorance of believing its authentic that is a problem (and that isn't necessarily a problem if you just eat it, only if you spout of about it). Food adapts to the local ingredients, local tastes, local conditions (and notably local religious observance etc). And the people of the great Chinese Diaspora are particularly good at adapting to local conditions and tastes with enthusiasm.

And 'authenticity' means a lot less than we think unless you are going for it as a foody experience. To people used to Western diets, authentic Mexican food seems like you've taken Tex-Mex and taken out the salad and replaced it with extra pork fat -- why not eat healthier food that matches your tastes better? Authenticity is, IMO, mostly a myth -- you can't really have an authentic national or ethnic cuisine beyond a dish or two, you can have an authentic cuisine of specific people in a specific time and place (which will have some regional and temporal variation, and usually borrow freely from neighbouring cuisine). The reason to seek out more 'authentic' Chinese food is simply that you are likely to get better, and more interesting, food if you avoid the lowest common denominator, but there is no reason why eating Australian Chinese (or Australian Generic Asian eg Hans) is any better or worse than grabbing a burger or a steak and chips. But interesting and wildly inauthentic food is great too (hooray for fusion and innovation in cooking). But it almost always makes sense that, unless you are specifically aiming for an experience out of your normal eating habits, that you try to eat food that is based around ingredients available cheaply locally, which will mean adapting recipes away from their places of origin.

In the case of China, which is of course a huge place, there isn't really a single Chinese food anyway -- there are the various regional cuisines that I know discover are called the Eight Great Traditions (plus some more).

I like Australian Chinese food. It isn't authentic, but who cares? I also think I like various kinds of Chinese Chinese food, but I've only eaten them in restaurants Australia, so who knows? I've certainly eaten lots of really not Australian things (ducks feet and jellyfish and various fungi and so on), but as to how it resembles what I might eat in China, I have no idea. And Australian Chinese food has quite a history of its own -- apparently, its been evolving since the gold rush era in the 1800s.

And oh, the Americans in particular do this to everyone, not just non-white people -- I have a whole story about Australian Toaster Biscuits, that not only would an Australian not recognise as Australian, they would never refer to as a Biscuit. I feel vaguely relieved to confirm that English Muffins are actually known as muffins in England, though.

The whole idea of authentic food breaks down so quickly, especially if you look at the history. The commonest dish in England is Chicken Tikka Marsala, a dish that was invented in Glasgow. Almost any use of pineapple in Australian cooking, now considered quite traditional, is essentially due to a single successful marketing campaign, I think in the 1940s. Vietnamese food can include a lot of recipes that are attempts to replicate French cooking using Vietnamese ingredients. The Tomato wasn't part of Italian cooking before the early 18th century or so. Vindaloo was originally an Indian attempt to replicate a Portugese dish. Chilli was introduced in Szechuan cooking only after it was introduced outside South America by Columbus. And so on.

I'm not sure how historically accurate this is, but I believe that when MacDonald's first went to China they had to change the recipe for the buns because there was too much sugar in the bread for the locals' taste. Less sugar? That's not authentic North American food!

Also: MacSquid and MacPavlova :-(

White American culture is General Tso’s Chicken and Chop Suey is an angry and trite essay. Apparently most people in America don't know that Amercian-Chinese food, derived in some sense from Chinese food, isn't actually what people eat in China. The essay then draws a line from that to the horror of white Americans trying to relate to Chinese americans (or just racial Chinese) through the 'chinese' food they eat.

How terrible that people try to find something in common with people they meet to start a conversation. How incredibly offense! I'm wringing my hat!

I can't state enough how much it annoys me that people ascribe terrible motives or underlying currents of racism to these things. Sure, it's a situation rooted in ignorance, but it doesn't seem something to get angry about. Knowing the history of Chinese-American food is interesting, perhaps this angry person should just educate people, and maybe calm down!

I agree with your analysis that moving in the opposite direction is not enough, especially when it's well-heeled urbanites looking down their noses at the plebeians who still think chop suey is Chinese food. Not every North American has the resources to access "real" Chinese food.

Also, they end up getting it wrong anyway, the real trick is that there is no such thing as "Chinese food." There is Mandarin cuisine (from Beijing), Cantonese cuisine, Sichuan, Tibetan, Shanghainese, Chinese Buddhist, Chinese Islamic, etc etc etc. A cook from Beijing would consider dan dan noodles (which are Sichuanese) to be very far removed from his own culinary tradition.

On a lighter note, potstickers totally exist in China, they're literally called "pan stick", and they're awesome.

PS - I followed your comment here from debunkingwhite. I hope you don't mind that I added you, your journal is very interesting.

Semi-random thoughts (should I invoke disclaimer 3b, too?): One of the problems I have with "authenticity" is that it's outsiders deciding that other people are or are not authentic. It reminds me a lot of the classism you discussed in your stuff white people like post. The reason White People complain about lower-class white people wearing "too much" make-up (to use an American example of classism), is because the lower-class people are being "inauthentic." Same with making desserts from mixing together cake mix and jello mix: "inauthentic." (Unless you're talking about red velvet cake, in which case it's authentic again.)

See

rydra_wong's review of Cooking Like Mummyji: "authenticity," as a system imposed by privileged people, is a mechanism that writes others out of their own lives and cultures.

On the other hand, "authenticity" has at least some of its roots in trying to protect people from being written out of their own lives and cultures: a way to keep privileged outsiders from coming in and using their privilege to take over the shaman business, or anime business, or Chinese cooking business. (I don't think that's the main source of its roots; just one of the roots, which happens to be a good one.)

Which is where the segregation/gentrification analogy comes in: the root cause of the problem is deeper than the solutions being proposed, so all the "fixes" are actually only temporary harm-reduction measures. There's an unaddressed difference in power, and as long as that power-difference persists, the temporary "fix" for an immediate harm is going to tend to lay the path for a different kind of harm.

Such as it is, harm reduction isn't too bad of a short-term option, I think. But it helps a LOT to try not to be too ignorant, to stay aware of the potential bad effects of what you're doing. And it helps even more to realize that it's a kludgy, short-term patch that doesn't address the root of the problem.