Following your taste: enjoying Chinese food

Food is something we required every day. More and more food comes together by people sharing the food. It makes people can have food with different styles or even from different nations. I only feel like enjoy Chinese food and this feeling becomes stronger after I came to the United States. As an international student, I don’t always have time to enjoy the food from my hometown, due to the schedule; I have to finish my meal in several minutes sometimes so I must eat fast food to make me full with energy. In my mind, I think most of the Chinese students who lives in the United States will agree with me because I could see Chinese students in every Chinese restaurant I went. Some of them just move out of campus because of the food in the dining hall and eating in Chinese restaurants or cook themselves instead.

I love Chinese food and usually eat a lot in Chinese restaurants compared with eating in the dining hall. First of all, Chinese food is delicious and always has a lot of oil with the dishes. This can make the food smells good and attract my attention of taste. The liquid oil in the food makes my throat get a smooth feeling while eating. It satisfies me a lot. For American food, these is oil inside the fast food, for example, fast food, there is oil with them like French fires and the meat in the burgers. However, the oil in this kind of food is not liquid even when the food is hot. This kind of food like burgers always have pieces of bread covering so it is usually dry and needs drinks to eat with or the throat will feel uncomfortable. Secondary, we have cooked vegetables in Chinese food. There vegetables are always hot with oil and fabulous taste. Also in Chinese food, there are not only broccolis and lettuce but also a lot of other vegetables that most of the Americans have never seen before. After some complicated steps of cooking, they are all delicious but tastes different. The most famous one is green vegetable, which is the most common vegetable that Chinese people eat. I hate eating vegetables when I was young. At that time, I just eat little food but spend all the meal time watching Television instead. Now, especially coming into the United States, I finally realize how good the Chinese cooking vegetables are and I only can get green vegetables in some Chinese restaurants. In American food, most vegetables are in salad which is uncooked and mixed with many kinds of fruits, other foods and some sauce. I found some of them are really sour or sweet and makes me uncomfortable to eat them all. Absolutely, most of the American vegetables are cold just like salad, because of being uncooked.

       I enjoy the taste of Chinese food very much because I can feel the original taste of the food in Chinese food. For example, a chicken soup, a very common Chinese dish in my daily life, is only cooked with some salt and water but not any other materials. But it can make the soup really delicious because people stewing the soup for more than two hours or even half a day! It makes the original delicious taste of the chicken come out but I can’t find this kind of taste in a chicken steak or the American soup. These cooking ways can not only make the taste of Chinese food good but also get the nutrition of it beneficial for our bodies and making us healthy. When choosing materials for cooking, the Chinese people always pick the fresh food, which is totally different from the Americans. The food and cooking materials are so fresh that Chinese people always get from the local farmers and picking very carefully. They go to the farmers’ market and buy from the farmers with fresh food instead of shopping in the supermarket since the quality of the food is getting lower after being packaged and putted in the supermarket. When they want to get some pickled food, most of the adults can make on their own with the fresh food they got. The old citizens always have some old but good traditional ways of making the pickled food. Because of getting the fresh food and making pickled on their own, the food materials are always nice, clean and fresh. Americans are really different; they eat a lot of red meat like bacons and hot dogs but the Chinese almost never do it. In the essay “Red Meat Consumption and Mortality”, the authors pointed out “we found that a higher intake of red meat was associated with a significantly elevated risk of total, CVD, and cancer mortality, and this association was observed for unprocessed and processed red meat, with a relatively greater risk for processed red meat.” (An Pan, PhD; Qi Sun, MD, ScD; Adam M. Bernstein, MD, ScD; Matthias B. Schulze, DrPH ;JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH; Meir J. Stampfer, MD, DrPH; Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH; Frank B. Hu, MD, PhD , 6)According to their research, they got the conclusion that eating too much red meat, no matter it is processed or unprocessed, can lead a higher risk or some serious illnesses and diseases.

       Chinese people like Chinese food. People will think this is kind of enjoyment of their own taste and culture. What’s more is that Americans like Chinese dishes as well. “When it comes to eating out, Americans love Chinese. And Chinese restaurants deserve credit for keeping a lid on saturated and trans fat, thanks to vegetable oil, no cheese, and a host of seafood, poultry, and (hooray!) vegetable dishes. (While the sat fat in some dishes seems high, the unsaturated fat in their oil lowers bad cholesterol more than the oil's saturated fat raises bad cholesterol.)” (Jayne Hurley and Bonnie Liebman, 13) This evidence shows that americans prefer Chinese restaurants while eating out because the dishes have more natural food but less cheese. Even some of them have a lot of fat, but some oil can decrease this problem. So, it isn’t a big problem. In the essay "Fowl Trouble", the author cook showed that in the United States, the process of chicken feeding is becoming into a quick and large program. Because of the huge requirement of the market, a chick is growing up to a chicken within a short time. People find this way has high efficiency and can always make monkey so that most of the farms do that and produce a lot of chicken to the market. The chicken meat for sandwiches and burgers are always this kind of meat. In China, because of some fast food coming from the United States such as McDonalds and KFC, people have this kind of chicken producing process as well, but they still keep the traditional ways of feeding chicken and this kind of chicken take over the most requirement in the market. The Chicken soup as I mentioned before, can only be cooked by the natural fed chicken, or the soup will not be tasty at all.

       However, Chinese food is expensive here and always complicated. This means that I can’t eat Chinese food for all the meals. Due to the schedule, sometimes I have to finish my meal in 5 minutes because of the short 10 minutes break: I also have to go to another classroom. In this case, I often choose fast food to make myself full and sometimes eat nothing but drink some soda instead. Fast food is efficient enough to be finished in several minutes. Even sometimes you can’t finish it in time; maybe you can have a choice to take the food with you and go, eating while on the road or having a class. Fast food like burgers, French fires and pizzas are mostly prepared so people do not have to wait for these foods. They can hold the food with their hands and just eat without the requirement of other tools like chopsticks while eating Chinese food. It saves a lot of time. Oppositely, while cooking Chinese food, it always needs a lot of steps and time to make it prefect. There are also a lot of ways of cooking while making Chinese food. Steaming is a good way of cooking which can keep the nutrition without a heavy taste or fat: “Anything steamed is obviously good, as is Jum (poached), Chu (broiled), Kow (roasted), Shu (barbecued), lightly stir-fried, dry stir-fried, or braised. Anything breaded, fried, or coated in flour is not.” (Brandon Guarneri) People enjoy and protect the culture of Chinese food like having table manners and using chopsticks to eat. Chopsticks are good because it can leave the extra sauce out of the food at the bottom of the bowl or the plate. (Christy Maskeroni)Chinese foods always have oil and sauce on the bottom of the plate and chopsticks is beneficial to prevent you from eating too salty. Also, steps of eating are a kind of culture but can have the best taste. In my hometown Suzhou, for example, we have a famous dish called steamed crab. These crabs are always steamed in the pot with high pressure after being cleaned. Since it was steamed with its whole bodies, you have to use your hands and teeth to get the meat from the shell and it always takes a lot of time. But steaming the whole body can keep all the nutrition and give you a original delicious taste of the crab.

       In my opinion, a meal is something you should enjoy and make yourself satisfied, not just eat and go; so I always go for my favorite tastes and feelings while choosing food. Chinese food can always fit my feeling so I can get the original taste of the food, and I am use to eating Chinese food since I was young, these are why I spend most of my meals in Chinese restaurants. They amazing part is eating Chinese food is so good and beneficial to my body compared with the American fast food, that’s what I don’t know before. So that, I will insist on having Chinese food but sometime get some fast food to catch up with my schedule.

Work Cited:

  "CHINESE RESTAURANT FOOD" Jayne Hurley, Bonnie Liebman, Jewish Advocate, ISSN 1077-2995, 03/2009, Volume 200, Issue 10, p. 28 Credo Reference. Web. 31 May 2012: [Online] http://0-proquest.umi.com.bianca.penlib.du.edu/pqdlink?vinst=PROD&fmt=3&startpage=-1&vname=PQD&RQT=309&did=1318942361&scaling=FULL&vtype=PQD&rqt=309&cfc=1&TS=1338520984&clientId=48347

  "Red Meat Consumption and Mortality" An Pan, PhD; Qi Sun, MD, ScD; Adam M. Bernstein, MD, ScD; Matthias B. Schulze, DrPH; JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH; Meir J. Stampfer, MD, DrPH; Walter C. Willett, MD, DrPH; Frank B. Hu, MD, PhD, Results From 2 Prospective Cohort Studies: Credo Reference. Web. 31 May 2012: [Online]

www.archintemmed.com

  "Fowl Trouble" Christopher D. Cook, In the nation's poultry plants, brutality to waker as well as to bird, by Christopher D. Cook ,Harper'sMagazine

  " Healthy Chinese Food" Brandon Guarneri, Men's Fitness Magazine， Feb. 19, 2009, Credo Reference. Web. 31 May 2012: [Online]

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Diet/story?id=6909990&page=1#.T8gz9KtYuSo

 

“Healthy Chinese Food Options: Quick Guide " Christy Maskeroni, MS, RD, CPT, February 3, 2011Credo Reference. Web. 31 May 2012: [Online] http://www.builtlean.com/2011/02/03/healthy-chinese-food-options/