http://restructure.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/white-american-culture-is-general-tsos-chicken-and-chop-suey/
Hello, everybody. So this is my first post, and I'm not sure what to post about, so after some time of brainstorming and inactivity, I figure I'd post about this video. As we all know, food is necessary for daily sustenance. This necessity alone has led to the creation of many types of food that we know and love, like hamburgers and stinky tofu. These are only two of the many foods available to us.
Life without choice of food would be sad. What would be even more sad is that if immigrants couldn't bring their foods to other country. Unfortunately, this thought can lead to good and bad. Regardless of the fact, different variations of the original recipe specific to the home country have come about. The video above gives some examples of foods, the origins of which we rarely question. Of course, eating is more important. I just stumbled upon the fact that it's nice to have so many different types of food, authentic or not, like the fortune cookie. As a collector of the fortunes, I like to think that I appreciate both the authentic and the not, broccoli beef and
say gwai dou" (some sort of beans). I think it's all great and I hoep you think so too.
This is a nice example of a semi-anthropological study - though an important question is left out of their little analysis - what exactly defines Chinese food? Does it have to made in a wok or come out of a region somewhere in China? If so then why are some foods in, say, sichuan province similar to a food in indonesia? And if it's food invented by a Chinese person in some other region - why is it still considered Chinese food? Culture, even as it's defined in terms of food, is not bound my friend. It is not static.
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