Why American Chinese Food Deserves Respect (And Why the MSG Fear is a Hoax)

have you ever laughed at american chinese food like that's not real chinese food what made you think that is there this notion in your mind that american chinese food is inherently fake and inferior to food from china itself see i once thought that too but then my mind was changed after i looked deeper into the history of american chinese food i realized that it's honestly incredible that a bunch of amateur cooks working with unfamiliar ingredients managed to create a cooking style that captivated america even though there was so much anti-chinese discrimination going on so let me tell you a bit about that history to start off most of the first chinese immigrants to america were male laborers from toishan in southern china where the tastes tend to skew sweeter and most of these laborers were leaving china because southern china at the point of time was like embroiled in chaos especially because of the typing rebellion and since cooking was seen as exclusively a woman's job back then these single men arrived having no idea how to cook at first yeah they improvised real fast with local tools and ingredients this is why you better not let any man convince you that he is incapable of cooking so you have to do it for him leave him alone on a new continent and see how quickly he finds out don't fall for that strategic incompetence okay anyway back in china there was a very developed restaurant culture so by the mid-1800s the first chinese restaurants opened in san francisco there were a few fancier ones that cater to the richer chinese americans but most existed in the nooks and crannies of chinatown and served mainly other chinese laborers white people were too terrified to go to them because of the rumors that they cooked with rats and dogs so chinese americans mostly kept to themselves until the gold rush ended white americans then started throwing hissy fits about immigrants taking our jobs as usual and blamed all their economic misfortunes on chinese immigrants this escalating discrimination culminated in the 1882 chinese exclusion act the very first time that america banned immigration from a specific country this act essentially legitimized discrimination in american culture making white mobs feel free to storm into chinese communities trash their houses and throw their stuff out onto the streets chinese americans were also driven out of the paid labor force so most could only go for self-employment options like establishing laundromats and restaurants it's not a coincidence that these are both traditionally seen as women's work like washing clothes and cooking food and all the feminization of chinese men can be traced way back to the beginning of the colonial era they were seen as less masculine because of their long hair and long robes so doing women's work doing these service jobs was often the only way that they could make a living after the gold mines dried up but the anti-chinese discrimination only got worse especially on the west coast and so chinese immigrants fled east across america on the very railroads they built they opened restaurants in towns far apart so they didn't compete against each other around the early 1900s chop soy was invented the name actually just means bits and pieces or leftovers but for some reason white hipsters looking for exotic food went nuts for it [Music] they thought they were eating some secret oriental delicacy when it was really just random improvised ingredients thrown together to vaguely resemble what was eaten back in china but hey the dish spread rapidly across america then because these middle class white americans were all yeah chinese restaurant owners were among the few classes of immigrants that became eligible for visas in 1915 then chinese restaurants gained steady popularity throughout the 1920s in 1943 the chinese exclusion act was finally appealed altogether but then mainland china had a communist revolution and so chinese restaurants were shunned it wasn't until 1972 when nixon visited china that interest in chinese food became mainstream again the photos that came out of the nixon visit especially photos of the banquets he ate in china made people curious about the actual chinese food he was served meanwhile the communist takeover in the mainland also drove waves of immigration out of taiwan some of whom had fled the mainland because of their ties to the nationalist party of china such as the inventor of general cho's chicken he was pong chongque the nationalist government's banquet chef general cho's chicken was inspired by his roots in hunan cuisine and named after general zul zontang a famous military leader from the qing dynasty so no the general himself didn't invent it his descendants don't even know what the dish is while we're on the topic of food though i gotta tell you about the sponsor of this video hello hellofresh hellofresh is a meal kit service that delivers fresh pre-proportioned ingredients right to your front door very 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cooking of this meal oh my god no no no no no help bam that is a hearty meal with hellofresh you waste way less food and contribute to sustainability because you get exactly what you need to make these recipes and it all comes in recyclable packaging not to mention that so much of the ingredient prep work is done for you to try this out yourself go to hellofresh.com and use the code xiao14 to get 14 free meals plus free shipping that's 14 free meals with free shipping on hellofresh.com with my code zhao14 anyway the wave of immigration from taiwan after the chinese civil war expanded the flavors of american chinese cuisine which can be argued to be the first fast food it was chinese restaurants in new york in the 1970s that pioneered delivery something we should all be very thankful for in this pandemic in the 1990s mainland china finally opened itself up and so even more diversity was brought to american chinese food though by this point the expectations for what chinese food is was so set in the american cultural consciousness that new restaurants had to go with what's sold if you're wondering why every small town in america seems to have a chinese restaurant it's because opening a restaurant became the thing that regional chinese associations set new immigrants up to do they were taught how to cook all the popular american chinese dishes provided with a starter pack to open an instantly recognizable chinese restaurant and sent off to assign territories maxing out their coverage like cell phone towers so really it kind of worked like chain restaurants and the reason it worked so well was because people loved american chinese food this distinct style of cuisine that was developed by a greatly oppressed people across at least 150 years of history i would say that the case is very similar to italian-american food we know it's basically nothing like the food that gets served straight in italy but doesn't matter if it's delicious i think we could benefit from a change in perspective in how we think about culture created by diaspora groups there's an urge to slap the label fake on anything not directly from the source land but really we could just make the healthy distinction between diaspora and native chinese-american can be a distinct identity no less valid than being native born chinese and so can american chinese food it's just one more branch of chinese cuisine which is not a monolith and is always evolving though because of how its history is so tangled up with poverty and racial discrimination american chinese food has the unfair reputation of being dirty and suspicious on top of being fake the biggest example is the whole msg drama msg is not inherently bad for you it's not some suspicious artificial flavoring sympathized in the lab it's found in a lot of natural foods and is extracted from natural foods too it was first isolated from wheat and soybeans in 1908 by the japanese chemist kikunai ikeda he was inspired to seek out this umami flavor when he noticed that his wife's dashie stock was extra delicious when she would add kombu seaweed to it eventually he identified the chemical source as glutamate and believed humans found it so delicious because it was associated with protein the only danger that comes from msg is eating too much of it because of its sodium component it's the same type of danger that would hit you if you guzzle down a pile of salt in 30 seconds use common sense and it won't kill you but where did this whole idea that msg was dangerous come from then well it all started when one specific doctor wrote to the new england journal of medicine in 1968 like oh man every time i go to a chinese restaurant my head hurts and my limbs tingle i think it may be all the msg they put in the food i don't know why i was doing a southern accent mind you this was just a letter to the editor not an actual scientific study there's even some dispute over the true identity of the doctor but i won't get into the mess i'll leave a link to an article about it in the description just know that after the letter was published other doctors piled on with their testimonies of oh my god that's totally true chinese food absolutely wrecks me but what the greater public didn't realize was that many of these responses were supposed to be jokes they were being ironic they were saying stuff like on three occasions i experienced the tightening of my masseter and temporalis muscles lacrimation preorbital fasciculation numbness of the neck and hands palpitation and syncope within 20 minutes of eating chinese food so they were memeing not being serious but because they were memeing in a respected scientific journal somewhere you would not expect to find ironic memes news outlets began reporting on these exaggerated accounts in full seriousness and often very racistly this conspiracy theory of chinese restaurants are making you sick with their msg just fit too well with the narrative that chinese food is dirty and dangerous so the theory soon spiraled wildly out of control and then scientists who weren't in on the joke started treating chinese restaurant syndrome like a real thing and they did studies to prove that msg caused adverse symptoms except these studies were highly flawed because the participants knew they were getting msg and sometimes the msg was given intravenously what did you expect would happen if you shot something that's supposed to be eaten straight into someone's veins instead later on when scientists actually did blinded tests not telling the participants whether they were eating food that had msg they couldn't find any links to any symptoms even in people who claimed they had an msg sensitivity so msg has been scientifically proven safe for literal decades why has this hoax about it being dangerous persisted in the public mind then because it fits the narrative if it's the racist preconception that chinese food is dirty and cheap so obviously it must cause disease i often see chinese restaurants and food products try to distance themselves from this stigma by slapping on a no msg label and it makes me sad because they're just taking out all that deliciousness for no good reason you know what other foods use a ton of msg and never have to worry about their use chick-fil-a doritos i mean those have other problems but no one ever brings up their msg content so it's important to be aware of the cultural context around american chinese food or you might engage with it in harmful ways like that white lady in new york who opened a clean chinese restaurant called luckily's that claimed its food wouldn't make you feel bloated and icky afterward that is gentrification that exploits racist stereotypes the problem here is that she is a member of the dominant majority trying to take business away from a disadvantaged minority group by claiming that she can do their thing better than them ultimately my point is that diaspora history is still important history fortune cookies may not be found in china itself but there's a tragic history to be learned in how they were actually a japanese creation but then the japanese-american factories got taken over by chinese americans during world war ii because japanese americans were all sent to internment camps and then there's how orange chicken was invented by chef andy cow in a panda express and speaking of panda express that itself is a billion dollar company still privately owned by a chinese american family it's definitely not any measure of white people's version of chinese food because it was all done by chinese americans this isn't some new york white lady faking it just because all of these things have nothing to do with china itself doesn't mean that they're not real or impactful or didn't leave a lasting legacy when you see someone eating american chinese food your concern shouldn't be whether they're eating real or fake chinese food but whether they think that this particular style is all there is to chinese food every region the chinese diaspora has settled in has developed a unique branch of chinese cuisine with the ingredients available to them that's what happens with culture they're ever evolving and that's not even getting into the incredible diversity in china itself northern chinese cuisine has lots of flower-based foods like noodles and dumplings very hearty flavors that skew salty and zhao nan food referring to the region south of the yantzi river has mild yet incredibly aromatic flavors and the ingredients are mostly fresh and prepared in a very technical way so tran food is very spicy and bold that's the home of hot pot their spicy flavors are so famous that even the women there are stereotyped to be aggressive and confident then cantonese food tends to skew towards sweet flavors and small portions it's the home of dim sum there's a lot of braising and stewing of seafood and then western china has heavy muslim influences with lots of lamb dishes honestly when you're in china and you mention what province or city you're from the first thing to pop into people's minds is that region's signature dishes like if you said oh yeah i'm from nanjing they'd be like oh my god salted duck duck blood vermicelli soup which is basically impossible to get outside of china by the way it's an issue with ingredient supply you know you're not gonna find local places supplying duck blood if there's only one restaurant using it and it doesn't taste the same if the blood is shipped frozen anyway some of my favorite native chinese dishes are peking duck cantonese wontons lanjo pulled noodles shrimp boiled fish and xian rojamo to find restaurants that make this kind of food that's like as close to that in china as possible you're gonna have to talk to your local chinese community because you're looking for restaurants that cater specifically to immigrants where the menu doesn't even bother to tell you what's in the dishes in english on that note though i also gotta address this stereotype that chinese people eat strange and bizarre things it's very true that some chinese people eat foods that i find to be strange and bizarre and so do some french people and so do some icelandic people food is extremely subjective and i don't think it's fair for chinese culture and other asian cultures by extension to bear the burden of being seen as the weird food eaters of the world and we shouldn't ignore the extent to which western colonial propaganda contributed to this idea that european food is all refined and fancy while asian food is not i swear french people especially are the absolute best hyping they're cooking up when i went to france i ordered a very expensive dish of the fabled escargot and then after the first bite i realized that it tastes exactly the same as the river snails i used to eat in china by the bucketful i don't know what i expected but it really wasn't anything mind-blowing i've had people ask me to clear up the misconception that chinese people eat cats and dogs the thing is why do i need to why is eating cats and dogs seen as morally inferior in the first place if the meat is sourced from factory farms just like beef or pork pigs are intelligent they dream we put millions of them through slaughterhouses anyway there is no moral superiority to eating any kind of meat and yes there is an issue in china of butchers snatching people's pets off the streets but plenty of chinese animal activists are fighting against that these things can only be solved internally not by outsiders pointing fingers my point is chinese people don't need to defend what kind of meat they eat especially in light of this covid situation it's westerners who need to rethink their judgmentalness a pandemic could have also easily started from some american hunter who was dining on a bear they shot though honestly many chinese people especially diaspora who are second generation and above need to rethink our judgmentalness toward american chinese food too many of us have a tendency to look down on this style of cuisine as we're finding out our identities while caught between east and west but really american chinese food deserves our respect they are the legacy of the diaspora that came before us chinese americans knew people wanted comfort food so they adapted and adjusted until even racists couldn't stop coming for their fried chicken balls therefore the next time you're eating chinese takeout and someone's like i can't believe you're eating that fake chinese food look them right in the eye and go actually it's real chinese american food anyway big thanks again to hellofresh for sponsoring this video and also to my generous donors on patreon especially my guardian lions benji sudokin blem lem blim darian dewitt out of spite jose valeskis kakuga kite's universe molly mcallister and nicholas coates [Music]

Channel: Xiran Jay Zhao

Views: 453,433

Keywords: chinese food, american chinese food, chinese american, chinese diaspora

Id: 1HFFxihgfzI

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021