China to Chinatown

"I’ve always been fascinated by the way Chinese people think about Western food and vice versa. For example, in the West there have been these weird stereotypes that have swung between seeing Chinese food as either cheap and trashy – dumbed down to a set menu of sweet-and-sour pork and egg-fried rice – or else as terrifying exotica – dog meat, penises and strange rubbery things. Actually, if you talk to Chinese people who are not acquainted with Western food you find the same horror and incredulity. Traditionally, they don’t eat dairy products, and certainly not cheese. Cheese is considered smelly and disgusting. Also they don’t traditionally eat much raw food, so salads were barbarian food, although the new generation are coming round to them. And in China people are not used to eating huge hunks of meat. So a whole steak on a plate with chips is not really a meal. At the Chinese dinner table you never have knives, only chopsticks, so to have a huge slab of meat you need to cut for yourself seems utterly barbaric. And whilst you would always have a refreshing soup with a Chinese meal, that’s not so essential in Western food. Finally, rare meat has shocked and scandalised a number of Chinese people I’ve met. But Roberts’s book looks at the question from the other side – what Westerners made of Chinese food, from early accounts by missionaries and explorers right up to Chinese food in America. He has drawn together all kinds of different sources that would be a lot of work to find on your own. And it’s very funny to see the range of reactions to Chinese food, for example what early visitors to China made of it. Some were very impressed by the diversity of the produce and the freshness of the diet that people had. But there was also horror at what people ate, which you see right up to today in the prejudice against the Chinese in San Francisco, and the anti-Chinese legislation which Andrew Coe also talks about very well in his book"