Why Aren’t More Foreign Chefs Cooking Chinese Food?

1위@saintcavish5 days ago

a few notes: 1. as ever, we are on Patreon, if you'd like to contribute to our travel budget: https://www.patreon.com/saintcavish 2. this is a complicated issue and it clearly can't be totally unpacked in a nine-minute video. also, i probably didn't get the answer completely right in this first attempt to put it into words. however, it's a topic that needs to be discussed, and needs to go beyond the ethnicity issue. so i guess i'll go first and put this out there, and let other people refine and add to the argument. 3. to be totally clear, chinese cuisine is doing just fine within china. my point is not that china needs this -- it's that the rest of the world would benefit. 4. i don't mean that the world suddenly needs a bunch of chinese restaurants run by non-chinese people. my point is more that chinese techniques and knowledge should be part of the toolkit of chefs everywhere. those techniques don't have to result in chinese food. they can be used in all kinds of ways.번역 보기

2위@ibenjaminmoody5 days ago (edited)

Let's not forget that food is a huge part of culture, and a country's cultural image is shaped by its economic strength and international relationships. Japan is an interesting example. Think about how it became the West's closest Asian allies after WWII, particularly with the US, and how much Japanese culture has since been promoted and embraced in the West. I see this in Australia and NZ as well. I have chef friends who love Chinese food, but for years none of them would even think about travelling to China let alone to go there learn the cuisine. I don't think that was really about the food, it’s more about how China itself was perceived. Fortunately that's started changing recently, partly because social media is showing people a very different side of China. Chongqing's whole cyberpunk trend is an example.번역 보기

3위@biueiue5 days ago

I absolutely agree and hope traditional Chinese cuisine gets more spotlights in the West, but please just not in a "weird" way. As a Japanese myself, I've seen tons of Japanese food hype in the past decades from an interesting and evolving way to not so respectful and borderline appropriating way, and I guess there will be thousands of different arguments about descriptivism vs prescriptivism of traditional cuisine, but I really hope Chinese cuisine doesn't follow the same oh so exotic asian culture pipeline like Japanese food did, because I am really tired of it. And what makes it even more tragic about the whole "thing, China:☹thing, Japan:😲" meme that is still very much a thing today is that none of us in Asia gets to decide what goes trending next. One day, all the people in the West decide your culture is a new, cool stuff and everyone starts jumping on it. It's definitely starting to happen already with Chinese culture as a whole, and in that sense I think it's rather healthy to see the process slowly moving forward with a few food enthusiast like Michael and you guys. Thanks for the amazing work as always.번역 보기