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One of the phrases that’s been popular in China this year according to this article: sixthtone.com/news/1014370

For more context, people in China have been assembling plain white bread sandwiches to try to understand how we live in this part of the world, and they are posting through it (the idea of eating anything cold or raw, especially a vegetable, is seen as especially disgusting in the Chinese world, with some exceptions)

theguardian.com/food/2023/jun/…

#Food #China #Language #Chinese #Mandarin

This entry was edited (10 months ago)
in reply to Adrianna Tan

This is also why there is no such thing as a Chinese salad. We simply *do not do* raw vegetables.

(There are some Sichuan cold dishes that can present as a salad. That’s different. And also, they never have raw vegetables either)

Anyway with steaming and wok cooking being so easy, you can throw any veg into the steamer or wok for a bit or put leafy vegetables on top of rice in a rice cooker.

It took me almost 4 decades to learn to like a raw salad (and only when I do it hehe)

in reply to Adrianna Tan

When I first moved here I was like ‘I’m hungry’ and someone said ‘do you want trail mix’ and I just laughed and laughed because in the history of eating food I had never been offered nuts as a solution to hunger (I come from a region that has thousands of piping hot fresh food at every corner, 24/7). Some days I think *that* was a big cultural gap I had to cross.
This entry was edited (10 months ago)
in reply to Adrianna Tan

When I was younger, if I spoke too much English inevitably someone will say ‘oh, you’re a potato eater now are you’

(To ‘jiak kentang’, where jiak is the Hokkien for eat and kentang is the Malay for potato, is to be an Anglophile especially during colonial times. Most people are such rice eaters that even today in McDonalds in SE Asia, you have to serve rice with French fries and burgers!)

This entry was edited (10 months ago)