Despite the fact of Asians having become so much more intelligent, better educated, industrious, innovative, inventive and economically responsible than westerners during the last half-century, a few things are still out there they’ll never catch up on. One of those is RC Royal Crown Cola with a bag of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts or Planter’s Peanuts floating in it.
A couple of other things they’ll never surpass us on include the kind of Italian food you’ll get down at the Fongoul Restaurant, Mexican food New Mexico style with green such as you’ll get at Cojone’s Mexican Cafe, and those fantastic Greek sandwiches I can’t recall the name of. Guido?
You’d have to have peeked into the kitchens of a few Chinese restaurants during your lifetime to know that, though all other Asians have it figured out, the Chinese got left behind about 10,000 years ago in matters of basic food sanitation. If you eat in Chinese food joints much there’s a middling good chance you’ve eaten something that’s already been through a Chinese digestive tract, introduced to the food when he clipped his toenails into the egg drop soup.
That’s the reason Chinese restaurants use all that MSG, even though they know it will probably give you a stroke one of these days. Covers up the taste of other things got in there, either by accident, or design.
I don’t claim to understand why it’s so. Koreans, Japanese, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thai, they’re all probably more concientious about food sanitation in their restaurants than the average westerner. But the Chinese restaurant that isn’t feeding customers cockroaches, toenails and spit is by far the exception, rather than the rule.
I’ve heard the matter discussed among health department inspectors more times than I can remember [none of whom would dare eat Chinese without having gone over the food preparation area before-hand].
Maybe they’re still trying to get even with Christian missionaries for the Taiping rebellion and figure everyone else qualifies as collateral damage.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 