The emergence of China as an economic superpower

There's a Chinese takeout on the street where I live that serves General Tso's Chicken. In fact, all Chinese resaurants in this area serve some sort of General Tso's Chicken. Now I have to ask, what the heck is General Tso's Chicken (update: after some research, it's apparently a Hunan dish)? During all the years I lived in China/Hong Kong, I have never encountered such an amazing dish full of floury chicken and monosodium glutamate. It's tastes like sweet and sour pork, except it's not exactly sweet nor sour, and it's definitely not pork. If you and I went to a so-called Chinese restaurant in America, you'd see me complaining non-stop. And there's a good reason for it too: there is no (or at least very hard to find) authentic Chinese food in the United States.

Minus New York City, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, it's pretty hard to find a decent Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. What we eat, says a columnist for the Gourmet Magazine, is a combination of substandard food that was first used to feed Chinese railroad workers and later taylored to the palates of the American public. A combination of bad meat, overcooked vegetables and soy sauce thicked by cornstarch and sugar. Perhaps that's the recipe for General Tso's Chicken. The end result for each dish is un-Chinese ingredients cooked in American barbeque style.

If you every wondered why a spring roll looks like an egg roll, or why Italian prosciutto can be substituted for western Chinese salted ham, now you know. Yet we can't blame the restaurants, for some only cater to these menus to stay in business, we should blame consumers and restaurant critics for reinforcing bad Chinese food by eating and buying Chinese takeout by the ton. Even recipe books tell you to substitute this for that and provide generally confusing and wrong information. According to the columnist, Chinese food (the authentic and yummy kind) can be found in the States. Enough Chinese chefs have migrated here, and all that needs to be done is to challenge them to create better food, not General Tso's Chicken.