Chinese dining habits likely to turn Westerners off - know before you go! Understand China.
Updated: Sep 20, 2020
What about Chinese dining culture is hard to stomach as a Westerner?
Another constant of Chinese food culture that you will find everywhere in China is something that can be called “bone spitting” (there’s gotta be a better name than this, I just haven’t heard it yet).
Where Western chefs tend to spend more time making sure everything on your plate is ready to be forked into mouths, Chinese chefs have a different playbook. In school cafeterias and Michelin restaurants alike, people eat around around bones, avoid ginger bombs and Sichuan pepper grenades. A sign that you’ve mastered the skill –
...by the time you’ve finished eating there is a little pile of bones and bits beside your dinner plate, just like everyone else.
Watching bones, pepper, shrimp tails and all the other inedibles blop into people's piles can be a turnoff, but the more Chinese meals you eat, the more you understand -as long as you're eating Chinese cuisine, "bone spitting" is unavoidable.
In my understanding, such cooking practices as these developed out of practical necessity. These chefs prepare food for ungodly numbers of people – there’s was no time to de-bone every piece of fish and meat. Now, everyone’s used to the lip and tongue gymnastics involved in.. say, peeling a prawn with just your mouth, and they’ve learnt to enjoy the process.
Bats, snake, cicadas, mice and all that? Do Chinese people really eat these things? Why?
Undoubtedly, these animals are sold for consumption as meat in certain places in China (not in normal supermarkets, though). But it’s a minority of modern, city-dwelling Chinese that go out of their way to buy such meats.
This youtube video sums up the situation quite well:
There is, however, one historical reason that I think has lead to the strange eating habits that we see in Chinese culture - something that people don't often mention.
Throughout history, China has been a land plagued by drought, flood and famine. In history there have been times where even the emperor and imperial family were hard-pressed to find the food for their next meal.
So, what did the people do?
They experimented. Just like in the stories of people boiling their shoes to eat the leather, or stripping their wallpaper to lick the flour-based glue during past depressions, so too did the Chinese open their minds to new sources of food. Among them: cicadas, baby mice… there’s even stories of children munching on coal because it “smelt good”.
Under the unique circumstances, some of these survival foods became part of mainstream food culture, and are still around today.
Plus, some of them that seem weird – like snake – are actually delicious!
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