Chinese Food

All my life I have loved Chinese food. When Sen. Lindsay Graham (R,SC) asked Elena Kagan during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings where she was on the day the underwear bomber tried to blow up the airplane on Christmas Day, she laughed and said that like all Jews she was probably eating in a Chinese restaurant. That is how I feel.

My first job after finishing school was in Hawaii, which afforded me the opportunity to eat Chinese food to my heart's content. Last night, my wife and I had takeout Chinese from one of the fine Chinese restaurants in our neighborhood : a big container of egg drop soup and beef Szechuan style with white rice. While awaiting my order, I studied the menu and discovered that their everyday lunch specials were a big bargain-- soup, main dish with pork fried rice, and egg roll for only $6.25. You can be sure this information will not be lost in my brain, unlike other tasks I sometimes forget to do.

I was reading their menu for the first time because this particular restaurant was selected by our friend and neighbor for a New Year's Eve lunch for us after a music practice. This Hunan Chinese place was a departure from our regular spot, which got to know me so well that on the phone, just by my voice without identification, the order taker would ask how many house duck sauce and mustard sauce containers I wanted, since she knew that I didn't like the pre-packaged variety. I was at the new place because I was enchanted with their delicious egg drop soup and wanted to give this restaurant, highly rated by Yelpers, a try.

I have belabored my attachment to Chinese cuisine, without even touching upon my childhood when Chinese food graced our table for New Year's Eve without fail, for a reason. The reason is that there is a real problem with Chinese food,at least in its Americanized form. A recent article on the front page of the New York Times described the "epidemic" of obesity in America, and quoted the pastor of a church in Mississippi, the state with the greatest per-centage of obese people,saying his greatest enemy was the fast food Chinese buffet in town. I too love Chinese buffets, and the problem is they are high cholesterol, loaded with salt and fat and calories, and very unhealthy to eat.

If you visit Chinatown in lower Manhattan, you will see streets packed with people but hardly anyone, young or old, is fat. It takes some doing to find overweight people in this population or any other Asian group. The reason must be that their food is prepared better, without the ingredients in Americanized Chinese fast food. Indeed, when I had dinner at a Chinese friend's home in Hawaii, the food prepared by his mother was just as good or better but different -- kind of like how farm fresh everything tastes better than supermarket food. I once heard a young Chinese woman explaining to her girlfriends how her family would never eat Americanized Chinese fast food.

So this is a kind of plea -- I hope all Chinese cooks will wake up and serve Chinese food that we will not only love eating but will also be healthy. This would be a welcome contribution to curbing the fast food problem of all types in our country.