Fuchsia Dunlop: belief

Transcript context

…Wow. This has a list of restaurants and dishes and snacks, and you can see from that period that it was already quite cosmopolitan, and there were quite a few dishes that were clearly from the Jiangnan region. There were Western dishes, like certain pork chops and dishes with curry, which would have come, I think, from the . . . There were foreign missionaries living in Chengdu in early 20th century. In the 20th century, there was a period when China closed in on itself. We’re now just having another period of flowering, but with increased transport links, of course, it’s faster and crazier and more international. But I think you’re right that the big difference with Chinese food in the West is that you no longer have a community of mainly Cantonese American Chinese people who are catering for Western tastes and who don’t have access to many local ingredients apart from dried and preserved food, which they could import very early on. You now have a fluid interaction between food in China and food in Chinese communities abroad. And many of the customers, as you’ve said here, are actually Chinese, and they’re recent arrivals or temporary residents in the States, and they don’t want to eat Americanized Chinese food. They want to eat the same food they have at home. Then also, I think in California, there are people growing Chinese vegetables. There’s fresh produce air-freighted in. So it’s not just soy sauce and dried shrimp and things that you can get to make Chinese food. You can get so many ingredients. Lydia, the new dish?…

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