Food Culture
Generally speaking, we Chinese think food is very important to man. People often associate food with important holidays and the chance to meet distinguished guests. The Chinese food not only is very delicious and tasty but also very pleasing to your senses and many of dishes have very beautiful and fancy names. The Chinese have the food culture of our own which are quite different from westerners. In the west, people pay more attention to the nutrition of food rather than the looks of it. The cuisine and table manners are quite different from ours in a great extent. Greeting by Asking Your Meal in China
It is a very common practice we Chinese people say "Have you had your meal?" when they meet each other around the time before or after meals. Sometimes they even ask this question everywhere even in toilets. In fact, it is a kind of greeting to communicate with each other. But foreigners cannot understand that because they think why you ask me this. They tend to think you want to invite me to dinner or I am not rich enough to feed myself regularly but that is my business not yours. Chinese think food is very important and essential to people so it shows some care and concern about you.
Everything is eatable in China
It seems that we eat everything and everything can be eatable in Chinese food, whether it comes from land or from the sky or from the sea or whether it is wild or domestic or whether it is inside or outside. Foreigners cannot imagine we eat the food like snakes, dogs and even frogs. When we sell the meat from the animal and poultry, we normally sell it as a whole or cut it from the whole body. I know a woman American teacher didn't want to buy and eat pork when she first came to China because she saw the meat cut from a certain part of the pig. In English, we know the animals and their meat are used different words because the words of the meat from animals originally come from French and they are used by upper class while the words of animals are Anglo Saxon, which are used by the farmer of lower class. So there are pig and pork, sheep and mutton and cattle and beef in English but it is not the case in Chinese.
Name of Dishes is Implicit in Chinese Food
Very often it puzzles foreigners a lot that we ask and talk so much when we order our food in the restaurant. One reason is we ask what the food or the dish is and try to clarify it because you sometimes never know what the food is just according the name of the food until it is put on your table in the restaurant just. Sometimes the food is very simple but the name is very obscure. For example one of the dishes is called "Ants Climbing the Trees." But the food is simple potato noodles and bits of meat in it, while most of western food has a simple and clear name and you know what it is when you hear the name. For instance, there is a traditional food call "fish and chips" in the UK. You see it is very obvious it is fried fish and potato chips. The reason for this in China is on the one hand to try to tell you the way it cooks such as cook, fry, grill and broil in the name and on the other it has beautiful good names so that you have a good imagination and association to let you have a good appetite.
Too Much Food to Eat at meals
We Chinese think it very disgraceful if we don't cook the food enough for the guests so we normally cook more food than guests eat. If you finish your food at meal, the host and hostess usually add more and more food in your dish or bowl without asking you whether you want it or not so as to show they are polite to the guests. They will keep saying, "eat more" and in English
