Have a good meal

Every culture is a world. There are big different cultures and each one has got its own history. Because of this, there exist loads of languages, traditions and ways of thinking. Nowadays, we can know cultures from around the world, we can travel to discover them or maybe they come to find us in different ways. One of them is food. Food is like a mirror, it shows a lot of things from his society. For example, there is the Mediterranean diet, very healthy and varied, or the American fast food, cheap and easy to prepare, but one of the main causes of obesity.

My favorite food is Chinese food. I haven’t been to China, but I’ve got a lot of Chinese restaurants near my village. Some of them are better than others, maybe because of the recipe, the quality of the food or the sauces. I think sauces are very important and they can decide if a dish is good or not.

In Spain, restaurants offer olives or something to peak at before asking the food. When you go to a Chinese restaurant they usually give you a dish with “shrimp bread”.

Then, you can choose from loads of dishes. For example, spring rolls, seaweeds and chicken, veal or duck prepared wit different sauces. You can try it with rice or noodles, for examples.

Some sauces are very strange, with Chinese words, and you only know the tastes until you try them. But some of them are very typical, common in most of the similar restaurants: The bittersweet sauce is my favorite one. It depends on the restaurant and only some of them have a good sweet and sour sauce, but sometimes it’s only a bad tomato sauce. Oyster sauce is also very common, and it’s good with veal. There’s spicy sauce too. Sometimes it has a very hot taste and you need to drink a lot after it.

There’s a rumor which says that, in Chinese restaurants, dogs are cooked in some dishes. Because of this, some people doesn’t want to try that food. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it isn’t bad if there are dishes with dog (and they sell it like dog, of course), because we eat things that other cultures never eat and we can’t imagine eating worms or ants, which are some of the main dishes from some countries.

One of the things which I like from Chinese food is to eat it with wood sticks. We are used to eat with forks, knifes and spoons, but with two sticks it’s a curious way to eat. Eating a bowl of rice with wood sticks is a very hard challenge if you haven’t practiced.

That’s been a summary about what can you find in a Chinese restaurant, but I think the only way to know it is to go and try it, because it’s an opportunity that maybe our ancestors didn’t have. One of my advices is that, if you don’t like it at first, don’t say “I don’t like that food” until you had tried three or four restaurants and different dishes. One of the options is to ask for the most popular restaurants and 请享用！(have a good meal!).