Live to eat, or eat to live?
Oct 26th, 2007 by Michael Max
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Here in China, the answer is “live to eat!”
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Jews and Chinese seem to have similar views of food.
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More is gooder.
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Enough is not enough.
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LOVE spelled backwards is FOOD
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If you are already full, well then, just eat slower.
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While the food is important, what’s more delicious. It is also a prop of sorts, it is stage that allows Chinese life to unfold in a colorful and social way. It is not enough to eat well. We have to eat well together. Work the crowd and the food, with toasts, and shared plates. Stories, and appreciation.
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They say the Chinese will eat everything but the legs off the table and the wings off a plane. Certainly 5000 years of kitchen art is adds greatly to the enjoyment of life. It’s all bite sized too, knives are left in the kitchen where they belong.
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While the word here for “liquor” is “wine”, it does not resemble anything like we in the West would call “wine.” Taken on its own though, the Chinese “wines” are not bad if you stick to the less spicy end of the alcohol spectrum.
Moutai, while it resides in the category of 白酒 something we would roughly translate into English as moonshine, does go down in a dangerously smooth way, and has been known to cure the common cold, gastric distress and shyness.
Gan bei!
Well, the Italians are in with the Jews and the Chinese on the matter of food (and other things, too)!
Buon appetito!