Food as survival
Sometimes food means survival. While the Chinese cooks who exported “Chinese” food around the world ate authentic cooking at home, the dishes they served, thus creating new cuisines entirely, were based on economic necessity. Chinese food in America, for example, is Darwinian, says Lee. It was a way for Chinese cooks to survive in America and earn a living. It started with the invention of chop suey in the late 1800s, followed by fortune cookies around the time of World War II, and the pervasive General Tso’s Chicken, in the 1970s. Waves of more authentic Chinese food followed, as Hunan and Sichuan cooking came to the U.S. by way of Taiwan.