Why is Chinese food popular

 

For people who live far away from Chinese communities, Chinese food might equal to Chinese express restaurants with those routine dishes and oversimplified tastes. I guess that became popular because they summarized what are the most popular flavors and commercialized that.

But another reason is that Chinese food is daily meals for over 1/5 of the world population, and it has been influencing cuisines of neighboring countries for centuries. That might have helped foster some Chinese stomachs.

A more in-depth explanation of this is that Chinese food is the accumulation of thousands of years of wisdom. Chinese cooking is diverse, and I don't think any other cuisine can compare with Chinese cooking in this aspect. Many cuisines have their classical dishes, but for Chinese, it's hard to say which ones are the typical ones. 

Sometimes I think you cannot compare China with any single country, it's better to compare China with the EU, and take Caucasian as the counterpart of Chinese, you will find many things became easy to understand. In China, we had several provincial centers that have had their heritages, including cookings.

Moreover, we also incorporated many new food materials and recipes from other countries throughout history. And Chinese cooking is still opening to new things. Sometimes I feel It's just like Chinese writing or painting, which you can liberally experiment with your creativity as long as you got the spirit of it, and they all can be called Chinese food.

There are fewer artificial regulations in Chinese cooking, so I think it's more "organic" compared to others. Sometimes I don't understand this modern world or the urbanized lifestyle, where you only have specific ways to cook certain things, and you only appreciate a few recipes that probably only account for a fraction of dishes cooked before. I see life as a somewhat random experience, and not everything needs to be simplified into specific rules and standardized. We need more creativity in cooking, not only in those fancy restaurants but also in our life ：）