China — The 800-Pound Gorilla

In the last several decades there has been a remarkable expansion in the product line of Chinese restaurants in America and Europe. The traditional Cantonese cuisine that dominated menus in the 1950s and the 1960s has given way to cooking in the Mandarin, Szechwan, and Hunan styles. The differences in cuisine reflect the immense size of China, and regional differences in basic foodstuffs — the Cantonese chefs work around rice dishes; seafood is an important component of the menus. Mandarin cooking is northern with wheat as the basic starch. Meats were important in the cuisines of Hunan and of Szechwan; and because the meats were not always fresh, hot spices were added to distract from the taste of the basic ingredients. The north–south wheat–rice distinction more or less parallels the Yangtze River, which bisects China; 500 million people live north of this river and 800 million south of it.