China — The 800lb Gorilla

In the last few years there has been a remarkable expansion in the product line of Chinese restaurants in America and Europe. The traditional Cantonese cuisine that dominated the restaurant menus in the 1950s and the 1960s has given way to cooking in the Mandarin, Sczechwan, and Hunan styles. These differences in cuisine reflects the immense size of China, and the fact that basic foodstuffs available on the seacoast differ from those available inland — the Cantonese chefs worked around rice dishes; seafood is an important component of the menus. Mandarin cooking is Northern with wheat the basic starch. Meats were important in the cuisine of Hunan and of Sczechwan; 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 is more or less the Yangtze River, which bisects China; 400 million live north of this river and 800 million south of it.