ABSTRACT
It is difficult to imagine a statement like that of F. T. Cheng being made about many Western peoples, and certainly not about the English or Americans. As Lin Yutang has observed, the Chinese consider eating food to be one of the rare joys of living, one to which they are more devoted than to religion or the pursuit of knowledge. In this he sees his people as quite different from the English, whose very words relating to elegance in eating come from the French. The English language, Lin notes (Y. Lin, 1935: 337), has a word for “cooking” but none for cuisine; it has one for “cook,” but no proper word for chef; one for “dishes,” but none for menu; and as for a gourmet, he is likely to be called, at least in English nursery rhymes, “greedy gut.” In fact, Lin points out, the only time an English person is likely to speak of his stomach is when it is “sick” or “aching.” The same might be said of Americans, of course, though not everyone in the United States (or in England) fits that mold. Nevertheless, the American view all too often is that eating, while necessary for survival, is something that should not interfere excessively with other, more important, things in our lives. Thus we have been pioneers in creating fast food chains of considerable variety, from the automats of Horn and Hardart in New York and Philadelphia early in this century to the present-day drive-up windows of McDonald’s and Burger King. Cheng, however, is presenting a quite different perspective, one in which food is seen as playing a central role in the life of a broad cross section of an entire people. It is a perspective so at odds with the standard American view as to deserve further examination.
