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   Peter Simon:

   Hi there,
   A nice entry again, thanks.

   Let me add a few remarks again. What strikes me most is that after a lot of entries on food, what hundreds of millions of people eat at their work-place or tens of millions of students and their teachers eat at school and at university canteens is still shrouded in mist. I think that’s the reality, especially come exam-time, and with the teachers having no time to go out with the thousands of tests to be corrected.

   What I noticed around a decade ago was that as to private schools, teachers and students almost never left the campus and were confined to eating canteen food, which was edible at best. Mostly people slurped up glutinous rice soup from a small metal bowl for breakfast, and often for lunch and dinner as well, in the latter cases supplemented with something like xī hóng shì chǎo jī dàn (scrambled eggs and tomatoes), or baozi. Scrambled eggs become terribly soggy as they add the raw tomatoes for a few seconds – I soon learned to avoid this dish. Baozi, jiaozi, long bao, and other items readily translated to mean “dumplings” by the locals are made of the same pasta, the name depending on the form. Each kind taste very differently depending on what’s stuffed inside and how well they are steamed, so, at least for me, a Hungarian, they were nothing like dumplings at all. However, these are among the best and most usual every-day food, especially when they are also fried a bit at the bottom (I’ve forgotten the name).
   To add just one more aspect, let me add that, as a lover of chicken meat, I quickly learned to avoid any chicken dish, as they are always made of chopped-up chicken pieces: a whole chicken is probably taken by the scruff after being gutted, and is chopped up carelessly with a big kitchen-axe, so my dish contains all manners of pieces of sinews, bones and joints intermingled with the meat. Besides, this all was then boiled, so there’s little taste to the little meat left. Nothing to be enjoyed together with pieces of tasteless boiled potatoes – or lotus stems.

   However, this is a continent-size country with 50% more people than Europe, so when they asked me (regularly) if I liked Chinese food, I asked back which Chinese food they mean. Because they left their mouths hanging after that, I always added that there was some that I loved (highly-ranked among all the kinds of food I love), and some that I don’t. I didn’t add that those I actually avoided at all cost.