My dad and stepmom have been to china, and are both adventurous eaters, and they will NOT eat most local food in china. It is NOTHING like what (at least) USians think of as Chinese food, and the sanitary conditions were most often questionable at best.

A world-traveling friend of mine says basically this about food in China and some other places too. What Americans think of as "ForeignPlace" food may bear little to no resemblance to what you'll actually find to eat there, and sanitation conditions may make you not particularly hungry. Like, China is a very big place! - they don't all eat the same "Chinese food" I can get at Jade Palace across the street. In the case of some of the dishes, none of them do.

I read an article about the food service people for the US Olympic team the year the Olympics were in Beijing. The usual procedure is for them to buy most food in whatever country the Olympics are in, and just bring whatever specialty items they need that aren't available there. For Beijing, though, they brought almost all the food from the US -- when they did their first visit, to see what was available in Beijing, they found a chicken breast at a grocery store that was 14 inches across. They bought it and ran some tests, and they realized that it had been injected with so many hormones that any athlete who ate it would test positive for steroids.

I've never gotten sick while traveling, but I clearly remember friends and I congratulating ourselves on surviving some very sketchy food in Guatemala . . . and then Jenn came down with Denge fever.

Like, China is a very big place!

In China, they just call Chinese food, "food."

t /Chandler

When I was getting my vaccinations to go to India, the doctor was very reluctant to give my a typhoid shot. He said I should just eat only "safe" food, and I'd be fine. When I asked him to define "safe" he said "Oh, anything in a 4 or 5 star hotel restaurant should be fine." I got the shot. Not too many 4-star hotels on the road from Chennai to Pondicherry.

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My rule for food in unsanitary places is that if you see it being made hot, it's probably fine. Salads and anything precooked are out.

Given what I've heard, I don't think I'd eat local food in China either.

I guess my pique with my friend in Tokyo was not based on overwhelm, sanitation or anything of the sort. And even thinking about it is reminding me of what bugged me about our relationship. She was WICKED strong as a human being...both parents disabled caused her to learn taking care of herself young...but when she invited me to Japan, somehow, she became a different person and leaned way too heavily on me to take care of her there. So much so, that I faked being sick so as to skip out on a trip to the country so I could travel on my own.

Bad friend, I know. But she planned the trip to McDonald's before she even got there. I suppose I shouldn't care about a gustatory experiment.

Hm. Guess I should let that go.

Are people supposed to get shots to go to Jamaica? Or "eat safe" there? Of course, I've had so many people tell me "it's not really the Third World" The fuck? Am I supposed to be flattered? It is.

When we went to Kenya, we started out with "good" intentions (read, what the doc had suggested), but the urge to eat like Kenyans overcame us, and we just stayed sticklers about handwashing. Plus the fact that we'd slipped up and had tomatoes in our sandwiches already.

My rule for food in unsanitary places is that if you see it being made hot, it's probably fine. Salads and anything precooked are out.

Except that the vast majority of food poisoning cases come from unsanitary hands, not unsanitary food. It doesn't matter how clean the ingredients are if the person cooking it didn't wash their hands before they got to the stove.

And while we're on the topic of foreign food, the chicken tikka masala I just had delivered tastes like Campbell's tomato soup. Blech.