In the West, we like our foods disguised as much as possible: cleaned up and diced and grilled and slathered in chipotle mayonnaise and flanked by curly fries. We want our foods to be as removed from their original context as possible. But that’s not how the world’s little international peoples roll! When they’re not luxuriating in scented baths or shopping for quirky gifts or getting their nails done, they’re eating meat a few feet away from that dead animal’s resentful second cousin.

This is a quote from an Salon article describing the Amazing Race reality TV show now playing on the American CBS network. Yet as I read it I was immediately struck at how true a statement it is. One of the parts of life that I miss (or use to miss) the most living in China is eating traditional American food or at least food I ate/eat in America on a regular basis. Each time I prepare to go home I make a mental list of what I want to eat when I arrive. Recently, however I have grown more and more disappointed. I rush out to buy this or that only to find that for some reason it just doesn’t taste as sweet or rich or spicy as I had thought before. For a while I just thought that it must be my taste buds (they were losing their ability as I grew older.) But then in a conversation with a colleague, who had also spent some time living abroad, we figured out that it’s not our taste buds but more likely American cuisine (as the quote above makes clear.) Indeed, the more I thought on it, the more I began to think that eating in China actually liberated my taste buds from their deprived status (yes, extra hot yang rou chuan and blood sausage has other values besides being tasty) and gave them the ability to taste food as it really should be (read: pure, unrefined with bones and head attached). Once freed…they have not gone quietly back into their prior suspended animation. And that is a good thing. So for all you Americans out there debating what to eat in that narrow hutong behind you office…be brave and try something new…it might just save your mouth.