Hong Kong fencer Cheung Ka-long won his 2024 Olympic gold medal after a dramatic, thrilling final. The close fight against an Italian opponent required video reviews, and Cheung eventually won the bout with a score of 15-14.
These comments were ignorant, but perhaps understandable. I have seen restaurants in Italy claiming to serve “Korean/Chinese” food. If you didn’t know better, you might assume they were the same thing.
Most of my open-minded Italian friends rolled their eyes at this storm in a teacup, but there are also those who are still upset about pineapple as a pizza topping. To them, I say: It’s time to get over it. The outrage is not worth your energy and stress.
Italy’s delicious flatbread has given humanity a lot and is an important part of world culinary history. The fact that pizza is loved everywhere is a testament to its genius influence.
However, it is important to know that the further the pizza is transported abroad, the more likely it is that local producers will bake a different version than the classic Margherita in Campania.
I mean, you don’t see the Chinese going crazy when a classic Cantonese or Shanghainese dish gets the fusion treatment. A Frenchman at Man Mo Dim Sum in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district has foie gras in Subscribe and most of us said “Viva liberté!” (I still prefer the traditional version of the soup dumpling, but to each his own.)
Across the Indian subcontinent, Indian and Chinese flavors are blended together and referred to as Hakka food—since many of the immigrants are originally Hakka. The cuisine is very different from authentic Hakka tribal dishes in China, but no one is suing to challenge the copyright on the term.
In Madagascar and the French-African world there is a popular Chinese soup this has little to do with a real Chinese soup, except that it is a noodle broth that may contain ground meat, eggs or seafood.
Chefs in Mexico now prepare beef stir-fries with cactus leaves instead of Chinese vegetables.
None of these points make us feel that the integrity of Chinese cuisine has been destroyed.
If people in America want to call the chop suey, orange chicken, or egg foo yong they order Chinese food, that’s fine with me. We don’t consider that a gastronomic blasphemy or a cultural insult. In fact, you can save me a fortune cookie.
Even when chef Wolfgang Puck sprinkled Peking duck and hoisin sauce on a pizza, we didn’t bat an eyelid. Where was the Italian outrage over this offense?
The reality is that “pizza” is now just a catch-all term for any kind of flatbread with toppings. I think that die-hard Italians who insist on this stingy brand of food fundamentalism are doing so more out of market protectionism.
In fact, it was the Greeks and Phoenicians who first added toppings to flatbread. Some say the Romans got the idea for pizza when they saw Jews topping their matzo with oil and cheese.
Italians can’t even claim tomatoes are a native product. The tasty fruit was brought from the New World – and it was not first imported by Italians, but by the Spanish. Cultural appropriation, anyone?
