How do the Chinese stay so skinny with so much good food?

When Lar and I went to Japan for a month, we wrote emails to our friends about our experiences, but I was criticized for writing too much about food. If you aren't interested in food, don't read this entry. But it is nearly impossible to go to a country with such a vastly different culture and ignore the importance of interesting and new food and the depth it brings to your experience in that country. When we traveled to Ontario for our anniversary this past summer, we did not write home about the food there because, aside from ice wine and Tim Horton's, there is not a lot of difference. But in Asia, the food is part of the experience. It is a huge part, actually, considering it is something you think about at least 3 times per day.

In response to my title, I know that a typical Chinese person is not wealthy and can't afford to eat the way that Lar and I have been eating on this trip. Also, we are staying in international hotels that have buffets for breakfast that represent food diversity of several continents. (This buffet, BTW, is something that our agency worked into the cost of the trip, which Lar and I are glad about because we would have balked at the price and gone out onto the street to forage for some food from a vendor every morning, but instead, we get to think of it as "free" and really enjoy it.)

Our breakfasts have consisted of fresh squeezed juices, coffee any style (latte, espresso, American, Brazilian, etc), fresh fruit, any type of pastry that you could find in America (hard rolls, toast on 20 different breads, Danish, Chinese donuts- think funnel cake without the powdered sugar, muffins, etc) and bacon and eggs.

But then there are the options for smelly cheeses and cold cuts of meat (European style), yoghurt type something (in the style of Turkish or Greek food), Chinese foods like eggplant, vegetables we don't have in America, familiar fruit and also fruits we don't have in America (like Fire Dragon Fruit- a white kiwi/pineapple thing), and various noodle dishes (my favorite breakfast here).

There are also a variety of soups (including Mutton, which Jim and Steph would enjoy given their love of mutton tacos), fresh made sushi, sashimi (the cuts of fish you can get in Asia put anything we have ever had in America to shame).

Lunches with our tour group have been family style, with 8 or 10 of us passing around bowls of noodles, unidentified meats, soups, rice, and many slimy (but good tasting) green vegetables. Lunches on our own, Lar and I find little shops that serve bentos (bento is the Japanese word for it; I don't know the Chinese word for it) which are small boxes of food with several partitions in them, each partition housing rice or noodles, meat, some type of Chinese style vegetable, and various other things we can't identify but taste new and interesting. One way our lunches fall short of our expectations are that, unlike in Japan where every block had several convenience stores to get take out sushi and bentos, we cannot find any such place here, so everything is a sit-down ordeal.

I'd also like to say a word about snacks in Asia. We experienced this in Japan as well as China, but there are the best snacks here, particularly crackers/cookies. They are not sweet and overloaded with high fructose corn syrup as everything is in America (inconvenient for me since I can't eat HFCS due to a health issue). In Asia, amazing things are done with with sesame seeds, almond flavoring, salt, or maybe a pinch of sugar in small but satisfying portions of individually wrapped crackers.

Bon Appétit