It’s supper-time, and you’re sitting down to a take-out meal — a double cheeseburger with fries and a Coke.
The damage? Roughly 1,000 calories.
On the other side of the world, a Chinese family is having a light breakfast of home-made dumplings and white rice.
Note the difference? I did.
You hear it all the time; The differences between Western food and Chinese food are vast. Well, after my overseas adventure, I’ve come home with the knowledge to crack this myth open.

As it happens, real Chinese food, (as opposed to chicken balls and fortune cookies), is about three-million times better for you than anything we eat here, for the most part, anyway. It’s a sad and inconvenient truth, but it’s the truth nonetheless.

That isn’t to say that everything they eat in China is 100 per cent healthy; it just doesn’t ever leave you with a feeling like you’re going to have a stroke immediately after consumption (a problem I sometimes face after eating our greaseladen food).

To put it lightly, the food in China is vastly, almost infinitely, different from what we Canadians are used to. Not only is the food there about a million times less greasy and fattening, but it all comes in much smaller portions, as well.

Dinner, most of the time, consisted of plain white rice, stew, steamed vegetables, and some kind of chicken or beef dish. And it was all delicious! Well, most of it was, anyway. I can’t say I was totally nuts about everything, (You can just imagine my surprise when my Chinese buddy offered me her version of chicken fingers, gnarled claws and all, or the look on my friend’s face when she found an entire chicken’s talon in her soup), but to each their own, I suppose.

Some of the food was so absurdly different from what we’re used to in Canada that I was forced to take pictures just to prove to the people back home that it actually existed.

Fried milk is a good example.

We indulged in this delicacy on our first night in Beijing at a swanky restaurant downtown. Fried milk looks something like an over-sized Twinkie. It has a crispy, golden exterior and is about the width of your forearm. At my table, I was the first to take a bite of this crazy-looking dessert, (at least that’s what we thought it was!).

You’re meant to dip it in this sweet, delicious cream that tastes a little bit like melted Betty Crocker vanilla icing. I made sure to slather my fried milk in this sauce before taking a bite. Upon sinking my teeth into the strange food, my mouth was filled with a supremely creamy, gooey substance that almost seemed a little flavourless, (we gathered this was the milk), but the melted cream really made it sweet! Who knew something called fried milk could taste so good? It wasn’t just in the restaurants where we were met with strange foods. On the street, you could buy things like glazed, skewered apples and corn-cobs! In fact, they seemed to be a little obsessed with corn over there. You could buy these soft, unseasoned corn-cobs on every street corner, and you could spy the locals eating them all over the place.

They also sold bowls of corn at McDonalds, something else that led me to believe they’re nuts about it in China.

The sweets were also something to marvel at. Instead of fruit-flavoured popsicles and candy, they seemed to have a thing for flavours like frozen-peas, corn, and red-bean! You could buy popsicles in the shape of corn-cobs that tasted like real corn! In the candy-section at Walmart, (yes, Walmart exists in China, too!), I noticed about a dozen different kinds of milk-flavoured candy, and an entire aisle devoted to gelatinrelated sweets. Needless to say, I brought a lot of this absurd candy back home to share with my friends and family. It was too strange to pass up.

Needless to say, the food on the other side of the world was enough to give me such an intense cultureshock that I’m sure I’ll stay electrified all year. It was fascinating to see how the other side eats; Not quite fascinating enough to have me indulging in fish-eyes and corn popsicles for dessert, but interesting all the same.

By Tess Allen – Editor of Whatever