The Constant Dilemma I Have With Eating Chinese Take Out

Growing up I was never a big fan of Chinese take out. My small tongue and even smaller taste buds did not recognize all the spices, which were foreign to my pallet. Whenever my parents decided it was time to order out for Chinese the only thing I would eat were the ribs, Lo Mein, Won Ton soup, and a fortune cookie. Even these I didn’t enjoy eating, but it was much better than whatever else was being served up from the Schezuan style of cooking.

Then one day when I was about seven or eight my oldest sister came home from her boyfriends house, and told my family the true story of how she was eating Lo Mein earlier in the evening, and that she had found a burned up cockroach in the bottom of the aluminum container when she went for seconds.

That one conversation about her Chinese food was enough to make me never want to eat Chinese ever again. That day led me to become prejudice against Chinese food. Whenever I would hear of someone talking about how they had eaten some delicious Chinese I would squirm and want to vomit at the thought that they must have had cockroaches in their Lo Mein or whatever else it was that they ate too. I would even tell them the story of my sisters’ horrors.

I kept good with the promise to myself that I would never eat Chinese food again. Every now and then I would hear jokes about how the chicken in Chinese food isn’t really chicken, but really cat meat. CATS! This rumor was doubly horrifying to my mind. I didn’t want to eat cockroaches, nor did I want to eat cats. I thought that these Chinese restaurateurs must be some of the sickest people in our society.

About 10 years of the promise had been under my belt of not to eat Chinese, and I finally gave in. I was going to “try” it. At the time I was interning at Bloomberg, and it wasn’t so much a “let me try that kind of food again” type of thing, as much as it was that I as the intern didn’t want to walk down to the Ear Inn and pick up the lunch order for everyone in my team, nor did anyone in my team (they went by teams instead of departments) want to order in from the now defunct Hudson Grill. Instead, everyone wanted to eat Chinese.

We all ate together for the most part. There was a big lunchroom/kitchens that were designated for only two teams, and it was a good environment, each day at about 11:15am I would call around looking for the local lunch specials, at 11:30am I would get every ones lunch order, 11:45am place the order, and then at Noon the food would be delivered or picked up. I was anal retentive to this timely manner day after day.

This one-day in particular was different, I just didn’t feel like walking, and everyone wanted Chinese. I remember telling my coworkers that I didn’t eat Chinese, and then naturally wondered why. I told them the cockroach story, and they explained to me that all restaurants have bugs and rodents in them now and then, and that this was just a part of the world in which we lived. This seemed to make sense to me, and these coworkers could see that my guard against Chinese food was beginning to come down, and they seized on the moment to drag it down all the way. After about 15 minutes of reassurances that the food was delicious from this one Chinese take out in particular, and that I would want to order in Chinese once or twice a week after trying them once, I semi reluctantly decided to break the promise to myself that I would never eat Chinese again.

I ended up ordering chicken with broccoli, and ate it at the big tables alongside about a dozen or so of the guys I worked with. They kept joking around that “this doesn’t taste like chicken” to screw with my mind. They were trying to get inside my head, and they were doing a good job of it. At one point I stopped eating and didn’t want to continue. I was sure that I wasn’t eating chicken, and that I was eating some unknown meat. The guys joked, and said it had to be chicken, and they even tried my food and assured me that it tasted normal.

Cut to three days later, and the local newspapers are reporting that the Board of Health in the City of New York closed down two Chinese restaurants. Both had dozens of cats in their freezer at the time of a surprise inspection. One of these restaurants was the very same Chinese take out place that everyone had been ranting and raving about how great the food was. I went into work that day, and wasn’t 100% sure if it was in fact the same place from which I had that chicken with broccoli.

I walked in, and everyone was talking about how we all just ate cat meat the other day. I knew it didn’t taste like regular chicken. I remember this guy named Nelson saying, “Those dumplings were the best dumplings that I’ve ever had.” Most of my coworkers at the time didn’t seem to mind the fact that we ate cat. They actually liked the food, they only wished that they weren’t paying for chicken meat, and that they knew up front that it was cat meat. So really, they just didn’t like the fact of the bait and switch technique of this local Chinese take out place. I on the other had felt like all the blood drained from my head, and that I was going to puke my brains up.

From that day forward I didn’t want to eat Chinese again, ever. I of course gave in to this promise again eventually. I started to eat Chinese again and only from the one near my place in Brooklyn. It’s a small takeout place, and you can go and watch them cook your food. You can see every step of the process. It’s delicious, and I am 99% sure that when I order my food, it is in fact chicken – although I never see stray cats on the same block as the takeout place.