Where’s the vegetables?

People who watched television in the early 1980s are almost certainly going to remember the advertising campaign for the Wendy’s Restaurant franchise. One may not remember where one put the keys, or the dog’s leash, or the birthday present (a beautiful pottery mug) one got for one’s husband several weeks earlier, but one certainly remembers “Where’s the beef.”

And in case you missed the commercial because you had not yet been born when it aired in 1984 or otherwise hadn't seen it...




To celebrate his birthday, my dearly beloved, who is now on the far side of 70 and doesn’t look a day older than...oh... say about 60 (which is what clean living will do for one’s face), decided he wanted to have Chinese food. We have not eaten a meal at an Asian  buffet in a very long time. And “what a difference a… year or two…makes!”

I get it that any cuisine from one culture that makes the journey to another culture is going to be adapted to the new culture. The ingredients will change: things that are readily available in a tropical or semi-tropical climate in another hemisphere halfway around the world may not be available in the new country. A number of the recipes in the Chinese and Indian cookbooks that I have contain lists at the end for substitutions if one can’t find the ingredient locally.

So yes, one expects the food is going to change – it’s inevitable – and that new recipes will be created based on some of the traditional food, as has certainly happened with Chinese food.

But, in the case of Asian food, the changes we have noted in the in Asian restaurants, both when ordering from the menu and in buffets, have been inexorable and not so subtle and not for the better.

I have the general understanding that authentic Chinese cuisine mostly uses of combinations of vegetables and carbohydrates—whether, noodles, rice, or tofu—and a little meat. Our hospice counselor, who went on an extended tour of China last summer, confirms this. A picture she sent shows the ingredients of an authentic Chinese meal, called “Hot Pot” that they were served and which varied depending on what part of the country they were visiting…

And most of the meals we have eaten in Thai and Vietnamese restaurants have indeed been mostly vegetables and a little meat.

Not so at the Asian buffet we ate at recently. Not counting the salad bar or the “Mongolian BBQ” counter where one picks what one wants and a chef cooks it to order (and expects a tip for doing so), and the soup, which had some vegetables, there were 2 vegetables offered singly in the buffet steam tables—fried green beans and fried mushrooms—and two dishes that were a combination of vegetables and meat—one with beef and broccoli and another with beef and wedges of onion. That’s it.

As I stood there looking at all of the meat cooked in a variety of ways (most of which involved a heavy, sweet sauce) and almost no vegetables, I was thinking one would be hard-pressed to get even a fraction of the “5-7 servings of vegetables and fruits” that we are encouraged to eat to be healthy.

Variations on the “where’s the beef” slogan have become catchphrases, perhaps “where’s the vegetables” should too.