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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 8033756" data-attributes="member: 6701124">tl;dr - Chunks of the midwest seriously wouldn't have thought of the various things you could do with rice in the early 80s.  The OA food section might have been aimed at them. An upscale Chinese restaurant in a city of 140k even felt the need to mention twice in a print ad that its customers shouldn't expect chop-suey!? Presumably it was no more the only greeting there, than hello is the only greeting here. Reading it I only assumed they were trying to emphasize how central rice was.  (Which, as you note, shouldn't have been true for the whole region).You specifically focused on rice vs. wheat in your post as the problem. I was trying to find out how much more you thought was awful. I brought it up suspecting that it might be as well. But, I was surprised that some variation of the greeting was/is apparently used in several different countries according to google.I'm wondering if there were a bunch of folks in the non-biggest-city midwestern US in the 1970s and early 1980s who didn't have Americanized cuisines of a bunch of different countries served at home (second largest city in Illinois at the time for me, 70 miles from Chicago, pop around 140k).  In my family we had potatoes or instant rice or pasta as a starch, along with a meat and a vegetables, four or five nights a week, maybe a casserole, tacos, or burgers the others, and all of them with an iceberg lettuce salad.  And when we ate out once a month it wasn't very adventuresome.  I remember a lot of Pizza/Italian, a German sausage place, Bishop's Buffet, a family restaurant, and maybe Red Lobster once a year.  If you time machined back to the early 1980s to ask middle-school me to name an Asian food, I'm not sure I could have named anything besides Chop Suey.  I think we might have had that at home once in a while.  :-/  That might have been typical.  Googling up a restaurant ad from 1980 (for a restaurant that is still there)  the first line is "It's not a Chinese chop-suey restaurant" and it later notes "Don't expect to have egg-foo-yung and chop-suey".  I'm not sure if I had been to a Chinese restaurant by 1985 or not.  By the end of the decade it was a very different story.I'm wondering if that's the audience they had in mind writing the half page about food.  One that literally wouldn't have thought of doing that with rice or have known what tofu was.  One that needed to be told not to expect chop-suey.Anyway, that doesn't make the book unproblematic today! And it's certainly not a good thing that the book would have led us to think everyone in SE Asia ate rice at every meal and numerous other simplifications.I'm sorry it has been so exhausting.  Thank you for fielding as many questions as you did!!</blockquote>

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