There's very little dairy in Chinese cooking. There's no cheese around. So I understand that you were missing cheese.

There was a traveler's cafe by the river where they had packets of sliced processed cheese kept under lock and key and they were very expensive and they were only catering for the old backpack.

That reminds me like when I did study abroad in London and I was trying to find American

cheese.

The only one that I could find was the Safeway brand cheese food product.

It was called, it looked like yellow wax.

Yeah, oh yeah. no, it was like that.

This is the sporkful, it's not for foodies. It's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman.

Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people.

Today I'm talking with cookbook author, Fuchsia Dunlop.

Fuchs spent the past 30 years learning and writing about

Chinese cuisine, more importantly cooking and eating it. She first visited China

in the early 90s when very few Westerners were traveling there and she stuck around

immersing herself in China

for years at a time, learning the language,

and studying traditional cooking techniques.

Her cookbooks are some of the best known English language books

on Chinese cooking.

And among the few that document

the cuisine of specific regions highlighting how people in China cook and eat

today. Her work has introduced many Westerners to the idea that Chinese food is

a lot more than orange chicken and grab Rangoon.

...