Blame it on the CIA. No, not that CIA; the Culinary Institute of America, which has a decidedly different mission than the U.S. intelligence agency. It is trying to enlist professional recruits to the cause of American cuisine and stir up a culinary revolution by teaching Chinese how to cook “American.” These days, that means preparing foods with distinctly Asian and Latino accents, like Vietnamese fiery grilled beef and jicama-orange salads. So far, the CIA, partnering with the Western U.S. Agricultural Trade Association, has educated about 100 top chefs and 2,000 food-service personnel in everything from making puff pastry to pairing salmon with a Sonoma Chardonnay.
The CIA’s motive is hardly selfless. China will enter the World Trade Organization and lower its tariffs in 2005–and everyone from peanut farmers to raisin growers is eying the huge, potentially lucrative market. Some estimate that China will be capable of gobbling up more than $3 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products by then. No wonder the U.S. government has funded the CIA’s project with $300,000 a year. And CIA instructors come equipped with free samples from a number of companies pushing alien products like cranberries, instant mashed potatoes and California reds. Their goal is to get a country accustomed to hot and sour soup and tea-smoked duck to develop an appetite for chilled avocado soup, cinnamon-smoked turkey, figs atop focaccia, and agnolotti stuffed with lima-bean mash. “Everything is brand-new,” says Andy Chen, the executive chef at Zhao An Hotel, enthusiastically hacking away at a side of salmon with his Chinese meat cleaver.
Changing the way Chinese consumers think about American food is no small task. Most still equate American fare with fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which arrived more than a decade ago. Given a Western menu, they steer toward grilled and lighter fare like ribs and seafood and away from things like cheese (especially blue) and beans. Those out for a good Western meal are limited to nice hotels and a few restaurants where dinner can run more than $50 a person–astronomical with an average urban salary of about $200 a month. And the well-heeled eat there less for the food and more for the ambience and prestige. The chefs who form the bulk of the CIA trainees commonly use ingredients from countries that got there first (say “salmon” and most Chinese blurt out “Norwegian”). Or they often pick homegrown products–like beef and apples–whose quality, they say, is close to their U.S. counterparts, sometimes at half the price.
But U.S. ingredients can always be billed as the best. Peanuts are peanuts, but the United States has concocted peanut flour (featured in the CIA’s chocolate-peanut cake, pakoras and lemon-tart crust). And though China’s raisins may be cheaper, California’s, their growers argue, are sweeter, plumper and prettier. “If you sell Rolexes, you know you’re not selling to the mass market,” says Tony Feng, marketing executive for the California-based Raisin Administrative Committee.
The food may catch on yet. Urban affluence is growing, and international luxury hotels are mushrooming. China’s WTO entry–and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing–will bring plenty of foreigners hankering for their native foods. Still, after the cooking was done, it was clear that there’s a long way to go. As they lunched on the potato blinis and vinaigrette coleslaw they’d cre-ated, many of the chefs acknowledged that they prefer Chinese food anyway. The chilled avocado soup had a “weird flavor,” declared the Hotel Sofitel Hyland’s Ringo Chen, and the chocolate-peanut cake was too sweet. Most skipped the Napa Valley zinfandel and filled their wine goblets with Coke. “You can’t change tastes overnight,” says sous-chef Alan Weng Hao Chang, who’s cooked on Western stoves for 14 years. Then again, the Great Wall wasn’t built in a day, either.
