对于Jing的创始人Jing Gao而飞,风味是换车的工具。
Advertisement
Chinese dishes
Credit: Courtesy of Fly By Jing

Chances are you've heard of chili crisp, the Chinese condiment that exploded into American home kitchens when pandemic-weary cooks were looking for new ways to add flavor to their food. My all-natural Sichuan Chili Crisp is what put my condiment companyFly by Jingon the map, but my ambitions for the brand have always been greater: To shine light on this 5,000-year-old culinary heritage, and rewrite false narratives about Chinese food that have existed for centuries in the West. If the goal is to shift culture, then Fly By Jing's vehicle for change is flavor.

It was flavor that brought me back to my hometown,Chengdu. I spent most of my childhood moving across Europe and Canada, but one thing that remained consistent was the understanding that my family and I were different. In an attempt to blend in as a kid, I adopted the name Jenny, which stuck for most of my life, until last year when I finally found the conviction to reclaim my birth name, Jing.

Jing Gao
Credit: Courtesy of Fly By Jing

When I moved to China for a tech job in my twenties, I was swept up in the food and flavors of my native country. Food became the primary path for reconnection with my Chinese roots, and the more I uncovered the rich layers of China's diverse regional cuisines, the more I learned about myself. I quit my high-flying job in tech and threw myself into the study of regional Chinese cuisines and flavor profiles, eventually opening a restaurant called Baoism in Shanghai, and anunderground supper club由金(Jing)称为fly,灵感来自成都的“苍蝇餐厅”的风味 - 小餐馆非常好,以至于吸引了像苍蝇一样的人。我不仅与自己重新建立联系,而且与家人一样,就像我的祖父母一样,我在发展第一次迭代时与他在一起辣椒调味料and调味品that I would later bring to the US.

Chinese food sits at curious intersections in the West. It is both completely ubiquitous and exotified beyond recognition. It's expected to fit into everyone's individual ideals of "authenticity," formed by vastly differing experiences from person to person. Invariably, it has to be便宜的.

西方目光对“真实性”的追求使人们对中国菜的叙述造成了虚假的所有权,从而扩展到了中国文化 -vwin德赢ac米兰and, importantly, its people—can and cannot be. In my journey to building the first premium, all-natural Chinese food brand in the US, I've met resistance every step of the way, in the form of everything from unconscious biases to rampant prejudices, and I feel it's worth breaking down just how we arrived at some of these commonly-held beliefs. The following is a closer examination of just a few things we're still getting wrong about Chinese food.

"Chinese Food will never be accepted by the mainstream."

When I first visited Expo West, the largest natural food expo in the US, back in 2018, I was shocked to see little to no Chinese flavors present. How could it be, I thought, when this food was so popular across the country? For context, there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than every single McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell, and Starbucks combined. It seemed to me that rather than a Big Mac, the most quintessentially "American" food in America might just be a bowl of chow mein or orange chicken.

That same year, I launched our best-selling hot sauce Sichuan Chili Crisp on Kickstarter, where it broke records as one of the highest-funded craft food projects ever on the platform. Clearly there was an appetite for high-quality Chinese flavors unadulterated by artificial additives and preservatives.Despite that success, I quickly realized that others did not agree. As I worked to get Fly By Jing off the ground as a boot-strapped founder, I met many investors (many of them white) who dismissed my early traction as a fluke, saying "Chinese food is niche, it will never cross over to the mainstream." Meanwhile,New York Timesrecipes with eyebrow-raising titles like "The Dish That Will Make You Fall in Love With Chinese Food" implied that the majority of people did not find Chinese food appealing.

我被迫建立该公司没有任何细节ide funding, but being capital-constrained forced me to be creative with resources.We went on to grow 1000% in our second year as a direct-to-consumer online brand, became the top-selling hot sauce on Amazon, and are about to launch in brick and mortar stores at Whole Foods, Target, Costco and more. Despite what those investors might have thought, these days, it's hard to flip through any leading food magazine without finding a recipe that calls for chili crisp, and I have a feeling this won't change anytime soon.

Chinese hot pot
Credit: Courtesy of Fly By Jing

“正宗的中国食品应该便宜。”vwin德赢ac米兰

When I moved to the US and started selling my四川辣椒酥脆,我在上海的Supperclub厨房中创建的小批量调味品,对产品的反应是立即的。大多数尝试过它的人都喜欢它。但是对于每个支持者,都有数百名在网上看到我们的广告,并在社交媒体上迅速抹黑了广告,例如:“一罐辣椒酱15美元?为什么如此昂贵?”“我可以在我当地的中国超市以2美元的价格买到这一点!”“ 这(商品质量)真是骗人。”

起初,我回应了我在中国花费了数年来采购的溢价和稀有成分的冗长解释,这是涉及制作调味料的艰辛技术,更不用说比较由跨国公司与跨国公司与跨国公司与跨国公司制造的产品进行比较的不一致性。规模经济。但是后来我很好奇。

是什么使人们认为中国食品没有价值?vwin德赢ac米兰致力于他们美食的手工艺和遗产的人们不应该从劳动中获利?值得注意的是,相同的批评很少针对白人厨师,他们声称在他们的旅行中发现了“高架”的菜肴。尤文图 德赢

I first read about the "Hierarchy of Taste" in a book calledThe Ethnic Restaurateurby NYU Food Studies Professor Krishnendu Ray. In it, he lays forth a comprehensive theory on why some cuisines command a higher price than others. Carne asada and steak frites are an example of a similarly high-quality cut of meat that are listed at vastly different prices, as are ravioli and dumplings, pasta and hand-pulled Lanzhou noodles. Ray puts forth that this hierarchy is shaped by a simple rule: the value we place on a cuisine is informed by our perception of the socio-economic status of emigrants from those countries. "With China, [Americans] are still filled with this funny disdain, that it is about cheap and crappy stuff, including cheap and crappy food," he says.

由于1882年《vwin德赢ac米兰中国排除法》,中国粮食在美国直接激增,这是第一个禁止仅基于种族的人移民的法律。但是由于漏洞使商人能够经营餐馆,因此中国食品像野火一样在全国范围内传播。vwin德赢ac米兰为了吸引食客,价格保持较低,这使中国食品成为负担得起的奢侈品,有助于使外出食物的经验民主化。vwin德赢ac米兰使这一可能的原因是对这些薪水不足和过度劳动的劳动者的剥削,这反过来又使其如此受欢迎。确实,黑暗的起源。这是一种面对种族主义和仇外心理的韧性而诞生的美食,从那以后,人们对中国食品的期望是我们从那以后一直存在的一种范式。vwin德赢ac米兰这就是我在2018年仍然无法在杂货货架上找到任何优质的中国食品的原因。vwin德赢ac米兰真正的食物vwin德赢ac米兰,实际成分,道德采购和制造是有代价的。我们的食vwin德赢ac米兰物,我们的文化和我们的人民有价值,现在是时候我们的薪酬反映了这一点。

Jing Gao with a jar of Fly By Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp
Credit: Courtesy of Fly By Jing

“我在中国菜的经历是唯一的经历。”vwin德赢ac米兰

毫无疑问,我们的博览会ure to Chinese food, or any "ethnic" food for that matter, has been limited and filtered through an oversimplified lens. Food media has been particularly guilty here, from tokenizing to white-washing in coverage, which led to a reckoning at several large publications over the past years. I've personally been told by editors and publishers that "Asian cookbooks don't sell," or "We've already written about one Asian brand in this issue of the magazine, so we can't cover another." This approach has led my company to lose out on growth opportunities, and fellow small businesses in the Asian food space are pitted against each other even when operating in entirely different spaces.

Jing最常在网上收到的评论的某些Fly是“这与Laoganma有什么区别?”,“这只是Laoganma的时髦,标有一些时髦的版本?”假设是:a)市场上只有一个中国酱汁,b)所有辣椒油都是相同的,c)由于一个人靠近中国文化(即“我去过唐人街”或永远信任的“我的女朋友是中国人”),现在,一个人的狭窄经历必须对其他所有人来说。

事实是,中国有成千上万种不同样式的辣椒石油,每个家庭都保护自己的食谱。我已经看到成分从坚果和种子到牛肉干,蘑菇和发酵的奶酪。有一种千篇一律的辣椒油既还原性又没有想象力的想法。

But it's easy to be reductive when our exposure to others has been so limited. There is no room for complexity if everything is binary. Like its people, Chinese flavors are far more complex, ever-evolving, and diverse than that.Weare more than that. What started as my personal quest to reconnect with my roots has become a mission to celebrate the many-layered stories of the diaspora, because real stories are personal, and they deserve to be told.

Fly By Jing is the product of a personal journey of discovery and coming home to self. Like me, it's born in Chengdu, but living in America. It's rooted in tradition, but made for the way we live today. It doesn't conform to anyone else's notions of value, taste, or tradition. It's one person's recipes, one person's vision, and one person's story.

And with these flavors, I'm telling you mine.