II. Differences in Diet Concepts

2.1 Differences in Diet Concepts  

   China has a long history of food culture and the Chinese diet culture is famous and renowned in the world. From the beginning of the Qin dynasty, the Chinese diet structure is based on grain, beans, vegetables, fruit and other planting food. There was a clear distinction between staple food and non-staple food. The staple food includes mainly five cereals. Non-staple food includes mainly vegetables, dairy, eggs, fish and meat and so on. A survey shows that Chinese eat more than 600 kinds of vegetables. The number of vegetables in China is six times more than that in the west. In fact, vegetarian food is common food in Chinese food. Generally speaking, meat is put on the table only during the festivals and holidays. Therefore, since ancient times, there was “vegetarian” in China. In the daily diet structure, food is the dominant. The Chinese diet is mainly vegetables. To a great extent, this has certain contact with Buddhism. Chinese people regard animals as “creatures”, and think plants are “low-spirited”. Therefore, people advocate vegetarianism. The staple food of China includes mainly rice, wheat, while millet, buckwheat, potato and sweet potato. What’s more, corns also have their own position. In addition, all kinds of pasta make people’s life become more and more rich and colorful, such as steamed bread, noodles, fried dough sticks and porridge, cake and so on.

With the highly development of America, people are very concerned about health. For the diet, they demand the quality of food rather than quantity. In the choice of food, they prefer to nutrition science rather than delicious food. As a matter of fact, the American prefer to the efficiency of pragmatism rather than delicious food. Food is only used as a mean to satisfy their hunger. They eat food just to sustain life. When American introduced their diet characteristics, they spent a lot of time in nutrition reasonable collocation. America is a developed country in the food industry and has produced canned food, fast food and so on. Although the kind of food is not very delicious, it saves too much time and is full of healthy nutrition. Therefore, Americans are more healthy and stronger than Chinese. There are some differences between body sizes of Chinese and Americans. In general, Americans are tall and have long legs, broad shoulders and developed muscles. Chinese are small-sized. The shoulders are narrow; the legs are short; the color is weak yellow. Based on the differences of diet objects, Chinese is called “plant personality”, but American is called “animal personality”.