If you look at American fast food as a sixty-year experiment, international in scope, China’s countryside would be the control group. While fast food in the U.S. was born and has grown up with the interstate system, China’s inter-province system is still in its infancy, and thus, there have been no arteries to clog. Pardon the pun. What you find instead, and only at great intervals as you travel, are little roadside shops with refrigerated cases out front. In the cases are a wide variety of lettuces, goose eggs, chicken eggs, beans, peas, lotus root, doufu, chickens whole and in pieces, chopped up pork mixed with spices, whole chunks of pork, beef, sausage, salted fish and various animal organs. The proprietor always comes forward with her order form as soon as you step up to the case. Depending on how many of you there are, you select several dishes and specify how you would like them cooked—with or without garlic, spicy or not spicy—and then you find a table, sit down and order your drink. Within minutes the food begins to arrive, piping hot, and perfectly cooked. The locals don’t need a new-fangled word such as “locavore” here; they’ve never been anything else.
