All the older first gen immigrants are like, it's not all authentic but it's pretty similar and tasty would eat it again. While the later gen kids are acting like its dog food.
China is 1 billion people over a large geographic area that has culturally exchanged for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years; at this point, the same dish can have many regional variations in preparation. The mapo tofu or kung pao chicken you find in its homeland of Chongqing is going to be very different from the versions of the dish served to locals in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. In that sense, American preparations of the same dish are adjusted to local taste and ingredient availability.
Most traditional recipes, if they were even standardized (and the aforementioned mapo tofu, as an example, is not at all) have only been like that in the last 100-150 years. In fact, I have seen people claim food that actually does come from China/Hong Kong as inauthentic. As an example, honey walnut shrimp is actually a dish from Hong Kong style western cuisine, which lost popularity in its homeland but is still made by the diaspora.
To fetishize the authenticity of food is to reject progress and innovation. Korean or Indian food is no less authentic with the addition of chilis, even though those are not native plants to those regions and were introduced from the New World.
If you conflate quality with authenticity I could see how "fetishizing" authenticity is tantamount to rejecting innovation. But I think they are distinct concepts, so I have to disagree. I also wouldn't characterize my stance as fetishization, more that authenticity is also something to appreciate, below more important factors like taste.
I think Nathan Myhrvold’s takes on the “authenticity” of food are nice.
https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-n...
There's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying non-authentic foods or being inspired to make variations/fusion dishes, but ignoring their origins is very insensitive IMO. I don't see what is so painful about acknowledging authenticity.
Edit: really it boils down to food being a huge part of culture. For example, when you say Pizza Hut is authentic Italian cuisine, you are saying something about Italian culture, and wanting to correct that is a perfectly normal thing to feel. We should not conflate authenticity with quality, but authenticity still matters.
as an example, a historic cooking show I watch got a fair amount of heat for making his Scottish-descended grandmother's Scottish shortbread recipe, which used rice flour. According to the authenticity experts, this was sacrilege because no true Scottish shortbread is made with rice flour, you use corn flour. And that may very well be true in 2021, but the show managed to pull a 1929 Scottish cookbook that used rice flour in their recipe; it turns out that corn flour is now common because corn flour became extremely cheap due to American corn production, but that is a fairly recent change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnYltDdE8Cw
1: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uncle-roger-rice-food...
ps: The conversation here brought up a question inside me regarding English tea and tea preparation; never had a cup of English tea better than the shot of best Chinese tea I have had in my life. Shouldn't it be considered inauthentic then?
White kids would also talk about how bad say, Chiles or Applebee's is, for the same reason.
In the video in question, the young people's complaints were very much the latter.
The old people seemed to more correlate it vs food in their country, but rated the food on its merits.
Yes Kung Pao Chicken is very different from Cantonese dishes, but that's because Kung Pao Chicken is from a different part of China.
Feel free to serve authentic Thai and Chinese cuisine in the west. Surely it will be a successful venture.