 What does Chinese and Mexican cuisine have in common? It seems like actually a lot more than you think. So in this video, we're gonna be doing a deep dive into talking about what the cuisine share and possibly what the cultures share as well. Yeah, we're gonna be reviewing this viral article by food writer Clara Wang right now. Andrew, real quick, let's get into some photos just to show people this connection is real. First off, Andrew, taquitos, floutas and egg rolls, right, seems pretty obvious. Boom. Okay, here we have tamales and zongzi, or, you know, lomai guys, basically sticky rice wrapped up. Empanadas and certain Northeastern-style fried jiaozi. Ooh, here we got minuto and then you have the Cantonese tripe dish. David, what is it called? Aotai yi. And we've got Mexican fried fish and we've actually got a more Southeast Asian dish, but you know, some of the more like minority groups in Southern China also eat this as well. Andrew, I've got mong, ginger chicken, as well as Mexican shredded chicken, boiled chicken here. Here we have flour tortillas that look exactly like the peaking duck pancakes, the chun bings, or the bings, sorry, from peaking duck and they look, they're almost made exactly the same too. I would say tacos and some peaking duck wraps, obviously depending on how you make it. Peaking duck wraps, obviously going with, you know, small taquitos as well. Like you said, tatue bing and fajitas. Almost we're getting into like Tex-Mex. Oh, those look really similar, bro. Chicharones and shioyuk, the Cantonese roast pork. Ah! A rune bing from Taiwan and then a open-faced burrito. Obviously I'm not saying burritos are fully authentic, they're more Tex-Mex. But man, Andrew, Chinese yotiao and Spanish churros, which obviously are really popular in Mexico as well. Let's get down to the peppers, David. Last but not least, these little crispy peppers that we get at Los Tacos number one that I love to eat, they really, really look like the Chinese peppers that come with a lot of Chinese dishes, like Sichuan dishes. Oh my goodness, make sure you like, subscribe, turn on your notifications guys. Andrew, in the article, so you guys don't have to read it, but we'll link it below. She brings up the linkage between ancient civilizations, population density, diverse climates with a lot of different ingredients, outside influences that came in over the years, necessity to tenderize and flavor undesirable pieces of meat, whether that was oxtail, offals, and a focus on family and food gatherings. Ooh. I can see all those points valid, Andrew. But here's a few other ones that she didn't mention in the article, Andrew. There's a lot of Cooley and migrant labor, both domestically in those regions, but also internationally. So you're saying a lot of blue collar workers that have left their homeland to work in other places, that's common amongst Chinese and Mexican. And Chinese actually have a gigantic migrant worker seen internally within the country as well. And, David, here's another thing. Climate-wise, a lot of Mexico and a lot of Southern China, including some Southeast Asia, is actually sharing the same latitude. Yeah, so usually places with the same latitude globally have similar climates and that can grow even similar crops, right? They both share the Pacific Ocean that could have, I mean, technically a whale could swim from one end to the other, right? They both have rural agricultural farming cultures as many ancient places were, whether we're talking about the Olmecs, the Mayans, Inkins or something like that, ancient China. I would say that, I guess, and this is more anecdotally on the people side, like when I meet a lot of Mexican people or people from Mexico, I do feel like that maybe their demeanor, you could say is similar to Chinese people, especially the ones from Oaxaca or Puebla, the very humble, hard-working. You're saying more indigenous native. Yeah, they're very humble, hard-working and quiet. They don't actually talk that much. I mean, if I just said that, you might think I'm describing some Asian people. Yeah, cilantro, peppers, pickled things, sauces, some sort of balance between fats versus acids, sweet versus heat, although, to be fair, those balances are often quite different. That creates the different flavor profiles despite looking similar. So yeah, I thought it was really interesting because prior to reading this article, Andrew, I did not, I had thought about it, but I didn't know that there were so many internet threads and articles comparing Chinese and Mexican cuisine. Oh, dude, there's actually a lot. I didn't know that people were asking this question for years. They were like, oh my gosh, you know, and also, Davey, here's another fun fact that in America, when you poll people and you ask them what is your favorite ethnic cuisine in America, you know what the top two choices are? Chinese food and Mexican food. Now, are those the most authentic representations of those, even though you're right, in America, the number one and number two ethnic foods are Chinese and Mexican. Obviously, Mexican above Chinese. Yeah, and people might be referring more to Tex-Mex like a Taco Bell or something like that, and they might be referring to Panda Express, but regardless, those are forms of Mexican and Chinese food. Yo, I also looked it up. The average GDP per capita in China and Mexico is kind of similar. Interesting. David, there's even some comments that people left that were so deep cut. They didn't say, oh, it's not just food, guys. It's also the appreciation of jade, jade jewelry. And here's two pictures of Chinese jade and Mexican jade. Obviously, this is more coming from like the Mayan, Incan days when they were like, Andrew, back to Quetzalcoatl. Whoa, yeah, I know. Like Quetzalcoatl is kind of like a dinosaur dragon character. And then obviously, like Chinese love dragons. I think the Chinese dragon, you can say, is a little bit different, but of course, there's always that too. Yeah, so I mean, let's get into the comments section, Andrew. Somebody said the tolerance and appreciation of animal body parts that are considered weird to some people is both there and it exists in a lot of folk cooking. However, a lot of folk cooking from other cultures has been worked out of the culture. Like let's say, for example, Western European people had fennel and they had offals at one point. They no longer really use those ingredients very often. Right. And here's another comment that said, hey, there's also a striking similarity between Mexican and Indian cuisine. And then they went on to list all the things that are similar. So it's kind of like what we're doing with Chinese food. So I guess like, I think there is an argument that it's not like, this is not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the comparisons between Chinese and Mexican food are not exclusively to China. Because you could do the same thing with Korea because a lot of, for example, Bedia or like, you know, like a Yuk Daejang or something like that with the red soup might even look more visually similar. But like just that general region. Yeah, I think initially I always looked at the Korean food that we ate in America, very similar to Mexican food, because especially if you go to Korean barbecue, there's a lot of pickled stuff, veggies and grilled meats. And essentially, if you eat like tacos off the truck, it's grilled meat, vegetables and pickled stuff. Right, right, right. So I, but I think that it is kind of interesting to see the similarities between Mexican and Chinese cuisine also anecdotally, because like, Mexican and Chinese people work in the same kitchens oftentimes. Right, I was reading that there's a, almost like a genealogical justification for this because Mexico keeps a lot of its indigenous roots before Spanish colonization or European colonization more so than other South American countries. Like each South American country has a different distribution of how much they work the indigenous culture into their modern day culture. And Mexico is at a pretty high rate. Right, I would say with Peru as well. You're right, I would say from the food that I've had, maybe like Argentina doesn't play up the indigenous roots as much in their popular food culture. So the food in Argentina is almost gonna bear more similarities to something in Europe, whereas food in Mexico, especially depending on the province or the state that you're in could remind you a lot more of Asian food. Yeah, I guess so, so far everybody, leave a comment down below if you really see the similarities. Also, what do you think are the similarities between the Mexican and Chinese people? I think like it's hard to say, because China's so big. I would say that it's definitely like parts of China, especially maybe certain more of the drier lands or like inland, right? Inland, central China, those foods definitely taste more Mexican because they share cumin spices, like cumin beef from the Xi'an region and stuff like that. Which actually was influenced by the Silk Road, which came to the Middle East, from the Middle East, right, Persia, Iran, right? And I heard that Mexican food low-key actually has a lot of influence from Lebanon and the Middle East as well, due to immigration from a few hundred years ago. Yeah, so I mean, I guess that could be definitely a linkage that I guess kind of ties the two together. But obviously like, I mean, and we always like indigenous North Americans, there is some linkage to Asia from like tens of thousands of years ago. Right, across the Bering Strait, right? Right, but as far as like food culture, I don't know if they, I don't know if they brought the peaking duck. You know what always stuck out to me though is I remember we knew some people that were pretty much full Oaxacan in LA, Andrew. And I used to ask him, I was like, yo man, is your guys' earwax dry or wet? And he was like, I don't know man, I think mine's just dry. Oh, that's a shared thing. So here's a quote from Clara Wang that I thought was interesting. Here's a few quotes. She says, you know, they both had to handle the nutritional demands of dense populations on a bigger scale than the scattered cities in Western Europe that have, and they had much longer to figure out what is most delicious. Cooking techniques like braising, stewing, broiling and steaming, as well as the use of complex spices and marinades were developed to transform tougher cuts of meat and awful into mouthwatering, manoodle flavorful braised pig trotters and tender oxtail stew. Yeah, I think they always had gigantic like physical labor populations and you need to feed those people, but oftentimes they don't get the best cuts of meat, but then you need to spice those cuts of meat to make them edible. But over time, what people don't want becomes the wanted. Dude, I guess that definitely I would say a lot of Mexican food also to me visually crosses over with a lot of Southeast Asian food because it's a little bit more tropical too. I think if you look at a lot of foods, not completely across latitudes, there is similarity. This guy runs a half Taiwanese, half Mexican restaurant in LA. He said, when you look at Chinese restaurants, Mexican restaurants all day, they're just stewing, cooking down, braising, making soups. Like in Biria, stewing the meat down, having a taco, but also serving the soup. My mom makes soup for dinner every night so we can have a soup, but we can also eat the chicken that we made the soup with. Says Sao, who considers a fond tuan like a rice burrito. Yeah, I almost think, David, does this kind of reconfirm the video that we did a while ago about how Asian and Latino couples are increasing in California? And Latino, a lot of Asian men and Asian women are marrying Latino men and women now. And it's almost like we always kind of joked about how cultures were similar. And I don't think they're exactly similar obviously, but of course there's a lot of like crossover. Yeah, well, I know that 23 and me for a while, I think they recently separated it out. They just put any sort of indigenous North American, like Native American First Nations Indian blood in with Asian. Like they just categorize that as Mongoloid. Anyway, I think that my main takeaway is that I think a lot of the seven most ancient cultures in the world are gonna have some similarity. Mesopotamia, which is Iran area, and Indus Valley, which is India, ancient Egypt, China, Mayan, and a little bit less ancient, but more recently, but still ancient Greek and Roman. But yeah, for sure, Mayan, Chinese, Egyptian, Indus Valley, and Mesopotamia, I think anything that's been around for that long is gonna have similarity in my opinion. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's cool to see pictures side by side. Let me know what you guys think the similarities are, or other Asian dishes that you see parallels with with Mexican cuisine or other South American dishes. It's a fun exercise, right, it's cool. I wanna get some tacos now. We got to. I'm going to get some tacos. All right, everybody, please hit that like button. Leave a comment down below if you learned something from this video. Thank you so much for watching, and until next time, we're the hot pot boys, or should I say the, I don't know how to say pot, fuego pot, I messed up. Fuego pot boys, until next time, we out, peace.