The Dish on Detoxes: A Dietitian's Perspective

Despite my best intentions to eat healthy and clean, it’s a serious challenge when traveling overseas for business.  Room service, the breakfast buffet, the lobby lounge restaurant, every option it seems, is full of fried, sauced, and buttered foods.  They’re delicious but afterwards you feel like a ton of bricks. I’ve taken to carrying a travel pack of Rolaids around with me.

But I’ve found a better alternative.

Cuisine in Hong Kong is overwhelmingly Cantonese, and fairly traditional, which means a big emphasis on fresh and steamed.  Cantonese chefs believe that heavy sauces and spices should only be used to cover up the smell and taste of less-than-fresh fare, and that food should never be greasy.  To show off technique and fresh, quality ingredients, they cook with the aim of light, clean, and subtle.  Not what most Westerners think of when it comes to Chinese food.
Granted, Chinese cuisine can include everything.  (How about a plate full of boiled chicken feet!) But, if you go with someone who speaks Cantonese and knows not to order the scary stuff for you, it can also be the lightest meal you never expected. (For example, check out the recipe from cuisine.com.au linked to the photo in this post.)

I ate shrimp dumplings, pork buns, blistered peppers, garlic broccoli, turnip cake, baby bok choy, rice, and whole steamed grouper.  A little marzipan filled rice dumpling for dessert and I still felt lighter than I had after three quarters of a shrimp burger in the hotel.  Everything had been steamed and all of it was packed with natural flavor.
If you find yourself in southern China, New York’s Chinatown, Queens, or San Francisco, hunt down some authentic Cantonese that’s not been changed for Western expectations.  Give your taste buds a new twist on Chinese cooking.  Surprisingly, it saved my stomach in Asia.