Chinese Food: Best Food?

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Speaker 17 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us, but that's okay because we can keep all the Chinese food to ourselves.

Speaker 17 We don't have to share with Jerry and this is stuff you should know.

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 16 A lot of caveats on this. Can I list off a few?

Speaker 17 Sure. All right.

Speaker 16 First of all, this is going to be a very broad overview of a cuisine that we could probably do like a 10-part at least episode series on.

Speaker 17 I would say 11. Yeah, maybe 11.

Speaker 16 So just, you know, have your expectations set going into this one. When you talk about Chinese food, there's a lot there.

Speaker 16 We are going to do our best to pronounce things correctly. I looked up a lot of stuff and I'm doing my best, but some of this stuff is hard for my dumb American mouth.

Speaker 16 And a lot of this is going to be, I mean, it's mainly about sort of, you know, Chinese food, although we're going to talk about origins and stuff like that, origin stories.

Speaker 16 It's mainly like what Chinese food has become here in the States, although we'll talk a little bit about other countries later.

Speaker 17 But it's through our lens.

Speaker 17 Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 17 That was great. Caveat City, right there.

Speaker 16 Caveat City. David Bowie, great song.

Speaker 17 So you said something that we were going to largely focus on American Chinese cuisine.

Speaker 17 And Laura helped us with this, and she makes a really good point. Chinese food is not just one thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 And the reason why it's not just one thing, or one of the reasons why, is because it's been exported all over the globe. Anywhere that Chinese people traveled, usually for work to immigrate,

Speaker 17 they brought their food with them and introduced it to wherever they they were.

Speaker 17 And then over time, the local flavors and tastes and ingredients from that place melded with the Chinese food and a new type of Chinese food was born. And America is no exception to that.

Speaker 17 So we have American Chinese food.

Speaker 16 Yeah. And you know what I love about that, this whole story is like everywhere Chinese people went, they were like, get a load of this.
Yeah. And everyone was like, oh my God, that's amazing.

Speaker 17 Yeah. And it took.

Speaker 16 Yeah, big time. I mean, I have no examples of places where Chinese immigrants have brought their food and people are like, nah, no thanks.

Speaker 17 Right. The only one I could find was Belize.

Speaker 17 Oh,

Speaker 17 I know you're kidding. I'm not going to fall for it.

Speaker 16 And the reason why is because, I mean, I can live on many, many, many cuisines from Asia. I love Japanese food.
I love Thai. I love Vietnamese.
I love Filipino. I like Korean food.
I love it all.

Speaker 16 But at the end of the day,

Speaker 16 good old-fashioned, like Chinese takeout is just one of my favorite all-time things since I was a kid.

Speaker 17 Very nice. Yeah, that's what I grew up on too.
It wasn't until I was an adult that I was like, there's other kinds of Asian food out there.

Speaker 16 Yeah, because that's kind of what you, and if you grew up in the 70s and 80s, that was sort of the first, you know, probably one of the first,

Speaker 16 you know, cuisines from another country you ever ate.

Speaker 17 Yeah. For sure.

Speaker 16 You know, maybe, I mean, Mexican food wasn't that big back then. That's only become more popular, I think, in the 80s and 90s even.

Speaker 17 Even still, as a kid, the Mexican food I was exposed to was chi-chi's, for God's sake.

Speaker 16 Or del taco.

Speaker 17 We didn't even have that. That was exhausting.

Speaker 17 But I think maybe even before Chinese food, I was exposed to Japanese hibachi because there was this nice restaurant in Toledo called N Japanese.

Speaker 17 And we would go to that. And I think I might have had that before Chinese food.
But regardless,

Speaker 17 I love Chinese food too. I would say my top two are Japanese, followed by Indian, but Chinese is definitely up there in top five or so.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, I'm a simple guy, like a pork fried rice and an egg roll, and I'm just now realizing we're not even going to talk about egg rolls in this, and I'm panicking all of a sudden.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that didn't strike me until you just said that, too. And although my voice doesn't betray that, I'm definitely scared right now as well.
All right. You know what? Hey,

Speaker 16 let's do a shorty on egg rolls. Maybe we'll pair it with this.

Speaker 17 Good idea. All right.

Speaker 17 So we said that Chinese food is not just one thing because it's been exported globally, but even in China, Chinese food is not just one thing.

Speaker 17 And they divide Chinese cuisine into eight different regions.

Speaker 17 Why don't you tell them what the regions are, Chuck?

Speaker 16 I'm just realizing I didn't look up a couple of these, so maybe you did. But the regions, as agreed upon right now, are and they have different names for each one.

Speaker 16 So the first grouping is Sichuan, Sezhuan,

Speaker 17 or

Speaker 16 I didn't look up C-H-U-A-N.

Speaker 17 I mean, you're braver than me. I was just going to say the first ones that they're mostly known by in the U.S.
Oh, we can do that then.

Speaker 16 That's much easier. So let's go with Sichuan, Cantonese,

Speaker 16 Hunan, which is also Zhang.

Speaker 16 Let me see here. We have Shang Dong.
We have Zhang Su.

Speaker 16 We have...

Speaker 16 Oh, I did look that one up. Zhujang.

Speaker 16 Very nice. Fujian.

Speaker 17 I've always heard it as Fujian, but that sounds kind of like an American version.

Speaker 16 Well, I heard it pronounced as if it had a Y in there almost like few.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 16 Fujian.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 16 And then what's the last one there? Anwei.

Speaker 17 Yes. And some people added at least a ninth one with Shanji.

Speaker 17 And they're all a little different.

Speaker 17 They bear a lot of similarities. A lot of them love sweet and sour.
A lot of them are heavy on the salt or umami. Some like sauces.

Speaker 17 but one of the big differences or some of the big differences is like where this, this area is located. Some of them are coastal, so they incorporate a lot of seafood.

Speaker 17 Some of them are colder, so there's like a lot of soups and heavy noodles and like really, really heavy flavors.

Speaker 17 And then others are like, hey, we love prancing around the wilderness and catching deer. So they incorporate like local um wildlife into it.

Speaker 17 And usually what I've seen is when they, when there's a lot of wildlife involved or game involved in the the recipes they tend to let that flavor stand on its own it's not like heavy with sauces that kind of cuisine isn't yeah and they um

Speaker 16 how they achieve spice is kind of different depending where you are too sometimes it's those numbing chinese peppercorns

Speaker 16 you can't you can't do those no Yeah, I've learned to eat a lot of spicy food over the last like five or six years and increase my spice level, but there's something about the numbing peppercorn that I have a hard time with with it.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I think that's natural.

Speaker 16 It's tough, but I can, you know, it depends on the cuisine. Other sort like the chilies that they use, I can, I can handle that pretty well.
It's hot, but I like it.

Speaker 16 And sometimes it's just the chili flakes.

Speaker 17 Yeah, the little red chilies that they'll sometimes serve whole with the dish. Yes, I can handle those too for sure.
There's a peppercorn.

Speaker 17 Yeah. It's tough.
Yeah. And what I mean by handling those little red chili peppers is that I eat around them.

Speaker 17 Same here.

Speaker 17 So, the cuisine that most people in the United States are familiar with is Cantonese. That's definitely like the first kind of Chinese food that Americans adopted.
And that has a lot to do with

Speaker 17 the first wave of migrants that came over to the United States. A lot of them were from Canton.

Speaker 17 And as a matter of fact, the first Chinese restaurant to open in all of North America, I'm including Canada and Mexico here, was called Canton, and it was in San Francisco.

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 16 I mean, if you've ever had dim sum, that's Cantonese. If you've never had dim sum, I highly recommend it.

Speaker 16 I hate to say, like,

Speaker 16 because it used to annoy me when a certain person I knew used to say, like, tortillas are like American bread. And I was like, no, they're just tortillas.

Speaker 17 Who said that? I'm not going to tell you.

Speaker 16 I'll tell you offline.

Speaker 16 But I was going to say, like, if you've ever had tapas, dim sum is kind of like the Chinese version of Tapas.

Speaker 16 But it really is just dim sum. But it's like shared small plates, a lot of steamed stuff, but also fried stuff, baked stuff.

Speaker 17 A lot of dumplings, right?

Speaker 16 A lot of dumplings.

Speaker 16 You know, just go to New York, go to Hopkey, get some dim sum, and thank me later.

Speaker 17 Okay. It's amazing.
I will thank you later. I've never really had dim sum, actually, now that I think about it.

Speaker 16 Ooh, boy. I mean, I like all kinds of food in Chinatown and New York, but

Speaker 16 dim sum is definitely one of them. But I'll also go to just the, you know, because if you're staying in a hotel, you can't get these huge orders and just like take tons and tons of food with you.

Speaker 16 Right. So my move now is generally just to pop down there by myself and get a couple of gigantic egg rolls.

Speaker 17 You and the egg rolls, huh? Wait, wait, we can't talk about that. We have to save it for short.

Speaker 17 Forget I even said that.

Speaker 16 But you did mention San Francisco in 1849 was the first operating restaurant in North America.

Speaker 16 And by 1851, when the population of San Francisco was but 34,000 and change, there were seven full-time Chinese restaurants open, which, you know, for that few people is pretty good for that time period.

Speaker 16 Yeah. It's not bad.
Like, people liked it, clearly. Yep.

Speaker 17 And there's a book that is going to come up, or we're going to draw from a lot in this episode. It's called From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express.

Speaker 17 A history of Chinese food in the United States by Hai Ming Leo. And Leo makes this

Speaker 17 point that a lot of

Speaker 17 like we tend to equate Chinese migrants in the 19th century, especially to California, with like railroad workers, maybe miners.

Speaker 17 We have like a certain idea of what the Chinese migrants were at the time. And that is a, I mean, it's pretty stereotypical.
It's also pretty narrow.

Speaker 17 There are a lot of Chinese migrants who made their way over.

Speaker 17 just to feed the people in the gold rush of 1849 in California. They're like, people are going to need food and we're going to knock their socks off with Chinese food.

Speaker 17 And so they started to go and open Chinese restaurants. And apparently, you could pick out a Chinese restaurant pretty easily because they hung yellow flags outside.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 And this is also sort of the

Speaker 16 kind of right away when racist

Speaker 16 feelings toward Chinese immigrants started, racist feelings toward their food even started arising right out of the gate.

Speaker 16 In Leo's book, there were a couple of examples that she cited.

Speaker 16 One was a criminal lawyer defending a white client following a race riot in 1865 and told the judge, why, sir, and I'm not going to say the racist Chinese name, but they live on rice and, sir, they eat it with sticks.

Speaker 16 And then there was a pamphlet from American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers in 1902 titled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion, colon, meat versus rice, American manhood versus Asiatic Coolieism.

Speaker 16 And apparently, coolie is a pejorative term for a low-wage worker.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 16 So it's all happening early on.

Speaker 17 Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting because, and we'll talk about immigration and racism, but those two things definitely shaped Chinese food in America in some surprising ways, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 17 So it turns out that the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in the United States is Pekin without a G, Noodle Parlor. And where else? Butte, Montana.

Speaker 17 Right.

Speaker 17 And it started out as a general store back in 1909, but within two years, they added a noodle parlor, the very same noodle parlor that's still open today.

Speaker 17 And I guess at some point, they ran an illegal gambling parlor out of the basement, but that has since been turned into an old Navy.

Speaker 16 Is that true?

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 16 Because that I could believe, actually.

Speaker 17 Yeah, me too.

Speaker 16 If you, you know, I looked up that place to see what it looked like, and it looks like a, you know, a Chinese restaurant and a building of an old West town.

Speaker 17 Man, all of those good things.

Speaker 16 What you might think. And there's a big neon sign that says chop suey.

Speaker 16 And I realized that chop suey is not a dish I've ever had, but chop suey is sort of the beginning of

Speaker 16 Chinese food in America. That's the dish that first sort of captured young America's attention.

Speaker 16 And there's some debates on whether or not it's even American in origin. And we're going to talk about chop suey right now.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 I don't know if I've ever had it either, but I think anytime you've ever made like a vague Chinese stir-fry with chicken and vegetables and maybe like some sort of thickish sauce, you basically made chop suey.

Speaker 17 Some people say that you can make it with egg, but those people are wrong. For the most part, it's a mixture of meat, vegetables, a thick sauce, usually with rice.

Speaker 17 And the name itself, not only where it originated, but the name itself is

Speaker 17 debatable, what it means.

Speaker 17 I remember, I think I might have learned this from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, that it meant leftovers in Chinese, so that people from China coming to America would see Chop Sui house, and they would think it would say like leftovers house to them.

Speaker 17 That's not exactly true, but it's not that far off.

Speaker 16 No, that's pretty close, actually, because some people say the name came from a Cantonese

Speaker 16 T-S-A-P, Tsop Sui, S-U-I, instead of S-U-E-Y. That seems to be an Americanized spelling,

Speaker 16 which is mixed bits or odds and ends, aka probably leftovers.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Lao, the author of the book, said that

Speaker 17 it probably comes from chow chop sui or chow chop suey, which some people call it,

Speaker 17 probably comes from the Cantonese pronouncing a Mandarin chow za zui. Chow meaning stir-fry and zazui meaning animal intestines.
I tend to go with the sop sui.

Speaker 17 Yeah. I mean, that's just my take, and it's almost meaningless, but that's what I'm going to go with since it's up for debate.

Speaker 16 I'm with you. I'll be in your camp.
Okay, thanks. At least we can hang out and play cards.

Speaker 17 What do you want to play?

Speaker 17 I don't know a lot of card games.

Speaker 16 I like Jin Rummy.

Speaker 17 I was going to say Jinrummy, too.

Speaker 16 I do love spades, but we need Emily and Yumi to come along.

Speaker 17 Okay, that's fair enough. They probably will anyway if we end up in a camp together.

Speaker 16 Because that means a zombie apocalypse has happened.

Speaker 17 Yeah, or else the Russians have invaded all

Speaker 17 Red Dawn, and you and I are alone in a men's camp, which is really just a fenced-off drive-in.

Speaker 16 Yeah, soon to die.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 16 Anyway, that's a weird sidetrack.

Speaker 16 A quote that, and we're going to explain the origins of this quote, but you may have heard that chop suey

Speaker 16 is as American as pork and beans. And that actually comes from a lawsuit from the early 1900s.
In 1904, a guy named Lem Sen said, you know what? I invented chop suey.

Speaker 16 I made it for a Chinese diplomat who visited in 1886, and everybody making this dish owes me money.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 It's kind of a bold lawsuit. Sure.
I don't even know who he sued. I couldn't find it.
Everybody. I guess so.
Lem Sen versus all chop suey chefs. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 17 So he ended up dropping the suit, but the suit left a huge

Speaker 17 mark on America. I mean, like it was reported on,

Speaker 17 it made the news for sure, and people knew about it. And one reason why it became such a big deal is because at the time, as we saw, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Speaker 17 So Lim Sen brought his lawsuit in 1904. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882.

Speaker 17 It was the first time the United States had ever passed an immigration law specifically targeted at one nationality.

Speaker 17 And it also basically laid the foundation for exclusionary immigration laws and much tighter immigration laws than we'd had before that we still have today, but this was super tight.

Speaker 17 I read when they loosened it up, the quota for Chinese immigrants was 104 Chinese immigrants per year.

Speaker 17 Really? Wow. Yeah.
And everybody was racist and against Chinese at the time, right? So.

Speaker 17 But people also loved chopped suey by then. I mean, love chopped sui.
So Lem Sen's lawsuit said, hey, you can keep loving chopped suey. I invented this in America.
It's really an American dish.

Speaker 17 So you can continue being racist against Chinese immigrants while still loving chopped suey. You're welcome, America.
And America said, thank you. Get out.

Speaker 16 Yeah. And he's the one who had the quote.
It's as American as pork and beans.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and the lawsuit, I think he said it too. I couldn't find that quote.

Speaker 17 I couldn't find the lawsuit, but even if it's not specifically in the lawsuit, it definitely seems to have developed out of that.

Speaker 16 Yeah, but but it's possible that it was Chinese in origin initially because apparently there are some dishes from the Pearl River Delta that are pretty similar.

Speaker 16 And some of the earliest Chinese migrants to the U.S. were from that area.
I can't parse out what's so different from chop suey than any stir-fry.

Speaker 17 I don't know either. There's a lot of overlap between Chinese dishes, including authentic cuisine, but especially American Chinese.

Speaker 17 I think it was one of the first.

Speaker 17 It was almost like an umbrella term for all Chinese dishes in America at the turn of the last century, kind of like smurf, but with Chinese food essentially.

Speaker 17 And I think because it was the first, a lot of dishes that we recognize as like American Chinese developed out of it.

Speaker 16 Okay, that makes sense. I do know that when I was a kid going camping.

Speaker 16 growing up in Georgia, I loved nothing more than taking a can of le Choy.

Speaker 16 Really?

Speaker 16 You know, it's like veggies and sauce, basically.

Speaker 17 Just sipping on it the whole weekend? A lot of water just

Speaker 16 put it in my canteen.

Speaker 16 And, you know, making some campfire rice and dumping that stuff on top, you know, heating it up and dumping it on top. I thought it was like the peak of, you know, fine cuisine in the woods.

Speaker 17 Yeah, no, I mean, that's definitely better than, you know, a human finger that you found.

Speaker 16 Yeah, but they were, La Choy was around since the 1930s doing that, you know, canned vegetable sauce.

Speaker 17 I was going going to say trick but you know it's a thing yeah but i mean that's a great explanation of just how crazy people were in america for chop suey that la choi could package and sell for decades this stuff and people were nuts for it um another sign apparently was that by the turn of the last century chop suey houses were so popular they'd started to migrate out of chinatown yeah um which was a huge deal and i should say in manhattan specifically that was a big deal because i think there were a lot of people who are like, I'd love chopped suey, but I don't want to go to Chinatown.

Speaker 17 And these Chinese entrepreneurs said, hey, you don't need to anymore. Here we are at, I don't know,

Speaker 17 Soho. Right.

Speaker 16 Another like pretty startling

Speaker 16 factoid is that

Speaker 16 it was in, well, this part isn't. It was in the 1942 edition of the U.S.
Army Cookbook. But as a result, when U.S.

Speaker 16 troops were stationed overseas in China and Japan in World War II, restaurants would put chop suey on the menu to cater to those American soldiers because they came in, were like, Where's the chop suey?

Speaker 17 Yeah, we want a hot dog, a hamburger, and chopped suey. Exactly.

Speaker 17 You want to take a break? We're at like 20 minutes, basically.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and put in my order for pork-fried rice and egg roll.

Speaker 17 I'm definitely getting Chinese food for dinner. Yeah.

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Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

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Speaker 17 All right, Chuck, so we're back and we talked about how immigration laws and racism against Chinese migrants

Speaker 17 helped shape Chinese food in America. And one of the first ways that it did was that that 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act actually led to a plethora of much more upscale Chinese restaurants.

Speaker 17 And the reason why is because part of that exclusion act is that certain kinds of businesses could achieve merchant status or the owners of certain kind of businesses.

Speaker 17 They had to be legitimate businesses that were considered kind of higher end

Speaker 17 and that if you had merchant status, you could sponsor relatives to come to the United States. And I guess in 1915, a court case got Chinese restaurants added to that merchant status clause.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and this came from a historian named Heather Lee. And she makes a case.

Speaker 16 It's like, you know, this addition to that list basically meant you were going to get a lot of like higher grade chop suey palaces. So the restaurants kind of got nicer.

Speaker 16 And you had to, in order to qualify, you also, if you were an investor or an owner, you had to spend a year managing the restaurant as the manager and not like, you know, working in the kitchen or something like that.

Speaker 16 And you've needed, of course, this had to be thrown in there. You needed two white witnesses to vouch for them.

Speaker 16 But because of these strict rules, you got, again, these nicer Chinese restaurants opening up that were qualifying for that merchant status.

Speaker 16 And then you would get investors getting together and saying, hey, let's start this restaurant. We'll take turns running it for a year and get our family members over here.

Speaker 16 And as a result, I mean, this is not the only reason, but this definitely helped.

Speaker 16 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. doubled between 1910 and 1920.
And again, between 1920 and 1930.

Speaker 16 And by 1930, they had overtaken laundries as the largest employers of Chinese workers in the United States.

Speaker 17 Yeah. So

Speaker 17 the first

Speaker 17 third of the 20th century, there was a boom in Chinese restaurants and specifically higher-end Chinese restaurants.

Speaker 17 And then another boom happened after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which greatly loosened restrictions on immigration, particularly from China.

Speaker 17 And within a decade of that act, the Chinese American population basically doubled, which sounds eye-popping, but don't forget, there was only like 104 people coming in a year.

Speaker 17 So it went from like, I don't know, 3,000 to 6,000 in a decade. It was more than that.
Yeah, it definitely was.

Speaker 17 But the point is, is that now you had way more patrons of authentic Chinese restaurants, which meant there were more authentic Chinese restaurants.

Speaker 17 And then you also had more people who were ready to open and staff more Chinese restaurants. So you had a huge boom in Chinese restaurants again in the 60s to the 70s.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure. And there was an article in 2014 in the New Yorker by Lauren Hilgers, and this was 11 years ago, but I imagine it's not completely different now.

Speaker 16 But how the labor arrangements work then and probably these days is

Speaker 16 if there's a Chinese restaurant in the U.S., there's more than 40,000 back then, and there's probably a few more now, but that's a lot of restaurants, generally run by families, but staffed by new immigrants.

Speaker 16 A lot of them are undocumented. A lot of them apparently are coming from the Fujian province, and they're providing the labor.
So

Speaker 16 what will happen is they'll have a restaurant. A new immigrant will come to town, probably a hub city.

Speaker 16 I think they concentrated on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago for the article, but any major city in the U.S. probably.

Speaker 16 And they'll go to a Chinese language employment agency and they'll say, all right, I got a job for you. They'll say this in Chinese, though.

Speaker 16 Go get on this bus. Here's the person's name.
Here's their phone number. Go to this restaurant.
And you can probably get a job there. And that's how they staff their restaurants.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 And Chuck, you mentioned, at least in 2014, 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, which is impressive in and of itself.

Speaker 17 But if you compare it to McDonald's, which is, you know, the benchmark comparison for us,

Speaker 17 there are 13,622 McDonald's in the United States versus 40,000 Chinese restaurants.

Speaker 16 There's probably, well, there's not because we know that number too. I was going to say there's probably 14,000 Panda Expresses, but we'll get to that later.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's close.

Speaker 16 The long and short of it is

Speaker 16 with how the staffing arrangement works is these cooks are moving around a lot. They'll sometimes work at a place for just a few months and go to a different restaurant, maybe for better pay.

Speaker 16 Oftentimes outside of city centers, you can get paid more,

Speaker 16 which sort of surprised me. I guess it makes sense, though.

Speaker 16 But if you're getting Chinese food for years and years from the same place, a lot of times there will be a different cook every few months and hopefully you won't even notice.

Speaker 17 Yeah, a lot of the reason you won't notice is because the immigrants from Fujian,

Speaker 17 I could not find out why the largest waves of migration lately have been coming from Fujian, but they are.

Speaker 17 But they are coming and buying Cantonese, formerly Cantonese-owned restaurants from the Cantonese owners who founded them.

Speaker 17 And they're just keeping the menu the same because, again, this is American Chinese. Neither one's making the cuisine necessarily that you would find in their provinces in China.

Speaker 17 They're making the American version. So if you have a set menu, you're probably

Speaker 17 any chef's going to be able to cook this stuff, I think.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 16 Now we're going to talk a little bit about General So,

Speaker 16 another classic Chinese dish that I've never had.

Speaker 17 Oh, really?

Speaker 16 No, I've never had it.

Speaker 16 I mean, maybe I've had it if someone out was somewhere and they ordered just a ton of food and I was kind of just dumping all of it on the plate, which is the best way to eat Chinese food. Yeah.

Speaker 16 But that's something I've never ordered myself. I kind of just stick to my main order, and General Sauce Chicken is not it.

Speaker 17 It's good. It's a

Speaker 17 sweetish, sour. No, it's not even sour.
It's like sweet and savory. It's kind of spicy, too, isn't it? A little bit, but nothing anybody couldn't handle.

Speaker 17 I think there's usually sesame seeds on it, too. It's good stuff.

Speaker 16 Yeah, not like kung pao is the real spicy one, right?

Speaker 17 Yeah, and we all know who likes his kung pao spicy.

Speaker 16 There's a funny Judge John Hodgman episode about that, too.

Speaker 16 There's a funny dad, or at least he thought it was funny, and his kids were trying to get him to stop making the same joke over and over.

Speaker 16 Wherever this guy goes,

Speaker 16 it could be like a toll booth worker. We'll ask, like, what kind of ticket he wants, and he'll say, I'll have the kung pao chicken.

Speaker 16 And he'll just say that to answer any question asked by anyone ever.

Speaker 17 Really?

Speaker 16 And the kids are really annoyed. I think it's hysterical.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it is pretty funny for sure, unless you're in a rush, because then you have to ask the question twice.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and I could also see how children of that dad might get really sick of that joke.

Speaker 17 Totally. I mean, dads can be pretty embarrassing.

Speaker 17 Except for this one. Yeah, well, not you, of course.

Speaker 16 All right, so what are the origins of General Seoul's chicken?

Speaker 17 Actually, Chuck, there was a guy named Pen Cheng Wei,

Speaker 17 K-U-E-I. He was from Hunan,

Speaker 17 and he was living in Taiwan at the time as part of the nationalist government. He was a chef for the nationalist government who was being visited in Taiwan by the chairman of the U.S.

Speaker 17 Joint Chiefs of Staff. So he created a special dish that was in no way resembles what we think of General So's chicken today.
It was a very heavy dish, sour, hot, salty. It was just not American.

Speaker 17 It wasn't fried.

Speaker 17 But this dish was named after an actual real Hunanese general from the Qing dynasty.

Speaker 17 His name was Zhuo Zong Tang or So Sung Tang.

Speaker 17 And you get General Seou from that. I think he was an administer of Taiwan for a little while.
It made sense to Peng.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 eventually it got exported to the United States, I think in the 70s, and it just got totally transformed.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Apparently, if you're in the Boston area, it's going to be called General Gal, either G-A-U or G-A-O.

Speaker 16 Did not know that.

Speaker 17 I didn't know that either, but that doesn't sound totally foreign to me. Like, I, um, well, it sounds a little foreign.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 17 Like, I feel like I've heard that before somewhere.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I feel like I have too. So it may exist outside of Boston, or maybe it's, you know, just more New England regional.

Speaker 16 But Chinese food is very popular as a delivery thing. I can't remember the last time I actually, actually, I can.
Rarely, rarely do I eat in a Chinese restaurant, but I ate in Las Vegas.

Speaker 16 There's a very popular, very upscale Chinese restaurant in one of the casinos,

Speaker 16 the kind of place where like a week ahead of time you tell them you want the duck, that kind of deal.

Speaker 16 And our friend of the show and friend of ours, Adam Pranica, made that with Ben Harrison and our

Speaker 16 booking agent and friend, Josh Lindgren, and all our wives. We all went and had this beautiful, big, big meal.
But almost always I'm ordering takeout or delivery Chinese food.

Speaker 16 And Grubhub, and this was 10 years ago, but they said that General Sal's chicken was the most popular dish that they deliver, fourth most popular overall.

Speaker 16 And just last year, they reported Chinese takeout is the, or delivery, I guess, is the third most popular food overall. I guess behind pizza, and I can't think of what else.

Speaker 16 I would figure Chinese would be second, but I don't know.

Speaker 17 Pizza and

Speaker 17 takeout lasagna, maybe? People love that.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and I think this guy from Grubhub named Garfield was reporting on that.

Speaker 17 Nice. That was a great joke.
Thank you.

Speaker 17 So back in 2023, Grubhub did say that there are two cities where a Chinese dish made the top 10, Crab Rangoon.

Speaker 17 And hold your emails because we know Crab Rangoon is actually not a Chinese dish at all.

Speaker 17 But it is found in just about every American Chinese food place.

Speaker 17 It was invented by an American, the restaurateur Victor Bergeron, for his Polynesian-themed chain, Trader Vicks. Love Trader Vic.
Named after a city in Burma, also known as Myanmar.

Speaker 17 And it has cream cheese, which is as American as chopped suey.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and I know I'm retelling this, but I'll have to just quickly say one of the funniest things from when I was a kid was when I was like 12 years old in a restaurant, and there was a gentleman ordering tick out from the counter.

Speaker 16 And after like six dishes in a row, he asked if it had cheese on it. And the very kind restaurant owner kept saying, no, no, no.

Speaker 16 And at the very end, he said in his very sweet, broken English, that no Chinese food has cheese on it.

Speaker 16 And I think the last time I told that story, you and I thought about like a slice of American cheese just on some stir-fry. And then we were like, I think we might want to try that.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that sounds like something we would try for sure.

Speaker 16 Yeah. Very funny childhood memory.

Speaker 17 What else? Oh, hey, there's another reason that some Chinese food became Americanized.

Speaker 16 Let's hear it.

Speaker 17 Ingredients. That's right.

Speaker 16 You know, a lot of them were changed to fit our tastes,

Speaker 16 including the ingredients sometimes. One example that Laura found, of course, is beef with broccoli.

Speaker 16 That is not, you know, they don't have that kind of, you know, as far as I know, they don't have that kind of broccoli in China.

Speaker 16 What they use is Chinese broccoli or gai lan,

Speaker 16 which if you look that up, it looks, it's more like bok choy than what we think of as broccoli.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and I was like, where's broccoli from? Turns out the Mediterranean. Okay.
It was, according to legend, brought to America by Thomas Jefferson, who grew it experimentally in his garden.

Speaker 16 He liked to fart.

Speaker 17 Yep.

Speaker 17 He said, this is going to make me blow.

Speaker 17 And then

Speaker 17 it took off in popularity in the U.S. in the 1920s.
Didn't see why, but it did, believe me.

Speaker 16 Well, we got to talk a little bit about fortune cookies because that is not Chinese either.

Speaker 16 That is originally adopted from something called the Japanese cracker, which is a savory thing. But in the early 20th century, Chinese restaurants were owned a lot of times by Japanese people.

Speaker 16 Japanese bakeries were making these cookies. And then after Japanese internment,

Speaker 16 a lot of Chinese Americans took over these cookie factories.

Speaker 16 And that got me down the road of like, well, who's writing the fortunes? There's a guy named Donald Lau, who's a CFO of Wanton Food Company, the largest fortune cookie maker in the world.

Speaker 16 And he was the sole writer or has been for 30 years of writing these fortune cookies.

Speaker 17 I don't remember specifically talking about him or his name, but there's no way we didn't talk about him in our fortune cookie short stuff from 2022.

Speaker 16 If we missed him, I can't believe we would miss that guy. There's no way.
But as a recap, he wrote him for 30 years. He used to write two to three per day.

Speaker 16 Now it's two or three per month because they have just thousands of them.

Speaker 16 And he got that job by default because he spoke the best English at the company. And his quote is, I am the most read author in the United States.

Speaker 17 I believe it for sure.

Speaker 16 It's pretty great.

Speaker 17 And then we got to talk about a couple of regional specialties.

Speaker 17 St. Louis, I remember when we went there.

Speaker 17 When we get back to touring again, I really want to go to St. Louis.
Everyone there was crazy nice. Yep.

Speaker 17 They had really cool, like regional foods that you couldn't find anywhere else, like good stuff.

Speaker 17 This is a good town. I want to go back.
But I also want to try the

Speaker 17 St. Paul sandwich there.

Speaker 17 It's egg full, but a sandwich.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 So you've got an omelet with vegetables, a meat or seafood topped with brown gravy. on a sandwich so you've got mayo pickle lettuce all that stuff

Speaker 17 it sounds just totally off the chain, and I really want to try it.

Speaker 16 There's another one, and I don't know if you looked up a picture of this thing.

Speaker 17 No, I didn't.

Speaker 16 But if you go to Fall River, Massachusetts, do you have your phone with you? Or a computer?

Speaker 16 Or a means of looking up a photo? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 17 Let me do that.

Speaker 16 While I'm doing this, you should check this out. It's called a chow mein sandwich.

Speaker 16 It hails from Fall River, Massachusetts, but it's in surrounding towns there, and who knows, maybe elsewhere in New England. But it is exactly what it sounds like.

Speaker 16 It's chow mein on a sandwich on like a hamburger bun.

Speaker 17 But if you look this thing up,

Speaker 16 it's not a sandwich. It is, you can't see the bottom bun.
It is just chow mein all over a plate. I guess there's a bun underneath, and there's just a hamburger bun sitting on top.

Speaker 16 Like it is a full plate of chow mein with just a bun in there somewhere. It's not the kind of thing you would ever pick up and eat as a sandwich.

Speaker 17 It looks like cousin Nit wearing his hat.

Speaker 17 It does.

Speaker 17 Especially. Little derby hamburger bun hat.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it's ostentatious to say the least, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Should we take another break? Yeah, let's.

Speaker 16 All right, we'll take another break and we'll finish up with an ode to Panda Express and P.F. Jangs right after this.

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Speaker 6 Living Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 16 And in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Argenix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

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Speaker 16 So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Speaker 16 Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 16 All right, so we're going to start off talking a little bit about how PF Changs came about, a restaurant that I think I might have been to once.

Speaker 16 I definitely picked it up a lot as a PA in the film business for like big production meetings.

Speaker 16 So I can't speak to its quality. It's supposed to be pretty good, right?

Speaker 17 PF Chang's? Yeah. Yeah, it's good.
I mean, especially for comparing

Speaker 17 typical, I would not call it a high-end chain, no more than you'd call Cheesecake Factory a high-end chain.

Speaker 17 Well,

Speaker 17 it's virtually on the same level of dining.

Speaker 17 I'm not taking a shot at it. I'm just saying, like, it's not, it's not like the place that you went to in Vegas or

Speaker 17 Peking Duck in Fall, I think,

Speaker 17 Falls Church, Virginia, which is an amazing spot.

Speaker 17 It's just like you can go to a mall and

Speaker 17 there might be one attached to it if it's a nice mall. Regardless, it is tasty, especially compared to like Chinese takeout.
It's definitely several steps up from that. Okay, I gotcha.

Speaker 17 It's just really hard to like what high-end restaurant has 300 locations? No. Like when you have 300 locations, you're starting to work in economies of scale.
It's really tough to keep

Speaker 17 like any kind of cuisine just top-notch in that sense.

Speaker 16 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 16 And I want to quickly plug, since you mentioned Cheesecake Factory, are again friends of the show and friends in real life.

Speaker 16 Adam Pranica and Ben Harrison of the Greatest Generation podcast have a side podcast called Factory Seconds where they're working their way through the

Speaker 16 menu of the Cheesecake Factory one item at a time.

Speaker 17 Those two could not be any greater American treasures. Yeah, it's pretty great.
I love those guys.

Speaker 16 Adam's uncle actually is the voice of the Memphis Grizzlies as the announcer basketball team. And apparently, Cheesecake Factory is huge with NBA players.
And I was like, why?

Speaker 16 And his uncle, he was like, because there's one in every city. It's the same menu.
It's a huge menu. The portions are huge.
And the quality is always the same.

Speaker 17 Economies of scale.

Speaker 16 Well, I was wrong. Apparently they make all their stuff fresh.
It's not like bagged food.

Speaker 17 Oh,

Speaker 17 if you believe that. Actually, no, I don't.

Speaker 16 It's true.

Speaker 17 That is a little surprising, but I mean, it's not like I'm hating on Cheesecake Factory. It's just.
I've never been. Oh, it's it's they have a really varied menu that's

Speaker 17 yeah, the portions are gigantic, and their cheesecakes are pretty great.

Speaker 16 All right. Well, uh, I'm going to be a guest on that show at some point.
So next time I'm in LA, we're going to go to one, and then I'm going to be a guest. Okay, can't wait.
Good.

Speaker 16 Anyway, a long way around describing P.F. Chang's, there was a woman named Cecilia Chiang with an I in there from San Francisco and she in

Speaker 16 I believe before 1965 before that immigration law opened a high-end restaurant there called Mandarin and she said no chop suey in my menu and no egg fund all this Chinatown stuff is a no-no

Speaker 16 and she owned a restaurant a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo

Speaker 16 years ago and her husband got a diplomatic post there so that's why she was you know doing Chinese food there and Mandarin opened in 1961 and that's where all of a sudden people are exposed to like kung pao chicken tea smoked duck mushu pork pot stickers like some of the really good stuff and authentic stuff yeah exactly um she uh sold the her son philip the restaurant mandarin in 1989 and he is one of the co-founders of pf chang yeah philip f chang but he dropped the eye

Speaker 17 exactly so pf changs Pretty large chain, 300 restaurants. It's definitely nothing to sneeze at.
But if you really want to talk economy of scales, let's talk Panda Express.

Speaker 17 They have 2,000 more restaurants than PF Chang's does, 2,300 in the United States, right? Yeah, food court city. But yeah.
Have you had Panda Express?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I have.

Speaker 16 I used to eat it when I was younger.

Speaker 16 I'm not going to say it's like not any good, but you know, it's Chinese fast food.

Speaker 16 And it's just not something I would eat now.

Speaker 16 I would in a pinch. It's not like I'd turn my nose up at it.

Speaker 16 But I have been there before. You?

Speaker 17 Yeah, a couple of times. And yeah, it is fast food.
And

Speaker 17 it's great for fast food. It's just such a, it's just different.
It's not, you know, Taco Bell or McDonald's or even like Chipotle or something.

Speaker 17 It's just Chinese version, the Chinese version of fast food. Yeah.
I like it.

Speaker 16 Apparently, it's a family-run business, though, even though it's this huge chain.

Speaker 17 And in the 70s, they just had a few little sit-down restaurants and it kind of grew very naturally and organically as this family business which I never knew which is pretty cool and if you're a fan of orange chicken you can thank the your friends at Panda Express because they debuted it in 1987 and now you can find it basically everywhere but they were the ones who came up with it yeah what's your order in a Chinese restaurant or for takeout I'm trying some hunan tonight because I don't normally eat that and I want to see what it's like

Speaker 17 but typically a garlic chicken of some sort I like savory brown sauces, umami brown sauces. Usually chicken, if I'm really feeling crazy, maybe like a happy family or something like that.

Speaker 16 Are you white rice or fried rice?

Speaker 17 White steamed rice.

Speaker 17 Boy, I gotta have that fried rice. Oh, yeah.
There's too many peas in fried rice, and peas are one of my most hated things on the entire planet.

Speaker 16 Oh, I love peas. I hate peas.
Yeah, I gotta get that fried rice. I'll get a lot of sweet and sour chicken or sesame chicken.
Gotta get the egg roll.

Speaker 16 I'll take a beef and broccoli if people have ordered it, but that's not my order. But I also try a lot of stuff.

Speaker 16 If I'm at a big group and someone's just ordering a bunch of Chinese food, I'll eat almost all of it.

Speaker 17 Do you ask them first?

Speaker 17 What? Like

Speaker 17 what to order? No, can I have some of your order? Oh, yeah,

Speaker 17 for sure.

Speaker 16 And then, you know, if you're in a place,

Speaker 16 not all cities have this stuff, but if you're in a place that has the really good authentic stuff and you get dim sum or some pork buns or soup dumplings, like all that stuff is great, but you can't find that everywhere.

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 17 I really want some Chinese food now.

Speaker 16 It's going to happen.

Speaker 16 That's the first thing I ordered after our week at the beach in South Carolina after eating, you know, coastal seafood, American seafood. I was like, I'm going to eat some Chinese food.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 America's not the only place that took Chinese food and said, here, meet this orange and squeezed it together and then fried it.

Speaker 17 That's like I said at the outset, it's happened all over the world.

Speaker 17 And apparently, I'm not on TikTok much as in ever, but there was a thing on tick tock a couple years ago where american people picked up on uk british chinese food and were like what are you guys doing over there

Speaker 16 yeah i didn't see any of that either but apparently it was pretty funny uh apparently the the food in the uk the chinese food is a lot different than here in america it is very popular over there um maybe even the one of the top two uh maybe even the top food in the country i saw that it definitely was by a long shot.

Speaker 16 Oh, really? Okay. So they love it over there.
They will have things like french fries, what they call chips,

Speaker 16 a lot of curry sauces, which is different than us because there's a lot of great Indian food, obviously, in England and throughout the UK.

Speaker 16 And they also have something called a chicken ball, and that's just what they call it. I looked it up.
I tried to find any difference. It looks like the exact same thing we get here.

Speaker 16 in like a sweet and sour chicken. It's just a fried little chunk of chicken.

Speaker 17 Yeah, which everybody loves. Even if you don't eat chicken, you'll eat that.

Speaker 16 I couldn't determine though from looking at first if it was ground like a meatball, but it's not. And they're not even usually round.
They're just, you know, chicken shaped.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Like a little chicken finger kind of thing.
Man, so poor chicken meat has been like subjected to so many different indignities over the years, more than any other meat. Yeah.

Speaker 17 So India also has a version of Chinese food that's so popular that some Indian restaurants in the U.S., I've not seen this, but they'll sometimes have dishes that are called Manchurian something or other.

Speaker 17 Yeah. I didn't know that either.
I didn't either. I've never run across that.

Speaker 17 And then in some cities, if the city's big enough, they might have like full-on Indian Chinese restaurants there where it's the Indian version of Chinese, just like if you had an American version of the Chinese food in India.

Speaker 17 There's probably some sort of cultural exchange. Like they open one here.
We have to open one there. It's got to be balanced.

Speaker 16 contractual.

Speaker 16 The same for Latin America.

Speaker 16 In the United States, Chinese Cuban restaurants started opening in New York City, of course, in the 1970s.

Speaker 16 And then what they call, would it be Chino-Latino?

Speaker 17 I'm going with Chino Latino.

Speaker 16 I mean, Chino Latino is what I want to say because it sounds so great.

Speaker 16 I just wasn't sure if that was right. But they started opening later on.

Speaker 16 They're in decline in New York now, but apparently, just like everywhere over the course of centuries, Chinese workers were brought over to Latin America for a lot of reasons, but usually servitude, sadly.

Speaker 16 But again, they brought their food with them and their food existed alongside stuff like Cuban food and Peruvian food. And then they start to blend it together.

Speaker 16 And all of a sudden, you have these cool like sort of mix-up dishes. Yeah.

Speaker 17 I want to try all of these. I do too.
And then apparently also South Africa has Afro-Cantonese.

Speaker 17 And that was, again, developed out of a Chinese community that were brought there as indentured workers back all the way back in the 19th century, basically just like America.

Speaker 17 But, and also just like America, as more and more Chinese immigrants have come, higher-end, more Chinese authentic dishes have kind of become more favorited than just the Afro-Cantonese version.

Speaker 16 Afro-Cantonese just, to my ear, sounds delicious.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Again, I said it, said it before and I'll say it again.
I really want some Chinese food right now.

Speaker 16 Yeah, it's going to happen. And we're recording earlier, so it's like creeping onto lunchtime right now.

Speaker 17 Oh, are you doing it for lunch? I'm going to make myself wait until dinner and really titillate myself.

Speaker 16 Oh, no, no, no. I can't get it for lunch.

Speaker 17 I'll

Speaker 16 probably do a skip lunch and order it for dinner.

Speaker 17 There you go.

Speaker 16 But this has inspired me to... I've been wanting to do an episode on Cajun food, but it was very intimidating, like Cajun sort of Creole stuff because there's so many influences.

Speaker 16 I was just like, we're going to screw it up.

Speaker 17 But this is

Speaker 16 maybe more brave.

Speaker 17 If we do Cajun food, we have to consult our good friend and friend of the show, Doug Shashery. Oh, yeah?

Speaker 17 Oh, that's right. Doug.
Yeah, when he brought us boudin balls at our New Orleans show and we ate them on stage.

Speaker 16 Yeah, what a guy.

Speaker 17 He's great. Oh, he's wonderful.

Speaker 17 So, yeah, plus his last name's Shashery, so he knows what he's talking about with Cajun food.

Speaker 16 That's right.

Speaker 17 Well, since we talked about our friend Doug Shashery here on the episode, as was predicted back in 2008.

Speaker 17 By the way, Chuck, today's the 17th anniversary of Stuff You Should Know. Today? Yeah, happy anniversary, baby.

Speaker 16 Wow.

Speaker 17 Happy anniversary, love. Okay, well, anyway, on to it.
As was predicted back in 2008, since we said Doug Shashery's name, we've unlocked Blistener Mail.

Speaker 16 Boy, that's about as fanfair as we get, huh?

Speaker 17 Yeah, we don't, yeah, we don't, we don't do that kind of stuff, you know? I mean, we don't do media tours or anything and say, look at us, everybody, look at us, you know?

Speaker 17 We do that every week anyway.

Speaker 16 Who wants to do that?

Speaker 16 This is a correction. Hey, guys, heard your short stuff on Tulip Mania and wanted to point out that tulip mania is now largely believed to be a myth.

Speaker 16 I only found out about that a few years ago myself when I heard an interview from the author Anne Goldgar. She discovered the historical reality when she dug into the archives to research her book.

Speaker 16 Tulip Mania, colon, money, honor, and knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. The myth was largely promulgated

Speaker 16 by Scotsman Charles Mackey in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Speaker 16 And he sent along articles from Smithsonian and History.com and even Wikipedia that said although McKay's, I'm sorry, Mackey's book is a classic citation needed, His account is contested citation needed.

Speaker 16 Many modern scholars believe that the mania was not as destructive as described.

Speaker 16 I'm a little behind on some of the shows, guys, so perhaps others have written in, but no one else has written in, Richard, so you're the only one. So way to go.

Speaker 17 I've seen that on the internets here or there since we released it, but I mean, honestly, Chuck, we used a lot of different sources for that. And

Speaker 17 I mean, yes, you can make a case that it was exaggerated, but the idea that it's a myth is, I did not run across that, but who knows?

Speaker 17 And if it was, then I feel a lot of dismay that we released an episode where we were catfished by history.

Speaker 16 By the Tulip Maniacs.

Speaker 17 We'll have to get to the bottom of it. Who wrote that?

Speaker 17 Richard. Thanks a lot, Richard.
We appreciate that. Thank you for setting us straight publicly.
And if you want to be like Richard and set us straight publicly, you can send us an email too.

Speaker 17 Send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 6 Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Speaker 3 Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

Speaker 3 Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, in partnership with Argenix, explores people discovering strength in the most unexpected places.

Speaker 6 Listen to Untold Stories on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 17 Andrew Moyes, VP of Fan Expo HQ, had this to say about Orlando. Luxury hotels, Michelin restaurants, easy access through the airport, all those key things feed into the proper executive experience.

Speaker 17 And while you may know Orlando for its attractions, industries like healthcare, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing make it a hub for cutting-edge businesses.

Speaker 17 And that's what makes Orlando unbelievably real. Learn more at OrlandoForBusiness.com.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.