Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land, It includes no bones, is prepared so as to be eaten with chopsticks, triturated, cooked for hours and hours in delicious sauces, and appears at last, looking like a variety of dumplings, served in little heaps in which nothing is whole and entire. Tou-fu, the sole diet of millions of peasants, is a kind of flabby, yellowish custard made with bean flour. 

E. Maillart, Forbidden journey (1935), 49