The so-called Chinese food that you can buy for $9 may be worse than that, and it is not delicious. But whether it tastes good or not depends mainly on luck and has little to do with price. The main reason is that many American Chinese restaurants have changed the taste of Chinese food to the taste that Lao Mei likes, such as sweet and sour. The one that suits Chinese tastes may actually be cheaper (because the customers are mainly low-income people in Chinatown).
Of course, there are also cheap ones, such as Chinatown. New York's Chinatown sold five-knife boxed lunches before the epidemic. But now that prices are skyrocketing, it is estimated that they will not be able to buy them.
If you want to know the price of vegetables, meat, fish condiments and other non-staple foods related to Chinese living habits in the United States, you can go to some takeaway websites, weee, freshgogo, etc., the price may be slightly more expensive than offline. It's not hard to Google it.
In fact, just like Vietnamese people who are accustomed to Vietnamese cuisine and Indians who are accustomed to Indian cuisine go to China to find Vietnamese restaurants, they will definitely be amazed that Vietnamese food and Indian food are so expensive, and Gao Yue and Gao Yin are so miserable in China. The Chinese will definitely scoff at it.
Because this is not the mainstream lifestyle of the locals.
The mainstream lifestyle of Americans is that because the lower income is higher (such as 6,000 or 8,000 dollars for restaurant cooks, and 3,000 or 4,000 dollars for the lowest level of small workers in restaurants), manual services are relatively expensive, and only high-income people enjoy more. Most people eat products from the industrial food industry (including baked bread and cakes, a variety of prepared foods such as frozen pizza) or cook their own foods. And raw materials are not much more expensive than in China. Especially for global products. (For example, I said that the pure Thai fragrant rice I often eat Costco sells for 25 pounds and 20 dollars, and relatives and friends in China say that it is cheaper than in China, and it may be counterfeit in China)
In fact, if you look at a universally recognized indicator: Engel's coefficient, you can see that Americans spend much less on food than Chinese.
