Americans craving General Tso’s chicken or any other Chinese cuisine have more than 40,000 restaurants to choose from to satisfy their taste bud delights.  

According to Jennifer 8. Lee, the producer of "The Search for General Tso" and author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” there are more Chinese restaurants in the US than the total number of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy's combined.

America’s love of Chinese food is one of the most unexpected stories of cultural exchange in world history.

“It started to become popular among non-Chinese consumers towards to the end of the 19th century because of the growing need for convenient and inexpensive restaurant food,” Yong Chen, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine and author of “Chop Suey, USA: The Rise of Chinese Food in America.”

Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in America beginning in the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000 Chinese miners, farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the US. Many non-Chinese workers felt threatened by these laborers, who often worked for lower wages.

“Similar to how numerous other cuisines came to the US, the arrival Chinese food in the New World was a byproduct of immigration, brought first to California by the first large wave of Chinese immigrants during and shortly after the Gold Rush,” Chen told CGTN Digital.

Amid mounting pressure, the US passed immigration laws that explicitly barred Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming US citizens, and made it extremely difficult for even legal residents to re-enter the US after making a visit home to China. But there was an exception to these laws - some Chinese business owners in the US could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list which historian said is how the restaurant boom was born.

“No government – Chinese or American - had any intention to introduce it to US diners,” Chen said.  “In the first half century after its initial arrival, it was rejected and even despised by Americans.” 

By 1980, Chinese food had become the country’s most popular ethnic cuisine. The spread of Chinese restaurants started a quiet but revolutionary change to America’s palate while transforming the nation’s dining experience.

“The extraordinary impact of Chinese food on American culture can be measured in a couple of ways. First, this is reflected in its ubiquitous presence throughout the United States since the turn of the 20th century,” Chen said. “Second, Chinese food’s spread played a significant role in the transformation of American culture and lifestyle: Chinese food was the first cuisine to be available for mass consumption across the nation.  As such, it democratized the dining-out experience, making it possible for almost everyone in the US.”

While Americans love Chinese food, Chen admits the dishes they crave the most are not really made in China. 

“When Chinese restaurateurs started to carry their food to non-Chinese neighborhoods, they also modified it to make it more suitable to the taste of Americans,” Chen told CGTN Digital. “Over time, such modified dishes became a distinctive tradition itself, known as American Chinese food, which is found in areas that do not have a large Chinese community.”

One of the most popular Chinese dishes in the US is General Tso's Chicken, but like so many of the western world Chinese favorites, this is a mystery to China. 

"Americans tend to think their food was immaculately conceived at Whole Foods," Lee told CGTN Digital.

She showed the man who invented General Tso's Chicken what had become of his dish he was shocked.  "That's not right. This isn't authentic," he told her.  

Even so, Chen said this assumption that American Chinese food is inauthentic has been around for more than a century is largely an incorrect assumption.      

“The differences are that food in China is more diverse and it has been changing far more rapidly,” he said.