"This was something that had been on my mind already. I wanted to find the data to show that structural oppression exists," she says.

Lorraine Chuen was browsing her Facebook feed when she noticed an argument between a person of color and a white person, the latter of whom could not be convinced that food often does—and perhaps should—feel political for people of color. As a scientist formally trained in experimental psychology, Chuen was inspired to find quantifiable evidence that food is, indeed, extremely political.

Chinese food was never fascinating for me; it is simply a part of who I am. My family would make annual pilgrimages back to Asia and growing up, the fluorescent streets of Tainan in southern Taiwan, rich with some of the best food in the world, were as much of a fixture in my life as the blistering hot pavement of Los Angeles flush with drive-thru burger joints. After school, my mom would take me to McDonalds for a Kid's Meal and for dinner, she'd cook us three-cups chicken (chicken legs slow-braised with one part rice wine, one part soy sauce, one part sesame oil), a steamed whole fish, a motley assortment of stir-fried vegetables, and pair it all with a cauldron of steaming hot white rice.

As a Chinese-American myself, who has built a career out of writing about Chinese food, the frustration that Chuen expresses in her post is all too familiar.

When I look at the repertoire of work that White chefs and restaurateurs have built on ethnic cuisine, it feels in a way, dehumanizing. White people are able to establish outrageously successful careers for being experts and authorities on the stuff that racialized folks do every day simply by existing. But of course, people of colour will rarely, if ever, be called experts on how to simply be themselves. It's as if racialized folks and their ways of life are objects to be observed—study material, of sorts—rather than entire countries, cultures, and individual complex lives.

Chuen's data set is open-sourced and her findings are meticulously broken down on her blog, Intersectional Analyst. She researched each of the author's ethnicities and listed them publicly ; after she published her post, some of the authors contacted her to confirm or dispute their ethnicities, and she revised her document accordingly.

What she found: Of the 263 entries under the "Chinese" recipe filter on the New York Times food section, almost 90 percent have a white person listed as author in the byline. Only 10 percent of the recipes are authored by Chinese writers.

While I loved my mom's cooking, I grew to resent it. For show-and-tell, all I had to do was tell people what I ate for dinner last night and be met with wide-eyed gasps from my teachers and from my peers, a chorus of "ewwwws." I quickly became the weird kid who adored boiled pig intestines and fermented tofu.

"People were afraid of our ingredients," says Breana Lai, an associate food editor at EatingWell magazine, who is half-Chinese. "They would see our shrimp paste bottles and think it's this really horrific pot."

So imagine my surprise when the 2000s hit and, miraculously, the food of my people was suddenly cool.

"Fish sauce just turned popular in the last ten years," Lai says, laughing.

In 2006, travel shows began highlighting China, showing viewers firsthand what cuisine in the Far East is actually like. That same year, Los Angeles writer Jonathan Gold became the first food critic in the world to win a Pulitzer Prize. Among his highlighted works: a tribute to the fleshy, cold salted duck at Nanjing Kitchen in Los Angeles.

I was baffled. I grew up eating salted duck. Hell, in Taiwan we have a salted cold goose, which I find much more spectacular and refined than Nanjing's version.

In a weird turn of events, people were making money and becoming famous for eating the things I had grown up with and had been bullied for.

And so fresh out of college with a journalism degree under my belt, I headed straight into the world of food writing, capitalizing on the nation's growing obsession with my people's food. I heavily researched the Chinese food scene in Los Angeles, piecing together maps and long listicles of restaurant after restaurant, indexed by region and dish and province. I found that 21 out of 34 provincial-level administrative units are represented in the Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles. Last year, I traveled to a dozen of those provinces and wrote articles on each one, breaking down the regional subtleties and traditions.

Only certain dishes like noodles, dumplings, kebabs, and rice bowls have been normalized. The majority is still largely stigmatized because, bluntly put, white people have not decided they like it yet.

I hold myself to high standards when it comes to writing about Chinese food, yet I live in a world that can be quite insensitive in their approach to the cuisine.