Apart from the fact that foreigners get excited from having the taste of nuts in their mouth, peanut butter -especially the natural one- is a really good option to have at home. It's high in vitamins that help reduce heart disease, high in protein, low in carbs and is calorie dense which help in dieting and prevent binge eating on shaokao or mixian late at night or even help bulking if you aer into bodybuilding. Overall it's a much better option than a bowl of noodles, which might be freshly prepared, but not with fresh ingredients since it contains processed ingredients liked milled flour (hello diabeetus), bottled sauces, seasoning etc...

yankee, if it is fresh, non-processed, non-preserved peanut butter without tons of salt and sugar added, then yes, that is correct.

I'm food safety manager in France before. The main reason of imports foods is much popular in china, it bring good image, food safety, the standard is much more strictly than locals.

mmkunming, perhpas its not what you say but the way that you say it. with your authorative vioce, and just repeating over and over, this can be annoying and borish, and condisending, which is probably not your intention. i can understand why people react. they are propbably reacting to you and not your message.
like i said, it not what you say its the way that you are saying it.

"I have my guilty pleasures, but I genuinely do not enjoy bland, processed foods."

So now you're saying that you don't eat processed foods because they're all bland?

So Doritos 3rd Burn Scorchin' Habanero chips are bland?

That's a ridiculous statement since scientists at Frito-Lay make more money in one year than you're ever going to make in your lifetime to ensure that their potato chips are anything but bland.

So what else? Everything that's fresh tastes better? Not necessarily. A lot of restaurant food tastes like crap, no matter how fresh it is.

You sound like an altar boy now Dezzer.
anyway also to valuate that China stop to import flours, many kind of fresh cheese by last 1st may, exactly one year ago.
Imported packed and powdered milk instead are items most highly imported.
More chineses are importing directly, buying whole productions, western wine.

Many meat cuts with a western name are produced here in China.
Like there's a reason why in supermarkets you have whole walls full of instant noodle, there are economic reasons for items coming and going. Nestle is well set up in Yunnan and all China, what about then local Vs Starbucks coffee... I mean there's something bigger, more difficult to see, behind the supermarket' shelves.
Soon you'll have a unique weijin-peanut butter, well done, and all foreigners will crave for that, you'll see. Supermarkets are the best place to study and monitor us, like mice in a laboratory.

I have this vision of huge ocean-going vessels pulling away from the West Coast of the US, filled with weightless Airflakes and Sugartoodles, churning and polluting the waters of the Pacific and exhausting fossil fuels so that leetle American kiddies in inland Asia can have their Frosty the Tiger breakfast. Now I've got nothing against indulging kids in their favorite foods and I'm well aware that it's hard to deny them, but all this comes at a price, and I'm not talking about dollars or renminbi.

It takes very little research to find that the idea that food in China is fresh and safe and healthy is an absolute canard. Vegetables are covered in DDT type chemicals long banned in the west and phosphorous is added to insure that rain will not wash it off, nor will the up drinkable tap water you have use to try and rinse your fruits and vegetables. Mats here are loaded with chemicals and in particular pork and beef. Chemicals to change appearance. Beef often is not even beef but other animals, including ferrets, foxes and cats, with chemicals added to the meat to make it appear like beef. Yunnan and Guanxi are hubs for this. There are no real ways to regulate packaging in China and food manufacturers can just put anything they want on labels, whether the food has those ingredients or not. Organic foods are often food to be nothing more than the same local chemical covered foods put is a plastic wrapper and labeled organic with an increased price. Bottled water can be boiled tap water. Expiration dates on packages are changed with fake packages routinely. If one thinks the green beans he is buying at the local market in China is safer than a can of Green Giant green beans he is dreaming. And the attitude of food handling here is disgusting. I watched a lady at a local market squeeze her nostril with her fingers and blow out a load of snot that stuck to her finger and she started whipping it around to get it off, and a second later when a customer asked about some lettuce she wiped it on her pants and took the lettuce with the same hand. Yummy. Most Chinese food in China sucks to be direct. It is dirty and greasy and loaded with MSG and gutter oil. Cook your own food is the way to go, but it is sad that you can't really get anything at these big carrefours and wal-marts in Kunming. They are jokes. Rows and rows of spicy Doufu and chicken feet and freezers full of the same frozen baozi or jiaozi. All packaged and processed. The last time I checked the import food section at a wal- mart in my area a it was like one self full of kimchi and Korean instant noodles. Wow. The reason there is no can food here is not that Chinese people as a whole prefer fresh foods, but that those foods are not made and marketed in China, the motherland. It is that suspicious outside stuff. It is all a matter of xenophobia.

I know a couple foreigners who go on and on about now you are in china and so should only get the glorious foods of can, but they do not seem to want to watch only Chinese movies or wear Chinese speedo underwear over boxer shorts. Most people I have met here who do the Chinese food is the best in the world route are just trying to provoke other foreigners whom they feel superior to because they do not get the runs as often from eating the local gutter oil noodles.

@BillDan, I must respectfully disagree. Buying fresh vegetables in a market in China is better than canned vegetables with preservatives and mushy, baby-food consistency. And as for the snot-vendor, well, having worked in some very top-notch restaurants around the world, I can assure you that this sort of thing goes on all the time — the only difference is that you see it at the market.

Market food is fresh and whole. The issue of chemical fertilizers is a real one, but it is not as ubiquitous as the gloom-and-doom foreigners make it out to be.

And Chinese cuisine is considered, by all experts, to be one of the world's great cuisines. To argue that Corn Flakes or Jiffy peanut butter is better cuisine is, simply, ridiculous.

@BillDan, moreover, this "gutter oil" stuff that everyone keeps insisting is used at every restaurant, is malarchy. There have been a couple of scandals about restaurants using recycled oil (which Western restaurants do too, by the way). But these have been scandals — the authorities bust them and shut them down. I see bottled, packaged oil being delivered to restaurants all the time. To seriously make the argument that all local restaurants use human feces to cook in, is just silly, foreign, paranoid propaganda. How some foreigners aren't too scared to even leave their apartments in the morning, boggles my mind.
This is not me being superior or condescending, but a realistic adult. If China is horrible and polluted and a rip-off and dangerous and deadly, then for God's sake, go back to paradise in Podunk, Arkansas, where all of the food is fresh, everything is clean and civilized, and life is too boring to do anything but get morbidly obese and watch Honey Booboo on TV.