I  love my Chinese colleagues. They're hard working, bright, fun and surprisingly witty. They also have a number of endearing habits, which help to make up for the few not-so-endearing habits, such as the nonstop cacophony of gratingly cute phone rings that saturates the office air during business hours.

One of the charming things they do is to bring back snacks to share with the office whenever they return from a trip. As we have people from all over China in the office, the days following any golden week holiday are a treasure trove of cultural enlightenment as delicacies from across mainland China appear in the pantry.

As an eating experience, however, it's a disaster. I am pretty open minded about food. I'll eat many organs, arthropods and thorny shrubs. I love a spicy chili burn, and I have no trouble at all being reminded in the most graphic terms that the meat I enjoy was carved from the carcass of a once living (or still living) animal. I've sucked on chicken toes, snaffled fried caterpillars and feasted on pig-blood noodles (as emphatically un-kosher a dish as you could hope to find). Nevertheless, nine times out of ten when I act on the chirpy e-mail that informs everyone that treats from Ningxia or wherever are in the pantry, I am left standing at the counter, scratching my head and trying to figure out exactly what it is that I am looking at.

It's not always this way. Colleagues who return from visits to Europe almost always leave chocolates or biscuits or some other nicely identifiable confection. I myself left a half kilo of lovely Xinjiang raisins in the pantry after getting back from my own Mayday holiday.

But today one of our freshly vacationed returnees left some Hunanese treat that appears to be single-serving sachets of chili-oil infused Neoprene. Sad to say, this is far more typical of what tends to appear in the pantry than any decadent truffles. As my colleagues continue to filter back into the office after the golden week, we'll all get treated to a nonstop buffet of bizarrely spiced tree bark, dried marmot's feet with anise, squid chips, fennel-dusted dung wasp pupae and BBQ flav-r creek leeches.

The problem appears to be that, while colleagues returning from overseas want to share something they enjoyed, colleagues returning from home are more interested in displaying whatever culinary exotica their province or district is most legendary for. And snack foods can become legendary for a variety of reasons, not all of which are necessarily good. For instance:

My colleague (aglow with pride): "In 832 AD, Viceroy Qiang defeated the Mongols in our province by leaving piles of pickled glizwitz fruit in the path of their army. When the Mongol soldiers ate them, they were afflicted with such hemorrhoids that they were unable to fight, and Qiang slaughtered them to a man. We have celebrated pickled glizwitz in my province ever since! Try some!"
Me: "Uhhh..."
My colleague: "Oh, don't worry. These days, the hemorrhoid-inducing agent is removed by soaking the unripened glizwitz berries in hog urine for three weeks before pickling."
Me: "OK. Yeah. Look, I, uh, have a meeting with, you know, that client..."

Even the sweets are dubious, which is a true tragedy considering the monumental nature of my sweet tooth. In truth, the Chinese have never entirely figured out either sweets or desserts. The notable exception of tasty White Rabbit (大白兔) milk candy aside, Chinese confections are generally a disaster area of oddly dried mystery fruits or the gelatinous resins of tubers and legumes not normally considered edible.

I can only assume that these odd choices of snack foods are the result of centuries of privation. After all, if you’re the French, and your soil is the most productive in Western Europe, you have a lot of options when it comes to sorting out your treats. Thus, you are like to end up with, say, nougat, raspberry tarts or some other decadent, labor-intensive creation. But if your local culture was forged in 250 years of dust-bowl famine and warlord rule, you probably took your snacks as and when you could. A people struggling to survive in conditions of legendary adversity has little time to invent Doritos. They'll eat candied marsh-rat testicles and like them.

Some of you may simply see this as ignorant cultural imperialism on my part; a Yanqui swine trying to impose his whitebread, suburban snack tastes on an ancient and rich culture that deserves more respect.

You are, of course, 100% correct about that. I'll eat almost anything any time, but I am rigid when it comes to breakfasts and snacks. After all, if a man can't be true to his snacks, what, in the end, is he left with?