She said something like this to me, when I giggled at her attempt to convince me that we needed rice for dinner: “You don’t know what it’s like. I’m Chinese, and we NEED rice”. I believed her. I remembered how I missed huge chunks of meat when she moved here, and the menu suddenly changed to meaty to “vegetably” overnight.

By now I don’t eat that much meat anymore, but sometimes I crave for a huge beef or similar. As my wife started working, I noticed that she started yearning meat too. Then she went back to studying and changed again. When she studied she didn’t use as much energy as now when she is walking/moving all day, so that might be the explanation?

Now I pretty sure the 2 goes hand in hand. Work = crave meat. Less physically active = less meat.

Of course that doesn’t explain why Chinese eat less meat generally, unless you think they work less hard?

It is much easier for a Chinese to understand a dialect than to speak one. My cousin from Singapore can speak English and Hakka, I can speak English, Mandarin and understand Hakka, so when we talk all three languages appear in our conversation. Personally, I think 闽南话 is the most difficult dialect in China to grasp. It is spoken among people from Fujian, Taiwanese and some Chinese in Southeast Asia. It is also the mostly used language, to my ear any way, in America China towns. To say Cantonese is a common language spoken by overseas Chinese business people is really not accurate.

The Yangtze river as a dividing line is rather a practical one, than a cultural one. It is a dividing line for the central heat systems. There is no central heat offered to the south of the river. The “money” part of your summery is certainly true within Jiansu province, some snobby southern Jiansu people would call northern Jiangsu people “苏北人”. But it is not true to the whole eastern part of China, Fujian and Jiangxi were never considered to be a rich place while Shandong was never thought to be poor. The rice part, you would have to push to line to the border of Shandong and Jiangsu, same with the weather. As to the language, you would have same trouble with the dialect in Anhui or with Yangzhou dialect for that matter and Shandong certainly has its own dialect. I always get a kick of thinking Confusions teaching in Shandong dialect.

There are many generalizations between Southerners and Northerners, but the dividing line is rather blurring, to me anyway. You can generalize southerners are more keen on the preventive medicine and healthy diet(sometimes through exotic food I will never touch), but Suchuan food川菜is well known to be spicy and rich, translation, unhealthy. You can go so far as to say southerners are more conservative, northerners are taller. But all those are just what it is, stereotyping.

Frank, linguistically, China is in a way is much like a present-day Roman Empire with Putonghua/Mandarin (for the former) and Latin (for the latter) as the official standard-bearer. You can stuff variants of Cantonese and Hokkien (similar to Greek and Aramaic in the Roman world) as the common language of commerce and business for overseas Chinese.