What is Fei-Chang?

February 6, 2004 8:20 AM

In my endless pursuit of bizarre new taste sensations, I bought, and ate, a packet of Fei-Chang Flavour Chinese Instant Sweet Potato Noodle. It was pretty good, actually: vermicelli noodles with a salty dark-green powdered stock, not dissimilar in appearance to a pesto of some kind. The ingredients list seemed innocuous: vermicelli, refined sweet potato, potato starch, salt, gourmet powder, sugar spices, vegetable, and the aforementioned feichang flavor powder. So what the hell did I eat? What the buggery bollocks is fei-chang?
posted by chrisgregory to Food & Drink (6 answers total)

huh. all of my googling suggests it means "very" or "extreme." That seems to suggest MSG... but I suppose that's the "gourmet powder."
posted by stonerose at 9:04 AM on February 6, 2004

Or perhaps a type of all spice?
posted by terrapin at 9:24 AM on February 6, 2004

flavored salt?
posted by banished at 11:49 AM on February 6, 2004

Feichang is an adverb meaning 'extraordinarily, extremely.' (Neige gushi feichang you yisi 'That story is extremely interesting.') It would seem to be just an impressive-sounding trade name.
posted by languagehat at 6:12 PM on February 6, 2004

Um, so theoretically there are some languages that you don't know right? :)
posted by rhyax at 11:17 PM on February 6, 2004

"Know" is such a flexible word... My Chinese was no great shakes when I was in Taiwan many years ago, and it's pretty minimal by now; it's just that I have references and enough knowledge to extract the needed information. I couldn't have come up with that Chinese sentence on my own, but I can say it pretty convincingly now that my Mandarin Chinese Dictionary has supplied me with it. If you're interested in my languages, you can read about them here and even see a picture of my language bookcase (well, the one in the old apartment, but the new one looks pretty much the same).
posted by languagehat at 10:28 AM on February 7, 2004