According to the data provided by the officials, a total of 12,129 people registered for the Good Taste Cooking Contest across four regions. For a cooking contest, this number of contestants is terrifying indeed, but there's also a significant amount of fluff. Many people just signed up for fun, like An Ling did. The first round of selections was expected to weed out half of them, and Jiang Feng guessed that the preliminary rounds would be even more ruthless in thinning the crowd.
Organizers had set up a special forum, which Jiang Feng browsed for a bit, but it wasn't very interesting. Some were complaining that the dishes for the tryouts were too simple to show their real skills, while others were grumbling that the contest rules were not strict enough. Common judges with no taste, they claimed, were the reason they got eliminated. One comment led to another, and half the posts on the forum ended up in arguments.
