I like your thinking. The funny bit is: I like Asian cuisine. Fish sauce is a similar thing. It adds a lot of flavour - short-chained amides and mino-amines, e.g., and some really weird other stuff, I think. But the production is amongst the smelliest things I ever came across.
However, usually, you can get the product as a condiment without the bloody production smell. That’s were the Swedish version definitely falls short.
Oh, while you are at looking up funny food which makes you think that humans basically eat anything and make a fuss about the worst-smelling specimen: you should really try West African soumbala.
It made my nose crawl from the inside and try to escape through my ears.
I really - no joke and hyperbolic snark intended - attributed the smell to several carcasses of cattle close by when one of our rangers started cooking with soumbala. (But I have to admit my senses were quite sharpened at the time. Tends to happen when I am working outdoors for months at a time.)
All these stinky foods and condiments always make me snort with derision when some Evolutionary Biologist claims that humans have become, through Natural Selection, naturally averse to gross things.
Every culture has some truly disgusting thing that they eat with pleasure. Outsiders find it revolting, but insiders have a real connoisseurship about its subtleties.
Hmmmm…now, I’m considering changing my current form of procrastination. I might have to visit the next neighborhood over and impulse shop my way through the Asian grocery stores…
I had a friend who LOVED durian, and I bought her some durian-flavored wafer cookies. She opened the package and started eating them, and I tried to join her, but…I chickened out. And I’m someone who is immune to the smell of skunks*!
I also was once standing around (in a different city) in an Asian grocery staring at those alien eggcases when an older, skinny man in flip-flops came running full-tilt to the crate of durians, grabbed one, and began running to the cash register before the rest of the family could get out of the car. When the woman that I presume to be his daughter entered the store and saw him with his prize, she began scolding him and he began pleading. She eventually relented. I was intrigued, but again - I couldn’t get past that smell.
*I can smell the skunk scent, but I’ve been exposed to it so many times, the olfactory center of my brain has grown a callus to the smell. [My Olfactory Center]: “Oh, not that stink again…”
As the person who gets hired to clean up after evicted tenants, I’ve seen a lot of human and dog poop used to ‘color outside the lines’, but I think I would demand double the rate for surstromming.
For awhile now (and certainly not in the 70’s) fast food commercials have been finely tuned to affect eating behavior; the science has been nailed down.
This is so true, and I can’t think of a better one for people of Jewish decent in the north eastern US than Gefilte Fish. I don’t know many people who can stand it but damn can I go to town. Pass the horseradish!
IMHO My entire culinary school would shudder at this uninformed comment.
A good cook preps things in advance. A smart cook finds local purveyors who prep things in advance for the cook so that the cook can focus on cooking, not prep.
I spent enough time working in restaurants, good and bad, to know there arent really purveyors out that will do things like dice celery for you daily. And that case of pre-shredded cabbage in the walkin presents the same problems as the baggies found at the geocery store vis a vis quality. Simple things like peeled garlic and shallots is one thing. But well run kitchens aren’t doing things like buying pre-trimmed green beans with wilted ends (because you have to re-trim them and they spoil much faster).
More over the substance of the comment was that a lazy or indifferent home cook isn’t going to own specialised prep equipment to make their prep work easier. They’re going to avoid doing their own prep work. Or avoid doing work entirely.
Nothing wrong or lazy about food processors or other appliances.
I deeply question obesity statistics. Through most of human history, we had no method to weigh ourselves. Back when President Taft got stuck in a bath tub, people might weigh themselves on public freight scales or at a penny arcade, a notion so unappealing that scale owners had to gamify it with fortunes, guess your weight games, and other enticements. Home scales didn’t really arrive until around 1910. The price then was $10, which in 2018 is $265. So it likely took a while for most homes to have a scale. https://timeline.com/bathroom-scale-fat-shame-94f1591c49c7
People also didn’t visit their doctor much and the piece cited above suggests that doctors recommended that people use public freight scales.
So what accurate data do we have to objectively show that people have gotten heavier and more obese in the long run? There simply isn’t a long public health record of weight. We have better climate and weather data than we do public health data.
There are issues with some of the ways we track this. BMI as an example, doesnt neccisarily account for things like build, body fat, muscle mass. The classic example being 2 guys of identical bmi in the obese range. One being tubby. One being a body builder.
The bad metrics go far enough that think theres at least some exageration in terms of how much fatter, and how many of us are fatter.
But much of what you’re talking about is beyond the point. Noones really arguing that were fatter and less healthy then we’ve ever been. Its not a historical trend people are looking at.
Its a near term thing, within the span where we have good public health data. This very article contains “since the 70’s” in the title. And whatever weakness we might have in terms of defining obesity and attempting to track it. There are much firmer numbers in terms of rises in diabetes rates and other complications of obesity.
We are in terms of that. Worse off now in most of those metrics, than we were over previous decades. With a clear trend line.
Uhhhh…a lot of the comments on here seem to be variations on ‘Lazy = Fat’. Lazy cooks, lazy exercisers, etc.
I’m a solid fifteen pounds overweight, and that’s if I generously call myself ‘Medium-framed’. I exercise like a maniac, and those who know me know how obsessed I am with food experimentation, kitchen gadgets, fancy ingredients, and gardening. …but I still jiggle when I run!
What is this mystery? I love to eat. I love to eat a lot. You don’t cook from scratch and cover your yard with herb gardens if you don’t like to eat.
Fortunately the chart I posted uses the same definition of “obese” for all the years it covers (see the caption). And while BMI might be a flawed measure of obesity for any given person, the CDC apparently finds it reasonable for looking at aggregate longitudinal trends.
It’s not just fast food though, and in fact those have better options than many other places. At least fast food restaurants usually have a dollar menu or something with relatively small portions.
My family doesn’t like fast food so we usually go to the sit-down restaurants with waitstaff. I always have a tough time picking from the menu and wonder if maybe I should just order from their kids’ menu. Sometimes I just get soup or an appetizer. The entrees typically focus entirely around meat and include enough of that to feed a village for a week. Veggies and grains are just a tacked-on afterthought. It’s rare that I can eat half a meal. As options, they may have a wilted salad, or a healthy pile of unappetizing quinoa and kale with crunchy bits in it, but nothing else that’s not meat-centric. (I’m not vegetarian, I just think we tend to eat way too much meat and would be better off eating it a few times a week than a few times a day.)
At least in Chinese and Japanese restaurants you can get tofu dishes, egg drop soup, and things like sushi or mixed appetizers in relatively small portions. Those have become my go-to favorites for restaurant meals.
My increasing dissatisfaction with restaurants and pre-pack food (can’t stand TV dinners anymore) has driven me to spend more time learning to cook. There are plenty of good, delicious ways to make meals that are filling on a reasonable-sized portion, have a good mix of grains, vegetables, fruits, proteins, and fats, and only (optionally) need reasonable amounts of meat a few times a week. They’re just not advertised or sold directly, you have to make it yourself. And be used to the idea that fresh food has a much shorter shelf life than we’re used to, so some days may be primarily canned and dried things mixed up with spices.
Making a batch now, homemade, greek-style, plain, no sugar added. Very different from the American-style candied yogurt snacks. Yogurt itself isn’t the problem, it’s that it’s marketed to taste good to kids but sound healthy to moms. People from other countries always complain when they try American yogurt that it’s wrong and too much like candy.
This is true (my wife has one of those counter apps). But once you’ve found good serving sizes and a balanced mix of things that fits your diet, it should get easier. They focus on the details, but should be helping you learn to recognize the bigger picture so that eventually you don’t need to count the details.
They do? What kind of American yogurt are they eating? These days Greek-style yogurts are by far the most popular in America, 0% or 2% fat with fruit added – a far cry from the super-sweet Dannon & Yoplait types popular 10-15 yrs ago. But then again, Chobani Flip is one of the fastest-growing brands, with actual chocolate chips and chunks of candy to add to your yogurt.
My theory, with no citations except anecdotal evidence:
The rich of the 70s adopted the “can’t be too rich or too thin”. Middle class emulated them. The poor couldn’t afford to eat well so they stayed thin.
The rich of the now are still thin. The middle class (whatever remains of it) still emulate it, mostly. The poor can find filling cheap food like chicken nuggets and beef slime burgers, and other chemical-laden, highly processed foods that came from technology being able to extract every bit of profit from crops of corn and soy.
I notice a much higher percentage of overweight-to-obese people in the public now.
Anecdotal evidence: We went to Velvet ice cream’s festival last summer. Granted, it’s ice cream, but almost everyone there was overweight-to-obese. Maybe 10% of the festival-goers were slim to average, 50% overweight, 40% obese. Most of them did not walk far before having to sit down and pant, and most of them dropped out of the tour when presented with stairs.
So:
More cheap processed foods made from things our bodies might not be able to use properly, larger portions, engineered snack foods that make you want more fat-sugar-salt, less exercise built in to our daily routines, no free-range kids getting hours of running, hiking, climbing, etc - all adds up to a weightier society.
