Thinking about how when I spent some time in Ho Chi Minh City, people kept feeding me their ‘foods to scare tourists’ and I just kept eating it and at some point they were like, oh are you Chinese? Nvm let’s just eat fun food then (I was like I’ve been...
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by [email protected]
Also when I was in grade school, Fear Factor was on tv and for a whole month kids were talking about how ‘in America they give you ten thousand dollars for eating CENTURY EGGSS I just had that for breakfast who gimme money’
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In rural Jharkhand a little kid asked me very seriously, ‘Singapore didi is it true? Chinese people eat nonveg? Like.. dragons???’
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I’m already a very conservative eater compared to other people I know! But there is something to be said about the range of textures and flavors in a lot of Chinese food that maybe needs.. some practice? Definitely exposure. Like a very popular vegan Chinese snack is.. vegan squid, made of konjac jelly
I do find the concept of some foods being clean and good, and some being dirty and bad, which exists in many cultures, to be utterly foreign
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Like I really struggle with some concepts of ritual purity in foods. It just doesn’t exist at all in the food culture I grew up in. So it is very hard for me to grasp why some people intuitively find certain foods gross, as if some foods have inherent grossness.
Or the idea that if you eat X, you are bad. Thinking less about Abrahamic food restrictions, more about some religions that have inherent food purity laws.
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@skinnylatte i feel this bc i’m quite a picky eater by asian/chinese standards but my white friends are so confused over how as an autistic person i seem to be ok with eating everything
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@atsuzaki yah same
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@skinnylatte
Century eggs are ridiculously more scary sounding to Westerners than they taste. I think when I heard about them as a kid I imagined hideously rotten eggs or something.It's funny how one culture's preserved and fermented foods can appear horrible to another. Either the magically transformed food is so totally normal people forget that it's transformed at all, or the transformation process is a crazy thing foreign weirdos do. ("You do *what* with milk/cabbages/prawns/eggs???")
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Vincent :coffeecup:replied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
Are there no taboo foods in Chinese cuisines?
Unlearning food taboos is much harder than unlearning food aversions. I was able to overcome my food aversion to tomatoes and some squash and the occasional eggplant, but eating insects is going to take a lot more effort. I'm willing to try, though!
(I tried overcoming my food aversion to artichokes, but I failed. The smell was too much
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Vincent :coffeecup: last edited by [email protected]
@vincent raw vegetables and uncooked foods are seen as quite gross
Can’t really think of a food taboo (other than etiquette stuff)
#Whitepeoplemeals: The story behind China’s ‘coldest’ food trend | CNN
A new trend has been sweeping across China’s social media platforms, with people sharing images of bland, cold foods, all unified by a single hashtag: #whitepeoplemeals.
CNN (www.cnn.com)
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Martijn Faassen last edited by
@faassen something that Chinese and Indian friends in NL always squirm about: ‘did you know they eat white bread? With chocolate sprinkles? For breakfast?’ Fascinating how our early wiring has so much to do with this (I would not be able to eat chocolate sprinkles and bread for breakfast, or any meal, but I can do congee and century egg)
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Martijn Faassenreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@skinnylatte
Singapore has pretty clearly labeled halal food though and people are quite aware of the rules even if they don't eat halal themselves. -
Adrianna Tanreplied to Martijn Faassen last edited by [email protected]
@faassen I’m thinking more about brahminical food rules. Halal and kosher stuff is easy for me to understand. But stuff like if you eat meat, or you cook during your period, food is contaminated and you are personally bad and contaminated is what I mean by food ritual purity. Or a foreigner touches rice and it becomes polluted and you have to throw out temple food.
In Abrahamic food rules it’s ’you did a boo boo’ and broke the law, not that *you* are polluted
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Hagfish fancier v4.02.01replied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@[email protected] I think like a lot of things in the usa it can be reduced to racism/classism, like the things which I always heard I wasn't supposed to like growing up were always the things that poor people ate, whether because of necessity or tradition. my dad was always a fairly "adventurous" eater so I don't know if we had the same stigmas in our household that a lot of people did
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Hagfish fancier v4.02.01 last edited by
@pagrus when I first got to the Bay Area I stayed with someone who was utterly scandalized by me adding soy sauce to eggs
And knew someone in San Jose who had never ever heard of pho
It’s wild how there are some very big bubbles here
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@skinnylatte also midlly annoys me of how the Asian "eat dirty and gross foods" way is a lot more sustainable, healthy and "natural" (i.e., close to what our ancestors ate for centuries) than the health-aware & environment-aware diets of the west but people refuse to admit it because weird stigmas
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@atsuzaki well when the Italians or British do it, they get Michelin stars and genres like ‘nose to tail dining’
