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...

Martijn Faassen

@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???")

Vincent :coffeecup:

@skinnylatte

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 )

Adrianna Tan

@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)

Adrianna Tan

@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)

Martijn Faassen

@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 Tan

@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

Hagfish fancier v4.02.01

@[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

Adrianna Tan

@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

atsuzaki

@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

Adrianna Tan

@atsuzaki well when the Italians or British do it, they get Michelin stars and genres like ‘nose to tail dining’