My wife says her classmates think she brings very elaborate lunches, instead of like a raw carrot or a cold sandwich or a something.
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@skinnylatte a single carrot seems too far in the other direction lol
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@Ashedryden maybe it’s a Bay Area thing. Or a dieting thing. I dunno, honestly never saw people chomp on raw carrots until I got here. Or eat raw veggies of any sort (even salads are very hard for me. I’ve grown to like them but I still need something cooked in it. Like lentils!)
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only recently learned that the reason why I’m very averse to raw vegetables is that in Chinese food culture, raw vegetables are perceived as very bad and very unhealthy! It wasn’t explicitly mentioned this way, but it was definitely something I picked up.
Like when I volunteer at a food bank event and try to give Chinese aunties raw salad with dressing they tell me I’m weird. I’m a bit better about it now, but it’s just interesting how we all absorb diff values about the same food
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May Likes Torontoreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@skinnylatte All the kids thought I was weird because I'd come to school with cooked lettuce and carrots.
Joke's on them, I LOVE cooked iceberg the way my mom makes them.
My parents wouldn't eat raw veggies until after 8 years in Canada. They still boil their water for drinking, even though they know they don't have to.
Old habits die hard.
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Anders von Hadern 🦪replied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@skinnylatte I'm sure you already heard about this book The Raw and the Cooked which is a cultural anthropologists work that takes raw and cooked as philosophical structures to sort the world.
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So it was hard for me to reconcile that with the ‘raw vegetables are good and moral’ aspect of wellness culture that I later encountered.
I just don’t like to eat that way, maybe from cultural conditioning.
But it does take me less time to stirfry an amazing restaurant-quality Chinese or Thai veggie dish than it does for me to put a good salad together. (Just 90 seconds or less)
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Adrianna Tanreplied to May Likes Toronto last edited by
@MayInToronto I cannot deal with raw lettuce. Even today. Like I physically recoil from it. Cooked, in a soup or stir fry is fine!
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@skinnylatte do you have any recommendations (cookbook, YT video, etc.) for somebody who is a beginner at stir fry but wants to get into it more?
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@darkuncle Kenji’s The Wok is a good place to start
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Martijn Faassenreplied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@skinnylatte
While I am sure raw vegetables are healthy, we have been evolving as fire users for a long enough time to affect us a lot. I was going to go into how weaker jaw muscles allowed skull and thus brain size to grow but that hypothesis has apparently not held up:The real story of myosin, jaw muscles, and ancient brains
The provocative idea that our genus arose with a deactivated muscle gene turned out to be wrong.
John Hawks (johnhawks.net)
Nonetheless cooked food allows us to spend less time chewing.
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Martijn Faassen last edited by
@faassen the Chinese believe raw food causes indigestion
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@skinnylatte I never thought of raw veggies or cooked as being inherently more healthful than the other but evidently many other Americans think of salads specifically as health food. I usually think of raw veggies or cooked but chilled as more fun and refreshing. Like I made gazpacho last night and that's my favorite thing to have this time of the year. But that leads to another thing you don't relate to - having food that's contrasting temperature from the current weather.
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@skinnylatte my wife's welcome to America moment was the dorm she was in serving her raw carrots and celery sticks and ranch. She didn't know what she was supposed to do with that and didn't like any single part of it. She thought ranch was a gross flavor. I loved any time I got to have that as a kid. (I might have said this story before to you, I don't remember but I'll make a mental note now to at least not repeat myself again).
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🇵🇸 Mari :nb_crossbow:replied to Anders von Hadern 🦪 last edited by
@skinnylatte @anders_von_hadern :blobcateyes: that sounds very interesting! I'm finding two in the library - one is a translation of a book by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the other a collection of essays by Jim Harrison... I'm guessing you mean the former? Or is there another? ty!
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@thomasjwebb thank you for sharing! I now like ranch and raw carrots, but it took a while
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Anders von Hadern 🦪replied to 🇵🇸 Mari :nb_crossbow: last edited by
@bouncinglime @skinnylatte The one with name that sounds like a jeans brand - you guess right and I apologize for not having mentioned the author ...
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Anders von Hadern 🦪 last edited by
@anders_von_hadern @bouncinglime also the name of the dynasty heir that is running for mayor in San Francisco right now. Ugh
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Adrianna Tanreplied to Anders von Hadern 🦪 last edited by
@anders_von_hadern @bouncinglime it’s hilarious, his campaign ads have to say where the money comes from and it literally says paid for by his mummy
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Karen Quinn Fung 馮皓珍replied to Adrianna Tan last edited by
@skinnylatte I follow a person on IG whose entire schtick is commentating on mainland Chinese social media trends in English. A few months ago Chinese folks were calling flavourless, simple and/or raw vegetable lunches “white food” and equating it with a waning desire to live.