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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42293 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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The luxury of having freshly prepared food made with complicated processes that are ubiquitous in Thailand- affordable even to the people who make this food themselves!- is lacking in today's rich countries.

This is partially due to density and economies of scale making operating costs lower. You still get this in richer places like Singapore and to a lesser extent in most of East Asia. There's a culture of having shops with 2-3 unique items, each with some minor variations, on the menu and high throughput.

The west has many places like this- fried chicken places, for example, often serve fried chicken and fries with only portion sizes differentiating the different option, maybe one is served as a sandwich.

The degree to which this is the case in East Asia is like, at least 5 times more than in the west. Any random food court in Thailand has probably 12 to 20 highly specialized food places that are all cheap and fresh, you're lucky if a random mall in the US has 8 food establishments in business, let alone cheap and fresh ones... Your average major mall in Thailand probably has 30-40 businesses just for food, not even counting the special booths that usually pop up for limited events that expand the count by another 20 or more. Truly blew my mind the first time I was in Thailand

Are we talking about outside of Bangkok?

Yeah, I went to Chiang Mai and Pattaya and it's the same way, we took a boat to a random island in the gulf and there were dozens of food vendors in the port, a beach on the coast we went to had endless food stalls. The density and variety of food options are staggering, you can't walk down a street without some woman cooking the best basil pork or whatever you've ever tried

Chiang Mai, Pattaya, Bangkok, these are all heavily touristed areas, which I would argue give a different picture of Thailand than you would get from a more local experience.

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