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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2832 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Why is food waste just turned a blind eye to in Asian cooking? Here are a few recent ones I can think of.

  • Ramen broth. Does anyone ever actually finish the entire bowl of broth? Do we need the noodles to swim in the broth as opposed to just idk have enough broth to still sip, but not throw out 3/4ths of it? After all all the work of making ramen is just making the broth.
  • Same for pho.
  • All the dips they bring out in a Middle Eastern restaurant. Yeah, I have never seen anyone finish all the dips.
  • All the greens and pickles they also bring out in the middle eastern restaurants.
  • The banchan in Korean restaurants. Once again, no one finishes all of these.
  • All that fucking oil that certain Sichuan dishes come with. I once got served a fish that was swimming in a salad bowl full of oil.
  • All that hotpot broth!!, does every table need a dutch oven sized amount of broth? I'm sure a small saucepan is more than enough for the amount of broth you actually need to cook an average hotpot serving.

I understand broth for the most part is made of scraps and is cheap. But this is just money sitting on the table. You can solve itt by.. serving smaller portions. What about not wasting food on principle? I've not noticed such obvious food waste in western cooking, even though I am sure a lot of it is happening behind the scenes.

I understand trying to not waste things probably has diminishing and probably negative returns past a certain point, but is that a fact of the universe or just an excuse that we are okay with accepting ?

In a similar vein, in 2024, do we not have the technology to produce deep fried results without wasting vats of oil? Deep fried foods are significantly improved by using better (more expensive) fats such as olive oil, butter or beef tallow. If we could get deep fried results without using a barrel of oil, we could have better fats as the default. It won't show up in the GDP figures, but it will be increased QOL.

Because to Asians raised in famine-stricken societies, it the responsibility of a host to ensure that their guests are well-fed. This explains the Asian obsession with food relative to westerners who are many generations removed from true poverty, a decent fraction of whom seem to eat almost entirely for sustenance and not pleasure. In many Asian languages the traditional greeting is "have you eaten yet?" and you can't walk ten feet in a rural area without someone offering you dinner.

I'm not sure what there really is to complain about here though. I love taking home enough leftovers from a Chinese restaurant to cook my next three meals; it's the customers who are leaving money sitting on the table if they let the restaurant throw it all away. The only things I don't usually take back with me are excess hotpot broth and dipping sauces. By contrast, whenever I go to a European restaurant and am presented with half a sandwich and a cup of soup I feel cheated because I could have gotten 3x as much of better-tasting food for the same price at an Asian or Middle Eastern place.

In truth though middle eastern or Chinese restaurants aren’t actually ‘better value’ than most ‘Western’ restaurants if value corresponds to costly food items (like meat protein). Sure, actual fine dining has a higher cost:ingredients ratio for obvious reasons (higher paid staff, more skill and time involved in preparation etc), but the amount of protein you get for your $30 isn’t higher at the average Chinese restaurant compared to the average ‘American’ cuisine restaurant.

What tends to happen is that ‘ethnic’ food places (including traditional “red sauce” Italian-American restaurants in the US, although less so in Europe) offer you a ton of cheap/free relatively tasteless carbs which cost them almost nothing to provide. My grandfather’s favorite Italian restaurant of 50 years on Long Island would serve every entree with a colossal bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce. I suppose this counts as cheap calories, but I don’t know that it really improves the value proposition of the restaurant.

Similarly, a lot of classic Chinese export dishes at Western Chinese restaurants have a pretty small amount of meat and large amount of cheap vegetables like onions and bell peppers.

If we're talking about dollars per gram of protein, Asian food is the best ime as a vegetarian. These days you might find some meat replacements in western restaurants, but it's still somewhat rare. Lentils are not bad, but have way more carbs than protein. Meanwhile in Chinese restaurants there's plenty of tofu and seitan on the menu.

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