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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.
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.
The way it was explained to me by Chinese friends was that excess == wealth. Chinese have grandparents who at different times couldn't buy enough food to eat, and parents who were restricted in the amount and quality of ingredients they could buy. So using ingredients extravagantly feels like a celebration of wealth and comfort. Similar story from Korean friends. Metal bowls and chopsticks were only available to the nobility, so they became a symbol of prosperity and class. Similarly, only the nobility had the money and ability to secure a wide enough variety of dishes to completely cover the table as is often done even in Korean homes. I'm sure that once famine and extreme poverty have mostly passed out of living memory people will question the need for such portions.
Re. the other comments on ramen broth -- you really shouldn't drink a lot of ramen broths. Tonkotsu, shio, and shoyu broths typically have a ridiculous amount of sodium, not to mention grease. Most Japanese also don't drink the broth and I think they many would consider someone who did a bit low-class and gross. There are however some more recent health conscious places (often targeted at women) that serve smaller bowls of ramen with totally drinkable broth (usually vegetable or chicken based). I try to find those since I love the broth.
Right, Chinese are pretty much all new money (if they have money), so it’s a different cultural perception of wealth. My parents would get angry because my best friend’s parents would give me like $1000 in cash for my birthday aged 10, which they found ridiculous and unreasonable (and would make me share it with my siblings). But I came to understand that - for them - to give me a card and a chocolate bar, the kind of gift ten year olds might give each other, would have been insulting. Arab friends were similar. The point of wealth in non-Hajnali cultures is to share it with chosen acquaintances, friends and family for your own prestige and good fortune. It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food. Or the Dutch with their endless ‘tikkies’ for €3 coffees. Nobody in the Arab world or in China would ever split the bill for a coffee, or even dare to suggest it, the idea would seem ridiculous unless both people worked for a western company and it was some expenses thing (and even then, someone would just pay). It’s an honor to pay for another.
And yeah, eating ramen broth is often a bad idea, as delicious as it is.
It just occurred to me -- I guess Americans mostly falls in the with the Arab/Chinese/Koreans on this matter? Or maybe somewhere in between. If you sent someone a "tikkie" in the U.S. for a coffee, I think a lot of people would think you're stingy. When I used to eat out with friends after around the age of 25 or so (i.e. when most people weren't scraping to get by), usually someone would pick up the bill for the entire table, and then next time it would be someone else's turn to pick it up. Occasionally there were weasels in the group who tried to only pick up the tab at the cheapest restaurants, but we usually would just go somewhere fancy next time it was their turn and stick them with the bill. Some people probably came out ahead a few bucks here and there but complaining about that would have seemed petty.
I spent most of my time in the South though and America is really a handful of nations in a trenchcoat pretending to be a single unified nation, so perhaps norms are different elsewhere.
EDIT:
N=1 but this is pretty much how I feel. I feel proud to be generous with my money and pay for my friends. Not sure how much of that is culture vs personality vs something else.
This is probably mostly a personality thing, but I hate the “I’m buying this time” culture that is pretty much standard both in America and also it seems in most of the English-speaking world. I hate it in part for OCD type reasons that David Mitchell lays out here, but also because I’m quite frugal by nature, which hurts both when I’m paying and when I’m not. When someone else is paying, I feel the need to keep my tab to a minimum, so as not to impose. When I’m paying, I still keep my tab to a minimum, since I’d rather not waste my money on eating out. My friends, on the other hand, don’t share my frugality, so they’ll happily order more expensive items regardless of whether they’re paying, which means I always end up paying extra to cover their profligacy. I much prefer the Dutch system.
It doesn’t really work well at Western restaurants where everyone orders their own food and drinks because of this defection risk (unless you really trust your dining companions, it’s always best to just order the steak/lobster/stack the cocktails for game theory reasons).
But in the Middle East and China it tends traditionally to be one person (not necessarily the person paying, but one person) ordering for the whole table, and then maybe ordering drinks for the table, so it makes more sense. Even when I’m with Chinese clients at Western restaurants they have typically tended (certainly more than average) to order sharing dishes or, say, the tasting menu for the whole table.
Until you consider the iterated game, and realize that you're not going to be invited back if you order obnoxiously expensive meals and drinks.
Yes if as @reactionary_peasant notes you follow my exaggerated example literally and order a $200 meal when your friends spend $50. But if you just get a $12 G&T while your friends get $7 beers each round of drinks, or you order slightly more expensive sides or dessert or a marginally more expensive meal then you can usually get away with it and won't be disowned as a friend at all. And in time that's essentially taking hundreds of dollars more than you 'should' if the desire is actual equal contribution.
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