I haven’t encountered a single vegetable-centered dish at any of the Thai, Japanese, Malaysian restaurants I’ve visited in LA. It is possible to eat differently from the rest of the world (re a conversation a few days ago about always having to order veggies)
(To be clear, I agree everyone should eat veggies if they want! But also that, there are many cuisines which simply aren’t vegetable-centered)
(I had a very large raw papaya salad, lots of fiber but also enough chilli to kill a bear)
@skinnylatte add Philippines to that list. Amazingly, my spouse, @czds was raised vegetarian there. Kare-kare without meat, with bago’ong made with fermented tofu, black beans, and savories rather than fried shrimp. We added lobster and oyster mushroom to her mother’s recipe to get a bit of shrimp flavor. Ordering mixed vegetables in a Filipino restaurant invariably means asking that they hold the ground pork, and patis (fish sauce) is a standard in many dishes.
Sometimes I volunteer at food bank things and when we serve a meal, I always get sent to ask the Chinese aunties and uncles if they would like a plate of ‘lettuce with salad dressing out of a bottle’ 9 out of 10 of them say no. Often with disgusted looks.
It’s 9 out of 10 yes for other people. It’s just a data point that makes sense to me (because culturally lots of raw veggies are very difficult / impossible to southern Chinese people like me.)
I’ve learned from talking to other people (like my wife) that they ‘feel good’ after eating vegetables.
I don’t think about food / balance that way. Balance for me in diet comes from having not too much fried stuff at once, almost no ultra processed foods. Of course we eat vegetables but it just not as central.
In a very expensive Cantonese restaurant, the veggie dish is used to show off the.. dried scallop superior gravy the chef spent hours making.
I eat 30+ types of vegetables a week now which is new, but it’s a ‘gut health challenge’ rather than anything inherently moral or good about eating your vegetables. I find the complex of vegetables are inherently superior and good and clean and pure to have some eco or religious fascist tones in some communities I’ve been around.
And I’ll always struggle with the ‘health food’ people.
@sashin I never had any issues with my traditional diet since it’s super low on ultra processed foods, even if not high on plant diversity. But I did get my gut health tested before I did the plant focused switch and I plan to do it later as well. I’d like to compare the amount of good and bad gut bacteria I got from a change in diet. I haven’t noticed a significant change but again that’s coz I have really had any issues
@sashin I got one on joinzoe.com. I like that it’s more scientific than other options which are just selling you probiotics (that part of the science isn’t really proven)
@toridas_ yes, and to their mind, veg could ONLY be moral and pure. And if violence is imposed upon people for eating meat, too bad for them and yay for the animals.
Which is completely at odds with the mandatory vegetarianism as a tool for severe violence and oppression that I know and have experienced and seen.
I think what’s also missing from the conversation is that lots of non-Anglo food, even with meat, has a much smaller amount of meat. I think all in, the total amount of meat across a shared 4 course meal might amount to less than the one single meat serving you might have in a traditional Anglo style meal. And across the random veggies in soups, stir fry, steamed stuff, I feel like it adds up. I know some people really want The Big Veg, but that’s a new way of thinking about food for me.
So I cook a lot of Mediterranean food now and enjoy it. I do enjoy the one Big Veg or Salad now. But that is a new way of eating for me.
But I did also get my gut health tested even when I was much less plant-focused, and I had extremely big scores across sugar, fat and good gut bacteria. I suspect that’s because I mostly ate ‘a non Anglo diet’ whatever that is. So dinner were often a good clear soup, veg, a starch and a meat. I don’t think a lot of advice is focused on people who eat like me.
I would go as far as to say that almost anyone who is 100% plant based in the cities I’ve lived in in Southeast Asia will actually end up consuming far more ultra processed foods than if they were to just consume an omnivorous traditional diet.
That, or you have enough time and money to prepare all your meals. I’ve said before, that is not how food works in my part of the world. We are very often consuming meals with other people.
The ‘why don’t you eat seasonal vegetables at every meal’ convo reminds me of the ‘why don’t people in Indonesia eat yogurt, it’s healthy’ convo. 1, there’s no dairy culture 2, only rich people can afford it, 3, and this one is really important: when you live at the equator there are.. no seasons! Ahahaha
(I used to meet backpackers in Thailand and Indonesia who were not used to the food. They often had very colonialist views on it too, right down to ‘there’s no yogurt here why don’t people eat it yogurt is healthy’ to ‘people here don’t eat veg’, so I feel quite strongly about this!)
In southern Chinese food, we cook with so many types of vegetables. There’s celtuce, whose leaves you can cook like spinach and whose stem works like asparagus. There’s kohlrabi. There’s all kinds of gai lan and bok choy. There’s taro leaves. There’s sweet potato leaves. There’s water cress. It’s just different from veg in other cultures. There’s soups. There’s steamed stuff. There’s many veg in a dish with diff textures. Never roasted (we never use ovens)
There’s at least 10 types of tofu (types, not tofu dishes). There’s hundreds of tofu dishes. There are so many types of veg soups. Often with pork, chicken, seafood, Chinese herbs, even with alcohol. Most of them have more veg than meat, but the meat is often essential in specific dishes for flavor (soups that are boiled for hours).
The reverse of this food culture shock is, when I ask my friends from Indonesia or Malaysia or Singapore how their trip to Europe was, they almost all say, beautiful countries.. way too much bread and potato (I can only do 3 days of it)
@skinnylatte I don't eat potato that often but I do kind of like them? (Maybe I would like it less if I ate it more often). Also a fan of cooked vegetables (not boiled).
@skinnylatte I miss even San Francisco's variety of tofu. I need to drive to Denver to get anything close.
Especially miss getting fresh tofu cut on trays for you at Wo Chong on Washington St. Even after COVID, the price per block went up from 25 cents to 30 cents. I met the owner of Wo Chong when he came into the store once. He usually works in the factory, but he was a really, really nice guy who keeps their little market open there as a way of helping the community. https://www.yelp.com/biz/wo-chong-company-san-francisco-3
@skinnylatte I lived half a block from those Vietnamese markets, and yes, normally I would go there to get the fresh Wo Chong... but after a few experiences where the Vietnamese Wo Chong tasted sour, I checked out the main store, which was MUCH fresher.
Not sure whether it's still open there, but there was another Vietnamese market a block south and around the corner from the one on Larkin. They had some really good fresh tofu there in larger blocks, as well as fresh tofu pudding everyday.
@skinnylatte@skinnylatte My understanding is that most of the world’s population can’t digest dairy anyway! It’s some kind of weird genetic mutation, if I recall.
@mculbertson I think the severe lactose intolerance of a lot of East Asians in N America actually comes from hormones in the milk, not from lactose. That’s been true for me anyway. Lots of people do like milk but it’s just not the same way like in W or N Europe
It's not that Asians (specifically for me, HK) don't eat veg, it's that protein is much less favoured as the main ingredient in a dish. This extends practically everywhere, like European countries.
Take for example the prototypical American BBQ: brisket, pulled pork, ribs, and the sides are mac & cheese and cole slaw... Americans don't consider a breakfast proper unless there's bacon or something red meat involved, or I guess if you really have to compromise, eggs.
If there's a breakfast without meat, it's explicitly called a continental breakfast!
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