Been thinking about the fat phobia struggle thread from a few days ago. Came across this video which gave a lot of “food for thought” about the systemic causes of obesity today. Food is engineered to be highly addictive, tweaking the interaction with all senses. Capitalism is a driving reason for the competition over our stomachs. This should occupy a larger part of standard leftist discourse due to its ubiquity and its ease of appearing natural and inoffensive.
they literally use focus groups, thousands on thousands on thousands of sensory trials tweaking the color, texture, flavor and mouth feel of various combinations and processes to tweak the experience and find the maximum dopamine hit to trigger compulsive consumption, drawing on psychology, identity, memory and targeted demographics. I've seen how these trials are designed and participated in some directly. I met someone who spent 2 years studying the optimal color yellow for butter pats that would induce feelings of quality and comfort in white Midwestern suburban consumers. 2. years. this is not a force that can be passively resisted.
after grasping that was when I started trying to reclaim and rewire my sensory experience away from pursuing simple flavors loaded with memory and notions of comfort. instead, I wanted to get into complex flavors ones associated with older food ways: dals, curries, acidic sours. dishes loaded with vegetables and plant fibers that come together in unfamiliar ways, novel but proven to be satisfying for a huge amount of humans over time.
my latest addiction is a thai-viet hot and sour brothy deal sometimes called Tom Yum soup, but I also turn into a heat seeking missile around massaman curry because wtf. it is food sorcery.
anyway, my idea was to run away from what I knew, food wise, and start over somewhere completely different. after a few months, these curries and once unfamiliar dishes became comforting and my old favorites became more like novelties that were yummy in the moment, but unpleasant to the digestion and no longer comforting in the way a sour soup full of mushrooms and cooking greens had become.
the brain is a weird organ, especially the way we can metacognitively interact with it and influence our habits. I think of it like an empty field that we walk around on. over time, the grasses grow up outside the paths we walk repeatedly and grow to obscure all the paths we might take. but we can forge new paths with committed, active effort and let old ones be abandoned or at least less frequently wandered along. the awkward and strange can become familiar.
and that's my commercial for your local Thai takeout place. if they ask how spicy you want something, say, "like you were making it for family" lol 🥵🥵🥵
Ironically I need to find some less spicy food to enjoy. I've got a very global palate. My only job ever has been cooking, I k ow what I'm doing big time but dammit I really like my food spicy and my tummy doesn't.
Maybe switch fromchilli-based spices to mustards? Why destroy your digestive system when your respiratory system has it coming?
It's the vinegar in play from either. I have a literal full mustard shelf on my fridge door. I am a huge mustard enthusiast. The real culprit is booze and coffee.
This is where I think active dietary restrictions make for interesting challenges towards forming new habits. I was only a vegan for one year, but trying to do that forced me to learn how to cook Indian food because that's basically the most common cuisine that can be made vegan without too many drastic changes and still tastes amazing. I worked at an American grill restaurant in the Midwest and everything was either brown or white and basically unseasoned, so I made an arbitrary decision to try cooking with as many variously colored ingredients as possible and that too proved to be a fun experiment. Idk life is too short to just eat the same processed crap all the time
Dialectical materialism!
Everything you’re saying is something I dream of trying. Glad it worked out for you.
My partner and I are far along that road, as well as the road to veganism. For us it was less a sudden departure, and more a slow journey into adventurous eating because we were bored with fast food and the food our families had always made. My advice is simply to remember that all tastes have to be acquired, and that takes time. Find people to go out together so you can try multiple things at once, esp people who already know what they like at a new place. Without one local Vietnamese place's veggie bahn mi I'm not sure we'd've ever acquired the taste for tofu, but now I can enjoy almost any of it.
Some simple recipe starters to cheaply move away from the American diet at home when you're looking for something simple: In a rice cooker, combine 3/4 cup dried green lentils and 1 cup brown rice, thoroughly washed, with 500ml of water with seasonings of your choice. Turn on rice cooker and enjoy in ~15 minutes. Also combines well with 1 can diced tomatoes and chilis (like rotel)
Heat 1 can of drained chickpeas on a plate covered with a cloth/paper towel to prevent popping for 5 minutes in a microwave, transfer into a pan with hot oil and cook over medium-high heat until at desired texture, being sure to season while in pan as desired. Place cooked chickpeas on tortillas with steamed corn, some salad greens (shout out to cheap coleslaw mix), chopped fruit, or anything else you can think of to give more texture and finish with any sort of sauce. Wrap and enjoy.
admittedly, it started simple and modest. less salt, more acid and heat. less sugar in general, more umami. that's what I would look for in dishes, what they were relying on to be savory. it was pretty easy to find Americanized Asian dishes that still use salt and sugar, but they would be supplemented by lots of garlic and ginger for an interesting sharpness. there's also a book called 660 Curries which gives a lot of context to just how diverse S. Asian cuisine is and functions as an insane recipe reference.
from there it was stumbling across a really cheap, no frills SE Asian takeout place that puts all the effort into the food. no seating, wait in the cold/rain outdoors with no cover, get food through a slot. only 3 choices, menu shifts weekly. that let me try a lot of things, learn some terms and discover a lot in a short amount of time.
also, if you smoke tobacco, definitely drop that ASAP. for health reasons for sure, but also it mutes/muddles your sense of smell and taste. it's hard to overstate how much, but I think it's one of the reasons so many restaurants prepare food that is overseasoned... because the exec chef's palette and their little brigades are all scorched and blasted from their cig breaks.
As a hyposensitive autist, thank you head chefs?
Fuck you now I want some tom kha but it's 2am and I can't get any
I like way too much salt and oil but my favorite thing is to just throw a bunch of vegetables and garlic and curry and tons of other stuff in a skillet. I don’t understand the appeal of pizza at all at this point especially compared.