The horrific reality that nobody wants to accept is that the well-prepared version of most cuisines is pretty damn good, whether or not it's specifically to someone's taste. There's nothing Morally Pure about food*.
*Except soup is the best food, and all others are inherently less good, but they're still FINE I GUESS
Yes, I think this all the time. No one likes bad food, and even food that looks bad will have a purpose or reason (e.g poverty meal, what grows in the climate, etc)
I have a pet theory* that there are really only two macro-level food cultures: one is based, in its most ideal form, on using good ingredients and mostly just trying to bring out their best qualities (nice steak or sushi or a good sunday roast are perhaps examples of this) and the other is on kind of layering flavors on top of flavors on top of flavors (rendang, biryani...) And I think often, one of the most fundamental issues people have is when they try a cuisine from the other "side" - "x dish is too spicy","y dish is basic," etc. But we'd all be happier if we tried to maintain an openness to the other general "type" of food culture even if it's not what we grew up with.
Obviously there's overlap and nothing is as clear cut as all that, but I tend to feel that most world food cultures can sort of be roughly categorized into one or the other.
You're sort of right,
In hot and humid climates, bacteria grows very quickly and spices are proven to reduce the growth of bacteria, and that also happens to be where these spices grow well as well.
And when children are fed spicy food from a young age, it becomes what they expect food to taste like. If you are used to things being spicy, then when those spices aren't there it feels like something is missing.
In colder climates, preservation is more important as food is more seasonal. Things like fermentation and smoking play a bigger role.
One thing that people also don't talk about is that a lot of the food we eat in restaurants are not anything like what people in that country eat on a daily basis.
Japanese people aren't eating sushi at home, they eat a lot of plain or lightly seasoned rice and grilled fish, which you will probably not pick from a japanese restaurant. Breakfast might just be a rice ball.
Same with most places and most foods. In india, people usually eat lentils/daal, seasonal vegetables, flatbreat/roti and rice.
"indian" food in the UK or US is usually adapted to UK/US tastes with different ingredients and spice mixtures as well, truely traditional cooking isn't actually that popular.
Same with chinese food. British or American chinese food is more foreign than it is chinese, to the point there are some american chinese restaurants in china serving american chinese food as its popular with people who were students in the US.
Truthfully, most people like the flavour profiles they grew up with and thats fine and normal.
And if you know the cooking context, pretty much every countries cuisine makes sense and tastes good.
I hate my fellow Italians for this. Most of them are so closed minded that they just can’t appreciate anything that doesn’t come from their mothers.
Their experience outside Italy is trying Italian food outside the country then proceeding in criticizing it for their entire lives (and I mean literally).
I’ve always had amazing local food everywhere I went, including the UK.
The only valid complaint I accept is that here we have many, many great dishes while I usually find less variety in other countries (but still, depends where).
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u/TheBankTank 22d ago
The horrific reality that nobody wants to accept is that the well-prepared version of most cuisines is pretty damn good, whether or not it's specifically to someone's taste. There's nothing Morally Pure about food*.
*Except soup is the best food, and all others are inherently less good, but they're still FINE I GUESS