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A thing I’ve noticed in Indian restaurants is people coordinating choices. Lighter, more snack-like meals tend to be more serializable (eg vada or pakoras followed by dosa or puri-bhaji). Either everybody will order thalis or everybody will order the lighter fare.
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Did not expect to shitpost on culinary medium-is-the-message principles this morning, but in a bit of a food coma after eating a whole loaded bagel.
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Hmm…, a simplified home meal in the western tradition is often a composed 1-course plate, with everything except desert, which looks like a thali. But a simplified Indian meal will eliminate threads rather than courses (eg only one vegetable but still 2 courses — roti and rice)
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I think it’s because the courses do less work but more important work, like hot followed by cold which matters more in hot (and more likely to be veggie) climates.
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One of the things I’m very curious about is how long it will take postmodern nutrition-hacking diets, based on equal parts bioscience, real science, and alchemy, to develop all the complicated nuances trad cuisines have kinda made tacit (but easily grokkable by inspection)
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Personally I enjoy food too much, and venerate body-as-temple too little to ever go full-stack nutrition hacker. I’m fine with body-as-trash-can. Otoh, I have no veneration for trad food ways either. They were once perhaps adaptive under varied patterns of privation, that’s all.
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* broscience not bioscience 3 tweets up I’ve definitely noticed effects of trying modern changes like cutting back carbs, increasing proteins, limiting/eliminating seed oils etc. But I’m broadly in the camp that argues that humans can thrive on a huge range of input mixes.
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Diseases of modernity probably have a few fairly specific causes like added sugar. I’m skeptical of theories and diets that demand really comprehensive revamps of entire diets, most of which have millennia of good-enough history and considerable old science behind them.
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Otoh no denying the explosion of metabolic syndrome diseases in India since heavy processing and eating out arrived. It’s a diabetes and hear disease time bomb. Me included.
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Did the glucose monitor thing recently. Interestingly, Indian sweets and chanachur spiked blood sugar less than modern candy, chips, or white flour things like croissants and pizza. There's something to the sugar theory, though it's definitely not the whole story.