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Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

So in Northern China, most food is

- raw food is rarely eaten unless it has a thick / peelable skin - mostly veggies are cooked in oil - starch heavy (flour for dumplings or baked goods, and rice) - spice heavy (chili, Szechuan peppercorn) - sodium heavy (soy, bean pastes, and preserved vegetables) - lots of odd ingredients from a western point of view (mushrooms, fermented beans) - no set "breakfast" foods vs "supper" foods per se; more like "banquet" foods vs . "Everyday"

I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric. Evolved people eat cooked food, or so the saying goes.

I can next talk about India, Pakistan, Bangkadesh and its varied regional diet...

My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...

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> My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...

Developing a comprehensive and objective view of human digestion wasn't the goal of the research. The primary goal was to disparage the so called modern "western diet," and glorify that of a traditional Exotic Other by contrast. Facts were then selectively chosen to support the pre-ordained conclusion.

For that purpose, only one non-western analysis is necessary, and in particular they must stringently avoid analysis of non-western places that are also heavily into fried food.

The author also goes on about how terrible antibiotics are, the damage they've done to the western microbiome. They further lament with little comment how antibiotics are now appearing with increasing frequency in the remaining environments where Exotic Others still live in a traditional fashion.

They fail to note that this is because in the absence of antibiotics, people -- especially children -- tend to die horribly painful deaths of sepsis at a vastly increased rate, and even exotic others tend to prefer not to die like that when taking $2 worth of pills can prevent it.

The modern Chinese diet is also relatively new (think decades) and china has high rates of diabetes and heart disease and stomach/colon cancers are on the rise.

Come back in 50 years and we'll see how well the Chinese have coped with their modern diet. I'm guessing it won't be so well.

I once took a cooking class in Beijing for home cooks (I speak mandarin and the class was for locals, not foreigners).

The amount of sugar going in some popular dishes was crazy (literally handfuls).

This has nothing to do with modern diet, the trend the GP is speaking is at least centuries old.

Traditional Chinese culture believes raw food damages the Qi of the Stomach. This belief may be grounded in the fact that their traditional way of fertilizing the crops is "night soil" or human excrement. Eating raw vegetables is a maladaptive behavior under those conditions.

It might be also linked with cooked foods being easier to digest. China has had high population densities - and therefore a recurrent problem with crop failure leading to famines - for many centuries (at least in the river valleys), so using non-eatable plants as an energy source to make human digestion more efficient is also an adaptive behavior.

That point on night soil makes a lot of sense. Note that point about thick-skinned fruits and vegetables being seen as safe, in the grandparent post.

I'm also reminded of how the Chinese traditionally regarded cold drinks as dangerous. They didn't even drink wine without heating it -- and certainly would never drink cold water, or tea that had been steeped without being brought to a boil (and, I think, held there).

I don't think the GP is talking about a centuries old diet (note the use of tense e.g 'in modern china, most food is).

Sure, the vestiges of that diet still exist today as do many of the cultural beliefs and habits e.g. only eating cooked foods unless they have a thick, peelable skin, boiling water before drinking it etc.

The point I am trying to make is that the Chinese have taken that traditional diet and added a huge amount of sugar, salt and MSG, not to mention significantly more meat (in recent years, this can often be doctored with water and/or various chemicals by the vendor). If you're eating at a restaurant rather than at home, meals probably contain a good dose of gutter oil too.

That should not be taken in any way as being healthy, and because it's also relatively recent, the effect it will have on the health population is not yet highly visible.

In mainland China they also have a poor concept of proper nutrition and this is exacerbated by the one child policy, with parents and grandparents feeding their only child whatever they want to eat (often sweets, candy, soft drink) rather than what is good for them.

On multiple occasions in China I've known children under the age of 5 with rotting, horrible teeth and when I brought it up with the parents and/or relatives (who I also knew) they laughed it off and said "oh it doesn't matter, they're just baby teeth and new ones will grown in soon and they'll be ok".

They completely failed to realise they were setting their children up for a lifetime of diet, teeth and health related problems.

I've got no problems with the concepts of traditional Chinese cooking, but it's increasingly difficult to find that in modern China.

Mushrooms are popular enough in western cuisine to be ingredients in canned soup (I don't just mean cream of mushroom soup). In the US fresh mushrooms are available in any medium sized grocery store and many people have the hobby of collecting wild mushrooms (notably morels). I'm pretty sure Europe is similar.

Yes, mushrooms are sold in virtually every european supermarket and some, like chanterelles, are considered a delicacy. Collecting wild mushrooms is also quite popular in rural regions of Germany. However, please be sure to bring along a local when doing so. There are some poisonous look-alikes to edible mushrooms. Recently, a 16 year old refugee in Münster died because of this [1].

[1]: http://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/muenster-16-jaehri...

However, please be sure to bring along a local when doing so

This is a pet peeve of a biologist I know: even though I know nobody who can determine species like he can, he's still very strongly against collecting mushrooms in the wild and does not do it himself. According to him there are just too many edible mushrooms with a poisonous look-alike which in some cases prefers the same surroundings as habitat and in for which the distinction can only be made by smell, or by squeezing it and see how the color changes, etc. Not sure he's exaggerating but it does illustrate why people die from eating mushrooms out of the wild, time and time again.

Not a biologist, but a fan of flora! He's correct. Maybe not the best comparison, but mushrooms are a lot like snakes. [0] Fact of the matter is, if I saw a snake with any variation of red, black, and yellow I'd be sure to keep my distance. To quote the article:

>Though there is no harm in assuming all colorful snakes are dangerous

I assume all wild mushrooms are dangerous. There is no harm in it. :)

[0] http://www.wildlife-removal.com/snakecolorrhyme.html

I think it is wise to set a very high bar, but having a moderate amount of experience picking morels, I can trivially tell when I have a real morel or a false one (there are several species of edible morels and several species of confounding mushrooms involved).

I'll have to take your word for trivially telling them apart. To my untrained eye, I wouldn't be able to tell the dangerous species of my region apart from the safe ones.

But looking at the math, the most fatal species belong to Amanita [0]. Amanita contains about 600 varieties (wiki lists 500ish). Of those 500, for my region only, I would need to learn how to identify about 30 varieties. A reasonably feasible amount! But wait... we can trim that number down some more. Ignoring the ones where edibility is unknown, that leaves only 10 or so to identify. Anyone who cared enough could likely easily learn to tell them apart. But with 5 being known as deadly and 1 of those being the angel of death [1], I won't be taking any chances. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amanita_species

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_ocreata

So go hunt morels after a forest fire. You won't confuse them with the destroying angel. The advice to start with someone who knows the difference among the species that might be confused with morels would still be good to follow.

It's also totally fine to not do anything, I just wanted to point out that your position was extremely conservative on the matter.

Some of the edible species have poisonous lookalikes, while some don't.

Here, beginners are advised to only pick extremely easily recognizable mushrooms like various Boletus (Tatti).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletaceae

The books have very thorough instructions on identification.

My wife, from eastern Asian descent (mixed, but her mother and primary influencer of her diet is from there), cannot understand eating raw foods. She eats almost no raw foods. She likes plenty of veggies, but cooked. She also gets most of her fruit cooked (things like chayote and pineapple cooked with meats and in stews, bananas fried, etc.). Interesting to hear it's a broader cultural thing.

I eat lots of raw food in contrast... salads, veggies with hummus, fruit, etc.

> Evolved people eat cooked food, or so the saying goes.

However, they don't cook their vegetables too much.

Westerners eat raw vegetables, Asians prefer them cooked (even fruits)...

Yes I know. But when Westerners cook vegetables, they are often (too) throroughly cooked.

And in a proper Chinese hotel, even orange juice in the breakfast table is hot.

>And in a proper Chinese hotel, even orange juice in the breakfast table is hot.

I believe that is due to a cultural aversion to cold drinks.

>I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric.

I found it odd as well vs here in India were it would be some cooked dish.

> I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric

I'm no expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that they need to cook their vegetables in China to make sure they are safe to eat. Tap water isn't generally potable there, or is that just in cities?

They use a lot of vinegar too, depending on the region. My ex is Chinese and she made a lot of what they called cold dishes. Sometimes raw veggies but also cooked noodles that had been cooled, with sauces added in.

As I understand it, safe water was historically a problem, which led to the prevalence of hot tea for drinking. I guess culture in Asia tended towards boiling water, as opposed to Europe's tendency to ferment beverages to make them safer?

I forget the source where I read this, but there were supposedly vendors who only sold hot water. Water is a really cheap commodity, so the currency reflected that. Those lightweight, fractional-cent coins with the holes in them were kept on a string by the water vendors to easily take/dispense for selling hot water.

It's been years since I read this, so I may be totally off base with my recollection. But it makes sense given the problems associated with very dense populations and potable water in pre-industrial times.

Some people say the "alcohol was safer than water" thing is a myth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031856

Some people aren't convinced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7798470

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