A Bid to Maintain One of the World’s Oldest Culinary Traditions | Hacker News Reader

A Bid to Maintain One of the World’s Oldest Culinary Traditions

nytimes.com

80 pointsrmason26 comments

It's a beautiful article. Most Parsi food joints in Mumbai are in the old colonial area called "Fort". It is an area that you can walk around unlike most of Mumbai.

Incidentally it is also India's financial capital with the main offices of the Reserve Bank of India in that area.

If you are ever in Mumbai, I strongly recommend walking around in Fort and taking in the sights and just eating your way through the place.

For some context on how close to vanishing the community is (granted, by their own strict definition on who a Parsi is), please see:

https://www.economist.com/node/21561946/all-comments?page=1 (Archive link - https://archive.is/S9pkF )

Unpopular opinion: the value of a culture is largely in the novelty it can offer to others. (This is explained in the article itself with the "adding sugar to milk" parable.)

So the worthwhile parts of Parsi culture, such as the food, will be preserved by other non-Parsis, and despite the doomsday tones of the article this is already happening with chains like Sodabottleopenerwala [1] carrying the torch. Sure, it will be mutated and transformed in the process, but it will still enrich the fabric of the world, in the way that austere Japanese sushi has paved the way for crispy tiger rolls in the United States.

[1] https://www.sodabottleopenerwala.in/

>you must come on a Wednesday, and you must be invited. Only members and their guests are permitted to enter, and membership is granted only to Parsis.

I for one am not moved to preserve such an exclusionary cuisine. Crap like this is why creative commons, copyleft, and the GPL came into existence.

My comment adds no value to the thread but are you really applying the concept of software licenses to an eatery? This is a classic technique for generating buzz and demand. Many many restaurants do it. People are fine with it, no harm is done. It does not violate any rights. Owners can choose to serve whom they please.

> "People are fine with it, "

Then who are you responding to?

If a restaurant did it in the US, it would be illegal discrimination on the basis of national origin. This particular restaurant would only fly depending on whether they could qualify as a private club exempt from the Civil Rights Act.

> Only members and their guests are permitted to enter, and membership is granted only to Parsis.

Implies that it is very much a private club.

Not related to the article, so feel free to downvote.

I had to open this in Safari and "capture" it in reading mode before the page loaded fully to read the full article. Sort of anti-user.

Parsis are amazing. Zoroaster! Incredible.

I can't believe how much cultural destruction occurs today -- simply through forces of homogenisation.

The idea that any culture is in and of itself worth preserving despite members of that culture not reproducing or passing that on morally questionable. It finds its greatest support today (in America at least) in the form of white supremacist groups responding to 'white genocide'. I'll pass, thanks. If the farsis do not preserve their culture, we do not owe it to them to do so. They'll join the ranks of thousands, if not millions, of respectable cultures that no longer exist today.

Oh well... thus is the nature of time and impermanence.

To be completely fair, if the wholely imagined and ludicrous concept of white genocide was real, it would be something meriting the discussion they have about it.

The fact that whites have been so far above every other culture for so long that anything less than that feels to them like erasure and genocide is a testament to how coddled they are as a culture.

Hasn't white supremacy been a leading cause of cultural extinctions at least since the age of imperialism?

> If the farsis do not preserve their culture, we do not owe it to them to do so.

I don't feel I owe anything to this group, but we owe it to humanity to preserve a diversity of ways to be in and think about this world.

Yes and before that it was Mongolian supremacy and before that parsi supremacy. In other words, cultures die and new ones form. We do not owe it to the world to preserve existing diversity. Sure take down artificial barriers to societal continuity for those who want it. That's human rights not particular to any group of people. But diversity is not something to be preserved. That's a regressively conservative approach to diversity and stems from a lack of appreciation of the true source of diversity: having a shit ton of people

> We do not owe it to the world to preserve existing diversity.

How about if we compromise and just stop actively destroying it?

> But diversity is not something to be preserved.

Well, I want it to be preserved. The world becomes a much sadder and less interesting place if we all think and behave the same.

> Well, I want it to be preserved. The world becomes a much sadder and less interesting place if we all think and behave the same.

You misunderstand. You dont want diversity. You cannot advocate for diversity when you simultaneously advocate for differences to remain the same. The world is naturally diverse because there are 7 billion people with 7 billion unique personalities. Attempting to artificially keep a dying culture alive does not cultivate diversity but rather outdated customs.

On principle, monocultures are not desirable as compared to diverse cultures. Resilience. Thus, bias towards preservation of diversity.

The idea that the United States (or substitute any other large country, such as China, India, Brazil, etc), for example, is a monoculture is laughable. The death of a no- longer-significant culture signals neither a lack of external diversity nor an inability for diversity to arise again.

I've already said it... the way you get diversity is by having more people. In that regard, we're doing just fine. In the unlikely event that literally every person ends up following the same culture (which again, is not going to happen, despite the false dichotomy you are trying really hard to set up), I can guarantee you that in a few years, people's ideas will begin to diverge, and in a few decades, there will once again be factions, and in a few centuries, there will be mutually unintelligible cultures.

That is how the world works. It worked when zoroastrianism was the predominant religion for a large portion of the world, when its monoculture arguably gave rise to things like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and it will work in the future. In the meantime, we need not take any drastic action to ensure the survival of a culture that not even its inhabitants want to keep alive in any practical sense.

We aren't discussing "drastic action to ensure the survival of a culture". We are discussing principles of value -- and I assert that functional diversity is intrinsically valuable (unless and until the diversity tears the broader system apart, resulting in less functional diversity).

On the face of it, more people does not automatically equal more cultural diversity. What's your argument?

To be clear: Walmart is a monoculture when it destroys diverse town centers in favour of standardized parking-malls.

But the argument is subtle -- why isn't the diversity of product offerings at Walmart sufficient to offset the diversity of town centers? I don't have a ready answer, but I intuitively believe that a nation of Walmarts isnt as strong a nation of main streets.

> To be clear: Walmart is a monoculture when it destroys diverse town centers in favour of standardized parking-malls.

Apples and oranges. Walmart is not a culture. Walmart is a company. Last I checked, Zoroastrianism and parsi culture is a human culture, not a for-profit entity.

> We are discussing principles of value -- and I assert that functional diversity is intrinsically valuable (unless and until the diversity tears the broader system apart, resulting in less functional diversity).

I highly disagree. Individuals are valuable. Cultures are valuable and should be respected as long as individuals subscribe to it (and they are within reason). However, cultures as a whole do not have any rights in aggregate that individuals do not have. Attempting to maintain cultural diversity is a form of totalitarianism, basically fascism by another name.

If no individual can sustain their culture, no one owes it to them to try.

Look, I belong to a cultural group that is dying out due to a diaspora and intermarriage (see the documentary bottle masala in moile). I like people with my customs, but other than the fact that I feel more familiar with people like my family, I recognize there is no inherent value in my culture, and I actually oppose things like coercing children to marry within the group out of some notion of group identity. Of course, in our case, there are a few governmental barriers that ought to be taken down. But, if no one wants to marry or continue the customs, no one should be forced to and it's insanely weird to have outsiders who were not raised in it to all of a sudden decide they want to take part. Anyway, it's not like any culture completely dies out. As groups intermingle, ideas are mixed, and good ones continued. New cultures will form and new identities forged. That's called dynamic society, and should be the goal. A society in which all cultures stay the same is basically an overly traditionalistic, totalitarian one.

Anyway, I'm kinda done pontificating here. It's clear we value different things. I value dynamicism, creation, and cultural progress, and you want all cultural divisions to remain the same for the foreseeable future and view any intermingling as a form of cultural destruction. I'm afraid the viewpoints can't really be harmonized.

>"you want all cultural divisions to remain the same for the foreseeable future and view any intermingling as a form of cultural destruction."

You have deceived yourself, good sir. I don't know why, but I'd reflect on it for your sake.

Yes, indeed And back to the good old days when Buffalo bill was the good one.

The value of novelty is purely emotionally driven, not economic. People love it, but they'll rarely pay for it.

Therefore, under capitalism, novelty is doomed.

Well they do have a very strict definition for who is zoroastrian. If marrying outside the faith cuts off the entire bloodline from the faith it is not going to last very long.

To be clear, this is a cultural lineage that dates to approximately 1000BC -- so, yes, I'd be quite sad to see it die out. America is great, but we don't have very strong cultural traditions today. So I admire groups that have longevity -- their culture will likely have a longer duration than ours.

Though, I'd love to see America only fading away in the year 4776.

Cannibalism?

"You two fight to the death and I'll cook the loser."

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