Speaking of cartoons, I happened to watch some videos from this guy about the white people who inspired manga.
Would Yall forgive me if I said that Japan is overrated?
They have been a giant American military base since 1945, not their own country.
Their culture got annihilated and replaced with hollow western swill.
They do not even wear Japanese clothing anymore, only western business suits.
Japan makes rather gross porn as well. Probably a reflection of their trauma or something.
It’s really obvious that Japanese have a different flavor profile. Their cold foods and soups are delicious, but they also like fried eggy things that are disgusting – like fried octopus balls.
Is taste stuff Nippon or just east asia? The continent has transcriptomics for odd taste.
Taste perception has been critical in evolution, especially for the detection of toxins. rs139938620 in TAS1R3, a sweet receptor, shows a high allelic frequency in Asians (0.79) compared with other populations (Table 2). TAS1R3 is a component of the dimeric protein TAS1R1/TAS1R3, which is the umami taste receptor, and the umami taste is a common feature of many foods in Asia. As a result, it is reasonable to speculate that this variant is beneficial for toxin detection in Asians and is, thus, selected for [67].
It’s almost paradoxical, how a greater sensitivity to toxins could lead to greater use of bitter, toxin-reminiscent cooking.
First, cooking tends towards magnifying the slightest sensation. The language they use is loud slightness, notable smallness. There is indisputably an element of paradoxical contrast in artful cooking, like an afterimage illusion born of cone/rod exhaustion. You need bitterness sublimated in subtle ways. Mirepoix smells like heaven, but the entire smell is actually very close to compost if you have some comparison.
Secondly, desensitization is an inevitable component of “high-brow” and “mature” taste. There are multiple meanings to sensitivity. Some meanings imply greater range. If you have greater range that may mean you can be desensitized to a greater (objective) level at the same fraction of your (subjective) scale.
I’m feeling dumb for talking about things that I know I don’t understand again. I know that food science people and cooks actually understand this stuff, and may have some real insight into the actual mechanics of it. Food scientists focus their entire careers on reducing bitterness in food. I don’t know what those receptors do. I don’t get how umami works. So much of the time when you’re pseuding on the internet it’s justified because it seems nobody has thought about this thing before. But this is one of those cases where I know there is something substantial and verified out there I can find if I really want to, but I don’t. I just want to post the newest hallucination plucked out of my bubble-venting vat of a brain.
Not sure.
Japs hate root beer. It tastes like medicine to them.
I also do not like Root Beer, and it’s not exactly a common drink here either.
Same for candy corn, which Asians always mention hating. Nobody ever eats candy corn unless during Halloween (even then, not much of it. Seems to be more decorative than anything).
It would be so cool if there were multiple branches of mathematics developed differently in different cultures around the world. Math has been so vastly dominated by the European tradition, there’s no comparison.
Even the Japanese stuff is just an alternate version- one that impressively approximates it’s European contemporaries in some respects while Europe was leaving everyone else in the dust, but it doesn’t sound like it diverges. It would be cool if they found a very different sort of puzzles worth pursuing.
This whole thread as it pertains to Japanese classifying things primarily though function has been very very valuable. I have been working on a project and got to a difficult point, sort of had a slight intuition on how to ‘solve it’
I was just reading older threads on the site and came across this, this helps a ton, basically gives me the framework to solve the issue I was having.