Asian foods are not “overtly-spiced”
Type Ashton, formerly known as The Blackforest Family, is a youtube channel dedicated to comparisons of life in Germany and the US. The titular host is an American woman who has been living in Germany with her husband and kids.
Even though I am neither American nor German, I love her videos for the healthy balance of academic researches (She has a PhD) and anecdotes. It makes her content informatively well-rounded. But, one video of hers sticks out like a sore thumb and it is not necessarily her fault.
In the video comparing American and European foods, she asserts how the latter are better because they let the ingredients to shine by themselves, no seasonings needed. I will explain later why I disagree. But, that’s not what pisses me off.
In the comment section, you can find quite a few commenters (fortunately, they do not dominate the comment section) looking down not just on American cuisines, but also any cuisines which are spice-dependent.
They argue not only the spices drown the flavours of the other ingredients, the spices end up making all of the foods taste the same.
As an Indonesian, I am going to say something controversial: I don’t think the so-called white people foods are bland.
Steak frites, pizza, cream of mushroom soup, croissant, tuna salad, egg salad, hamburger, macaroni and cheese and even toasted multigrain bread with butter spread. While the tastes may not be for you, I don’t think you can honestly say they lack flavours. Not to mention western foods do use spices and herbs, albeit in relatively minuscule amounts.
But, that does not mean I think western foods allow the ingredients to shine by themselves.
Western foods — including European foods — are very dependent on animal products for tastes. Whether it is the fresh meat, cured meat, tallow, lard, butter, bone marrow, cream or cheese, the flavours of such ingredients are always the dominant features of many dishes.
It is not to say Asian cuisines use little animal products. They definitely use lots of them. But, the difference is we are not entirely dependent on them for flavours. In fact, it is much easier to make vegetarian and even vegan versions of many (not all) Asian dishes.
Indonesia, my home country, is one of those spice-countries. Obviously, if you make vegetarian or vegan versions of our traditional dishes, people wouldn’t find them as satisfactory. But, they cannot deny the essential tastes are still there.
Soto still tastes like soto, rendang still tastes like rendang, sate (satay for you English-speakers) still tastes like sate, even after you remove the meats; the exceptions are dishes which call for fermented seafood like salted anchovies or shrimp paste, as they are treated more like seasonings rather than protein sources.
In fact, I can think of four similar Indonesian dishes which are already vegetarian: ketoprak, gado-gado, karedok and pecel. They are basically a mixture of different vegetables (which may or may not be cooked) with spicy and sweet peanut dressings, eaten with either rice or rice cakes. They are basically salad, but filling enough to count as entire meals.
While I hear they may be served with meat, I have yet to personally encountered such variants myself. When there is an animal product involved, it is just egg.
And I haven’t talked about India and China.
Even though both countries heavily consume meat, especially the latter, they boast a long history of vegetarianism, which means they have quite an experience cooking exclusively vegetarian dishes. They know how to create flavours without meat.
Can the same thing be said about western foods? Unless you are talking about salads, I doubt you can easily turn the dishes vegetarian and still retaining the essential flavours. In fact, I was surprised to find out that many “seemingly meat-less” dishes contain ingredients like tallow and lard.
I am not a vegetarian and I am definitely not a vegan. I don’t have any plans to become any and I certainly don’t buy the moral arguments for such diets.
I also acknowledge that meat and dairy-dependence can be environmental. If you lived in a place which was hostile to plants’ growth and/or had harsh winters, you had to consume lots of them in order to survive; the Maasai, Mongolians and Inuits would have perished if they decided to be meat-lite. Even in the 21st century, being meat-lite in such places can be financially burdensome, as most of the fresh produces have to be shipped from faraway places.
In fact, I love meat and dairy; in an alternative universe where I didn’t grow up Muslim, I would happily gorge those bacon, ham and lard-heavy western dishes.
But, at the same time, it is also dishonest to claim those spice-lite cuisines allow the ingredients to shine by themselves when, in reality, they still use meat and dairy as their main seasonings.
And how those people criticise Asian foods are just dishonest.
My spice tolerance is low for the Indonesian standard and, as a kid, it used to be much lower. But, even as overwhelmed as I am at times, I still can taste the meat and vegetables. Of course, other people’s spice tolerance may be even lower than mine, so low they can only taste the spices; I cannot criticise them for it.
But, those people also say spices make dishes taste the same. Yeah, that’s a dumb opinion.
There are literally more than a hundred of spices existing in this world; we can can use them to create an almost infinite amount of spices. Considering every spice country/region has its own sets of spices, many of the blends are unique to certain places.
There is no way you have tried many different kinds of spicy dishes and still think they all taste the same. You cannot expect me to believe that rendang, butter chicken, tom yam, Japanese curry and arrabbiatta pasta taste the same. If you don’t have a damaged tongue, either you lie…… or you love your preconceived beliefs so much, not even facts can change them.
You may as well claim you have met lots of brown people and still insist they all look the same.
I genuinely wonder:
Do you genuinely believe your tastes are objectively the best?
Or are you prejudiced to anything non-western/European?
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