/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Why do you feel the need to judge what others desire? What motivation did you have for making this thread?

>>17980594
OBSESSED

>>17980594
I grew up in Korea and moved back and forth from the states. I honestly think it has to do with school lunches and dining culture as a whole.

In most countries, developed or otherwise, "traditional cuisine" is readily available, affordable, nutritious, and tasty. This is the case for school lunches as well. In the states, from day one, it's Campbell's soups, fucking goldfish, Kraft Mac n Cheese, and Burger Helpers. The prevalence of fast food, processed food in everyone's diet has molded this weird bubble where people have a skewed idea of what's good/healthy/tasty. School lunches are shit as well and even packed lunches are mostly random mixes of fruits, haphazard sandwiches, and processed shit. Fuck, the sheer number of classmates in college who had never had a pumpkin outside of a god damn pie or even tasted a bone-in fish before was astounding.

And you know what's really fucking hilarious? All the "red necks" that wore camo everywhere turned out to have the best god damn palates. If I'd be grilling a chilean sea bass or chopping up some abalone, it'd be some dude who shoots varmits with his dad on the weekends that'd be the one most excited to try some.

>>17980601
I literally said "I'm just completely exasperated."
One is entitled to their own tastes but it's just so bizarre that so many people are effectively picky eaters. The extent to which I've seen people go to avoid even the scent of really normal stuff is kind of just baffling. This isn't something with an unusual texture that they refuse to eat like oysters or oatmeal, this isn't something with an overpowering scent like curry, people will freak out to the extent I described over regular old veggies.

I'm not saying "you have to like this" but when you go to a neurotic extent and demand others cater to your frankly weird tastes, it's a problem. I used to work in food service and it was just something else, the number of people who would come in and absolutely despise the most standard of ingredients.

>>17980594
Processed foods are engineered to taste really good and have nearly universal appeal. If you grow up eating processed foods, that's what you end up liking. It's so very important for parents to feed their children a broad diet of fresh homemade dishes.

>>17980594
I will not eat that gross green shit, faggot. Fuck off.

>>17980594
Eggs used to make me nauseous until I discovered the french omelet. After looking into it, turns out overcooking eggs fucks them up. Since the average american doesn't know how to cook and makes shitty omelets that are half brown and have the consistency of rubber, it makes a lot of sense. All the other shit is jsut people being pussies

>>17980617
I'd say I ate a "balance" of both processed crap and real food growing up, and I simply can't abide the former anymore. I keep a little around if I really, really have no fugging time and need to eat and immediately go, but I'm not fond of even that. I suppose I am a bit neurotic about it, but at the same time, I don't fault people for having that stuff sometimes. I'm just incredulous when it's nearly all someone eats. I've met fully grown men who unironically survive off of Bagel Bites, chicken tenders, fish sticks, and frozen fries. It's ridiculous. It's a 5 year old's diet. And none of these things are inherently bad once in a while, but how can this be *all* you eat?

It's like
how
How do you survive on that
Does that not make one feel like crap?
Does that not completely screw up one's digestion---would they not poop either rocks or have diarrhea? There's no fiber in that.
Do these people honestly not want something, anything, better? I know it's not "well this is cheaper I'm destitute" because I'm pretty poor myself and can afford to make something proper.

>>17980639
This would make sense were there not several different basic ways to cook an egg, and each way smells and tastes different.

>>17980611
>And you know what's really fucking hilarious? All the "red necks" that wore camo everywhere turned out to have the best god damn palates.
I agree with this; I was discussing all of these issues with a friend and they said (and I kind of agreed) that it was largely an Anglo thing. The US South has some of the best food I've ever had and not everyone there is black or Mexican, whites down there can cook too. But other Anglo-Americans cook the most bland stuff imaginable and they're the ones who are getting clowned on when people say "white people can't use seasoning" or "white people can't cook."

Generations of Americans that haven't had mothers at home cooking for them. They've learned to consider good food to be fast food, frozen food, and the lowest effort of home cooked food.
Just look at the general state of the board and the mystery unravels itself

>>17980612
same. worked at wawa for ages, cooked for parties/gatherings frequently and most people eat like toddlers. American toddlers.
>>17980617
Kind of has been happening in Korea and a lot of other nations as well, but those countries do a good job of teaching kids proper diet/nutrition and dining customs. How to prepare food, how to serve food, how to clean, all that jazz. Not everyone ends up learning how to make kimchi but it's expected that you should know or at least bother to be able to seek out good shit and not subsist on ramen noodles.
>>17980660
It is pretty bad in Black/Latino communities in North East metropolitan areas. Black mothers feeding their kids Ensure instead of real food, mexican 12 year olds lookin like samoan sumo wrestlers. Food culture in the states as a whole is fucked. I think food education has to start in the form of teaching kids how to make real ass food, and letting them know how affordable/convenient/delicious it can be.
>>17980661
I completely agree. Cereal is a treat, not a fucking meal. My toddler brain gf gushes over looking at instagram vids of korean hot dogs covered in french fries and wants to live off off cereal. It took so long for her to get used to me cooking pretty much every god damn meal for her, doing a shit ton of meal prep, and stop asking for fuckin mac n cheese and pizza. Like, her mom actually cooked for her as a kid but she still has the american girl mentality of wanting to eat out all the god damn
time and rather spending 20 bucks a week on wine and more eating out than spending that on getting better ingredients to cook with.

>>17980611
It seems like, a couple generations ago, people just stopped passing on knowledge of cooking to their children. Maybe the (literal) boomers thought that, with the advent of canned foods and refrigerated/frozen foods, cooking would become unnecessary and low-class.

>>17980660
Southerners ARE mainly Anglo (and Welsh/Scottish) descended. "American" is the most common ethnicity in the census in the south, probably because many families have been in America for so many generations they don't even remember. Whereas Midwesterners are more German/Scandinavian/Irish descended.

>>17980702
I remember finally having the funds and transportation to buy and cook pretty much anything that I wanted and feeling like I hit a milestone. What I ended up appreciating though, were all the core culinary experiences I had by living and workin in different cities in the states that helped me understand, in a home cooking sense, how different stuff worked, and how to cook without recipes.

Eating is such an integral part of people's lives and like pretty much anything worthwhile in America, it's honestly gatekept to an insane degree.

Here's my experience growing up, I think it's like this for most american kids
>2 garbage meals a day (breakfast is just eating a bunch of grains, lunch is whatever processed shit the school gives you).
>Dinner is the only time you eat something that has a chance of being good
>even then there's a chance it's just some processed shit like hotdogs, Mrs. T's pierogis, or grilled cheese.
>and otherwise it was usually just the same few old family recipe staple american foods over and over (In my own experience mom's cooking got way better once smartphones became a thing and she learned to find recipes online)
>and a lot of staple american dinners just don't have any vegetables in them
>and if there are vegetables, they are usually just thrown in a heap on the side of the plate instead of incorporated into the dish so you just associate vegetables as being the miserable part of the dinner before you can eat the real food
>and also there was a decent chance you just wouldn't like the dinner and just end up eating garbage like spaghettios or kid's cuisine instead
I eventually got over it because I'm fat and want to be able to eat as much food as possible, but most normal weight siblings still get disgusted if there's a chunk of onion in their food. And even then I'm still too picky to eat some common shit like shrimp, mollusks, or shiitake mushrooms.

>>17980713
Yeah that's why I said "other Anglo-Americans."

>>17980702
But yeah, being poor for quite some time also helped me understand how to cook with whole ingredients and less choice cuts of meat, including stuff like liver, shanks, chuck, and not having to resort to making a big stew and calling it a day.

Something I'd been doing since 2017ish was trying to recreate shit I've eaten, whether it's pork napa dumplings from chinatown in Busan, or a margherita pizza I had in Italy in 2001. It's insane how many memories food can unlock. I just wish I had more people in my life that had the same passion for cooking and eating.

Most my parents ever cooked was mashed potatoes from a bag. Everything else was deli, delivery, or frozen.

>>17980723
if we were friends, I'd make u the best fuckin shrimp cocktail, ebi furai, smoked conch served w/ beer, dried squid jerky, and shiitake fried rice. It's fun to cook for picky friends and have them over the course of months and years start eating stuff they thought they hated and the occasional seething looks I get from their parents.

like, fuck, if you wanted them to not be picky, maybe you should have made them real food. nigger.

>>17980601
judging = forming opinions

>>17980594
>I don't like tomatoes!
fellow American here, this one can be explained by tomatoes being one of the vegetables that doesn't transport well unless it's picked early as fuck thus tasteless as fuck. I was one of those people who thought raw tomatoes sucked until I grew some one summer just for something to do, and the difference between them and store bought tomatoes is night and day. It's one of the few vegetables that you're better off growing yourself instead of buying it at the store.

>>17980746
No, I understand this. I won't eat like non-canned tomatoes unless they're home grown or farm fresh. There's simply no point.
However, canned tomatoes (surprisingly) taste...acceptable at least. Not delectable, but decent enough to cook with.

>>17980737
>ebi furai
Would Probably like this, I just hate the way shrimp look
>dried squid jerky
oh fuck I forgot squid's are mollusks, nah I'm fine with squid just not the other ones

>>17980764
if u had the opportunity to shuck your own live oysters and eat them raw, you'd probably like them. Juicy, sweet, briny. Good oysters need no lime/lemon juice! Chase with some cold beers. And fuck, a well grilled octopus is fantastic. Tender, smoky, buttery, rich. Italians and Greeks make great fuckin octopus.

Speaking of how shrimp look, I had a disconnect between learning about mantis shrimp around middle school and actually having eaten them a couple times as a kid. I remember describing how cool they are to my grandparents and my grandma saying "you know you've eaten those right?". I put the dots together and had a weird dolly zoom moment of realizing that I'd eaten on a bunch of occasions the cool crustacean I thought I had just learned about through the Discovery channel.

I knew a kid who only ate carrots and celery. He was mid-functioning autistic though

>>17980750
>However, canned tomatoes (surprisingly) taste...acceptable at least
That's because unlike most fresh tomatoes, canned tomatoes are usually ripened in ideal conditions since the problem of shelf life is solved by the canning process.

how bad is this?

>>17981492
nah bitch go back to the other thread you accidentally posted this on and double down instead of bitching out and deleting

>>17981503
I posted in the wrong thread by accident, hence why this is a thread where it makes sense for this image to be in

>>17980612
how tf does other people having different palettes "exasperate" you? sounds like you have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, because of how much of a fag you are

Am I a picky eater?

>>17981588
>never ate ranch
how

>>17981597
I'm not American

>>17981604
It's decent, not the best salad dressing but a good dip for chicken tenders, celery, carrots, or other veggies

>>17980594
Americans in particular got used to eating highly processed ready-made food and many of them didn't eat much fresh vegetables in their childhood, which is why they're not used to it, but used to fast food and obesity
it has something to do with the 1950s shoving canned and ready-made food down everyone's throats

template for those who want it

>>17980594
>Furthermore, how can so many people survive on nothing but frozen, pre-prepared stuff?

I grew up on and am still living on frozen food nearly every night. I'm healthy, and an ok weight for my height and age, I don't get what you're complaining about. But also I'm Australian so I don't know if our frozen food is as bad as ameritards frozen food.

>>1798163>>17981633
just not the biggest seafood fan

I don't think I've ever had a food item I don't like in at least some form. There's some styles of preparation I dislike(for example, liver is terrible when overcooked), but for everything listed there's at least one dish utilizing it that I enjoy.

>>17981753
You never ate peanut butter?

>>17981817
It's not really a thing where I live. Or maybe it is, but still I don't personally recall ever seeing it anywhere.

>>17981492
>Blue cheese
>Snails

Like what the fuck? Is this meant to be a list of disgusting things? The only reason I avoid blue cheese is it's ridiculously strong, and as I say that as a guy who enjoys cheese that smells like feet. Never had snails but they look gross. Everything else on that list is bitchmode shit.

>>17980594
God, I worked at a place where the Karens got butthurt if anybody cooked broccoli, popcorn, and anything with onions. It is bad enough that the average person is a crybaby about fish smells. I got sick of avoiding eating normal fucking foods at work and just kept microwaving broccoli regardless because they couldn't do shit. Don't want coworkers and want to pretend you rule the office like it is your home, don't work.

>>17981850
Blue cheese can range from pretty mild to very strong, depending on the type. You might still enjoy something like gorgonzola even if the stronger blue cheeses taste too strong for your liking.

>>17980594
what you have to understand is that there's a lot of people that go through life without really thinking about what they're doing, but rather what they have to do next. they're too fixated on the future and the past so they waste the present away, not being able to enjoy simple pleasures like cooking and eating
this same issue is what prevents them from getting over their childhood traumas, which is why they hang on to their toddler-tier picky eating and fastfood loving

it's funny, pretty much every single issue humans suffer from is caused, at the root, by just not being aware of themselves.

>>17980594
My mom's friend was fed baby food until she was 5 I think. She won't eat a vast majority of foods, but at least she'll have a burger. She's on keto too now... she's dumb and weird but I love her anyway.
Anyway, America is/has been conditioned this way. It's annoying yes, but I can't blame or resent others for being brainwashed their whole life to be even more retarded than they originally started off. People are stupid, which allows them to become even more stupid. It's a vicious cycle handed down from the haves who control everything and gaslight you daily.

Basically, feminism, the war effort in WWII, television and American accessibility to refrigeration and freezers. Other countries didn't adopt fridges and freezers as quickly as the US and Canada did, so frozen ready meals weren't readily available nearly as early.
With men off the fight the war, women had to earn to keep the lights on, so off to work they went. Spending the day at work and coming home to relax with the TV for a short bit, spots in American televised programming bombarded viewers with the notions that cooking is hard and/or time consuming and Swanson frozen turkey dinners, Kelloggs corn flakes and Campbell's chicken noodle soup are the solution. So there's Mrs Sheeran, off to the Piggly Wiggly, to buy a week's supply of the stuff to feed Billy and Susie.
Well, it's 1946 now, Corporal Sheeran is back from the war and Edna doesn't want to give up her independence, even if the factory sacked her and gave her position to a returning private. So she continued to buy those ready meals, filling her time instead with gossip and cocktails.

While this social evolution has reached most countries and cultures these days, it was slow moving. What started in the US in the late 1930s didn't, for example, take hold in my country until the mid-to-late 60s.

>>17980594
Anime posters will be the first to get the rope.

>working food service
>making sandwiches
>"Can I have a Philly cheese steak?"
>get the premade steak out
>"Can I have it without onions?"
>"It comes with onions"
>forced to pick them out by hand
Like I'm not there anymore, wagie, wagie, etc. but this is just ludicrous.

>>17980594
To be fair on the broccoli point, members of the cabbage family release a very strong aroma when cooked that a fair percentage of the population finds objectionable...even if they eat broccoli!

>>17980594
Globohomo pan-culturalism destroys any semblence of self-actualization including things as small as passing recipes down from parent to child. Fast food replaced meals for many kids, so it's nostalgic and "normal". 70+hour work weeks make getting fast food "more convenient." On and on. It's been engineered.

>>17980594
I'm not a picky eater either but people freak out when I'm just not in the mood for something
like I'll order a sub with no tomatoes and the person at publix is like WHAT YOU DON'T LIKE TOMATOES????
I like them I just don't want them on everything I eat
same with pickles on burgers. I love pickles just not on a burger

>>17980594
>weeb is friends with children
Let me guess, you met them on discord?

>>17980702
>Maybe the (literal) boomers thought that, with the advent of canned foods and refrigerated/frozen foods, cooking would become unnecessary and low-class.
This is literally what happened. The US government had heavily invested in logistics to easily transport things across the country, and some of the things that was easily transported everywhere were canned and frozen goods.
Around the same time as the interstate projects were really taking off, microwaves became popular (late 60s). Companies were selling all kinds of gadgets to housewives, to "make their lives easier". If you were a fancy woman, you didn't need to cook your family meals, you could just nuke some frozen or canned foods in the microwave, stick the dishes in the dish washer, and spend the rest of the day relaxing - this is probably why boomer women are so fucking obnoxious and entitled, as a side-note.
The combination of the rise of food logistics and microwaves, coupled with just how aggressive American marketing is and how much "keeping up with the Joneses" is part of American suburban culture, led to a cultural shift away from home-cooked meals to easily heated processed foods.

>>17980594
eggs actually do make me nauseous
i thought i was just a dumb retard too but then i took a stomach sensitivity blood test and it said i was very highly sensitive to egg whites

not liking tomatoes or onions is fucking retard shit though

>>17980785
Hey I knew that kid too. One time he shaved his eyebrows off for like fifteen bucks. He went on to be some kinda math genius.

>>17981753
Thanks doc