Nattō is associated with both health/wellness food culture, which as we all know has fascistic roots and is associated with ideas of purity and national strength.
Further reenforcing this is that Nattō is considered a food only Japanese people like, a pillar (albiet a minor one) of ethnonational identity. Consider: 30% of people who eat it do not enjoy it but instead eat it based on aformentioned health reasons[1]. Offering nattō to people in order to see their repulsed reactions is an act of humiliation, reenforcing the superiority of the Japanese character and identifying an out-group.
Anyway it’s ok, a little mild. More stale coffee than cheese, I keep craving it though and am now fermenting my own
For me just learning about the ways different Chinese cuisines use sauces (so many sauces!) and fry/cook/broil veggies in it totally changed how I relate to food compared to “boil bland ass veggies and consume and if you don’t like it add butter and salt” that seems to be the middle American go to forever.
It’s so fucking wild, like I work healthcare and I’ve gotten cases of people especially elderly parents being given GLP meds by their fuckin’ kids or friends without a prescription. This isn’t even bringing up the peeps just doping themselves with what amounts to be bathtub growth hormones like BPC-157 that seems to be a compounding factor in cancer cell growth when used unregulated. More and more I wonder if instead of cybernetic freak shows we’ll just live to see horrible biological modding with the risk of becoming a walking tumor.
Hell yeah, I’ve been vegetarian and then vegan most of my life but I’m always learning new stuff. I got this book: https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-vegan-chinese-kitchen-9780593139707 and have found it really useful for learning lots of fast ways to prepare tasty greens. Prior to learning more chinese food I tended to go more 1 pot type meals but this whole style of blanch or rapid fry some veg with an often quite simple sauce is a really great way to get more of whatever is growing/in season in your diet. Especially with foraging weeds (dandelions and milk thistle are easy to ID and quite tasty, beware anywhere where poison might be sprayed or road runoff heavily present) I can often pick some greens on my way back from the grocer and whip up something pretty decent with a little ginger, garlic, and vinegar to accompany whatever.
I have always been pro people experimenting with their bodies in an informed way, and when I was younger played around with psychedelics and “nootropics” with well established safety records (actually interestingly when I tried piracetam (no noted cognitive metric changes) I did get the ability to visualise pictures for the first time in my life, and learned people weren’t being metaphorical when they said they could). The thing is this shit is replicating the worst of people messing around with RCs or impossible to assess “stacks” but it’s so much more mainstream and so much more likely to mess you up in difficult to detect or sudden ways. I mean most are injected, and for suuuuuure I do not trust that the preparations are safe and users have good practice.
Loss of expert trust has been devo, I reckon a lot of this peptide shit comes via the research the cosmetic industry is pumping, and labs selling off their excess production capabilities on the grey/black market. If any industry is going to convince people to turn themselves into piles of cancer it’s that last bastion of pure snake oil.
My fav easy go to meal is rice cooker meals you can just dump and cook for the day, especially if you do it before heading out to work and so have lunch and dinner ready to go. Nettles are another great readily available green that you can actually grow a ton of easily in a sizeable pot on a balcony (makes a great soup addition after it’s been boiled then blanched properly).
Yeah same stance when it comes to a variety of various psychedelics and supplements, but I fear this is more of an overall regression in societal use of accepted medical pathways and instead into full on internet scam bait. A big factor is how bad the anti covid screed led to overall decline in trusting medical officials, and now our own HHS and CDC are led by nepos and fools. It’s why you have people praying they found the wellspring of eternity and will willfully give medications or supplements to their loved ones that no sane practitioner would ever prescribed or advise to take.