Restaurant food (split from Heat Regulation - Obesity)

[studiot]

3 hours ago, CharonY said:

It depends on where you are, I think. Some restaurants have to have their ingredients delivered by specialized importers. While things are a bit easier specific seafood and certain vegetables can be  rather tricky to get in high quality. Then there are of course specialized items soy sauces from specific brewers which you might not find in regular grocery stores and so on. There is also the topic of authenticity which often boils down to local family traditions (hence the cultural aspects) which sometimes is not well captured based on recipes you find. Also, certain dishes take a really long time to prepare and/or require specialized equipment. Not a knock on your wife, but contrary to what I stated earlier, when we go away from general cooking and are talking about specialties, there is often a skill gap due to preparing and optimizing dishes over years. 

Well I have yet to see anyone in England that can make a half ways decent paprikash or goulash -  or even know the difference  - except my late mother.

I only wish I could do better than come near her standard.  And then her bannocks. I have never been able to replicate those.

[John Cuthber]

5 hours ago, studiot said:

And  I have never poisoned anyone, unlike some self styled high class establishments.

To be fair, that's a population size bias.

[Lee0110]

On 3/2/2023 at 5:43 PM, Michael McMahon said:

Restaurant food is cooked by a professional and might always taste nicer than home food. As such ordering healthy food in restaurants would make it easier to eat healthier at home. There's no harm in the odd indulgence in fast food at restaurants. Yet ordering too many burgers at restaurants would then make fast food more tempting for home dishes. The dilemma is that restaurants can be seen as a form of recreation if someone eats out seldomly. Yet there might be more reward to choose heathy dishes from the menu for those who eat out rarely. I've tried to desensitise myself to porridge through jams and fruit by ordering it frequently for breakfast at a restaurant:

mmmm it looks so delicious. 

[Michael McMahon]

A fresher raspberry jam!

[Michael McMahon]

I often have glasses of juice but only recently did I drink a 1 litre carton of juice in one sitting. It’s possible to drink too much sugary juice when the real fruit is meant to be healthier. Nonetheless juice isn’t as bad as chocolate where some people need to make their own decisions. For example I decided to cut down on cream in hot chocolates and desserts by simply drinking a 1 litre carton of milk more often over a few minutes. After all French people can spend hours to ingest a difficult dinner!

Edited May 30, 2023 by Michael McMahon

[exchemist]

26 minutes ago, Michael McMahon said:

I often have glasses of juice but only recently did I drink a 1 litre carton of juice in one sitting. It’s possible to drink too much sugary juice when the real fruit is meant to be healthier. Nonetheless juice isn’t as bad as chocolate where some people need to make their own decisions. For example I decided to cut down on cream in hot chocolates and desserts by simply drinking a 1 litre carton of milk more often over a few minutes. After all French people can spend hours to ingest a difficult dinner!

That's because French dinners are social occasions. They don't eat that much, generally. In fact, one benefit of that style is that there is plenty of time for one's system to react and send a signal when you have had enough. (My late wife was French, so I have some experience of family gatherings.)

I understand that one factor in obesity can be the bad habit of wolfing down food very quickly, as it takes time for the body to react to the amount of food consumed and send a "full" signal. So if one eats fast, one runs the risk of overeating. A slow succession of small courses, in which ones chooses how much of each to take, is far better from that point of view. I doubt that anyone in France (apart, perhaps from Obelix, who is no role model) would drink a whole litre of milk in a few minutes. It would be thought rather barbarous, I suspect.  

The French are a lot slimmer than the Americans -  or the British.

Edited May 30, 2023 by exchemist

[Michael McMahon]

On 5/30/2023 at 7:27 PM, exchemist said:

I doubt that anyone in France (apart, perhaps from Obelix, who is no role model) would drink a whole litre of milk in a few minutes. It would be thought rather barbarous, I suspect.

One option is to diversify your drinks if you’re drinking a litre of one type each day. For example you could drink a litre of apple juice one day and then choose orange juice the next to avoid being addicted to apple juice. After all they say the hard fruit is much better for fibre where as juices can concentrate the sugary part of fruit too much. Likewise you could intermittently drink a litre of soy milk instead of the customary cow’s milk. 

[exchemist]

29 minutes ago, Michael McMahon said:

One option is to diversify your drinks if you’re drinking a litre of one type each day. For example you could drink a litre of apple juice one day and then choose orange juice the next to avoid being addicted to apple juice. After all they say the hard fruit is much better for fibre where as juices can concentrate the sugary part of fruit too much. Likewise you could intermittently drink a litre of soy milk instead of the customary cow’s milk. 

Many Englishmen get through a litre  or more of tea each day, of course. But not in one go.

[Michael McMahon]

On 6/3/2023 at 6:36 PM, exchemist said:

Many Englishmen get through a litre  or more of tea each day, of course. But not in one go.

The way developed countries have access to an unlimited diet can reveal their ethics. For example obesity isn’t evil but it’s not always very ethical either. So our food choice might betray limitations in our ethical system. For example honey is an old-fashioned treat that makes you feel slightly healthy from its nutrients in spite of blatant indulgence in its sugar content. Hence honey is an amoral food source. I remember a child’s book about God making bees and the devil making wasps. As such honey is really ethical only if you were really devout about lesser evils in a food chain. Yet few people who pour honey onto their cereal are spiritual enough to thank the bees indicating that they’re not as ethical as they might believe themselves to be. Honey is so complicated in its texture that no artificial sweet could ever match it without requiring lots of artificially intelligent insects. Likewise a resistance to eating sweetcorn can betray an obsession about food. Sweetcorn is so passive and repetitive that it doesn’t distract you when you’re eating it. As such you can read the newspaper while eating sweetcorn and maintain the same focus. By contrast chocolate is too possessive of your attention no matter how delicious the taste is. So the way food can reflect hedonism in an ethical system is indirect. For example slightly overweight people can appear indulgent to thin people while obese people in turn can appear very indulgent to slightly overweight people. As such the differences in mindsets has to be understood in relative terms. 

Overweight people can try to normalise their heavy diet whereas obese people can try to exaggerate their diet as a form of self-deprecation. As such some physiques aren’t romantically attractive to other physiques when one could be an absurdist disproof of the other. The way obese people can sometimes lose all of their weight in a diet means it can be all or nothing. Turkish delight mimics honey in allowing you to feel tolerable for a slightly fruity taste in spite of a sweet tooth. By contrast buying a big bar of chocolate means you don’t want to conceal any bad habits as a form of humility. 

A classic oversight is to eat a lot of meat for protein in spite of not being very muscular. By rights you should grow muscle in the gym first and only afterwards should you worry about maintaining your muscle size with more protein. Hence a healthy diet needs to be in proportion to your muscularity. For example Chinese people are very thin and industrious where eating syrupy Chinese food very frequently would only work for a thin European who exercises a lot. 

Edited June 8, 2023 by Michael McMahon

[Phi for All]

3 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

The way developed countries have access to an unlimited diet can reveal their ethics. For example obesity isn’t evil but it’s not always very ethical either. So our food choice might betray limitations in our ethical system. For example honey is an old-fashioned treat that makes you feel slightly healthy from its nutrients in spite of blatant indulgence in its sugar content. Hence honey is an amoral food source.

I know this is the Lounge, but you're making a LOT of assumptions here that deserve to be challenged. I'm not really interested in how you arrived at "honey is an amoral food source", I just know that it's not something that should be posted on a science discussion forum as if it's a fact.

3 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

Yet few people who pour honey onto their cereal are spiritual enough to thank the bees indicating that they’re not as ethical as they might believe themselves to be.

If you don't have a link to a study, or at least some reason to link bee-thanking to ethics, statements like this are anecdotal at best.

3 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

Honey is so complicated in its texture that no artificial sweet could ever match it without requiring lots of artificially intelligent insects.

Are you trying to link insect intelligence to the taste of honey?

3 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

Likewise a resistance to eating sweetcorn can betray an obsession about food. Sweetcorn is so passive and repetitive that it doesn’t distract you when you’re eating it. As such you can read the newspaper while eating sweetcorn and maintain the same focus.

Are you playing with ChatGPT, or are you using some kind of translation software?

 

[Michael McMahon]

I’m often stuck for time where boiling whole potatoes can take too long. So I decided to peel my potatoes like wedges instead. Potatoes can often feel too hard so I created the opposite problem of overly watery potatoes as if they were greasy chips!

[exchemist]

15 minutes ago, Michael McMahon said:

I’m often stuck for time where boiling whole potatoes can take too long. So I decided to peel my potatoes like wedges instead. Potatoes can often feel too hard so I created the opposite problem of overly watery potatoes as if they were greasy chips!

Oh dear. You really have no idea what you are doing in the kitchen, have you? Potatoes take 25-30 mins to cook. If you don't have time for that, cook rice or pasta instead. I usually steam large potatoes, to avoid the risk of them disintegrating. Small ones are safe to boil. But one point I agree with you: they are best cooked in their skins. The skins add flavour, and nutrition, supposedly. I always leave the skins in when I make mashed potatoes.  

[Michael McMahon]

I usually run out of milk for the last cup so I decided to even it out by pouring the whole jug of milk into the teapot(!):

Tea is good for diluting milk because pure milk can become too heavy over time. For example I might have over-drank milk in the past few months by having too many whole litre sessions! For example when I used to eat lots of cream I eventually tried to eat a carton of cream only to realise that it can be stale by itself. It takes a lot longer to realise that ingesting lots of calcium in milk won’t reverse the ageing process. Perhaps a combination of my recent pain from emerging wisdom teeth followed by a wild diet and an older age of 28 made me feel an almost alkaline taste from excessive milk quantities that deterred me drinking more. Hence overeating can actually help you eat less when stomach aches can be a deterrent much as hangovers would be for binge drinking. Yet eating a food source to exhaustion can be a big gamble if you fail to feel stressed. 

[TheVat]

Milk is not so great for humans.  It's for baby cows.  It's murder on the prostate, blocks absorption of iron, has a fermentable oligosaccharide that gets harder to digest in middle age (or never is digested well), sours the breath, amps up some allergies, and increases lethargy.  Pretty much all the nice stuff you hear about milk is sponsored by the dairy industry.  I know a fair number of singers and they tend to avoid milk, though the common belief that it weakens the voice may be more anecdotal than factual.  (it has been my experience, too)

Calcium absorption is better effected by eating leafy greens whose vitamin K content helps metabolize the calcium.  Combine with a non-dairy milk like Ripple or Silk, and anyone can try non-dairy to see if it benefits, without concern about losing calcium.

I suppose I take too much pleasure in dissing milk, but it's a reaction to the way Big Agri pushes it at you relentlessly in my country.  

 

 

 

 

[Genady]

15 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Milk is not so great for humans.  It's for baby cows.  It's murder on the prostate, blocks absorption of iron, has a fermentable oligosaccharide that gets harder to digest in middle age (or never is digested well), sours the breath, amps up some allergies, and increases lethargy.  Pretty much all the nice stuff you hear about milk is sponsored by the dairy industry.  I know a fair number of singers and they tend to avoid milk, though the common belief that it weakens the voice may be more anecdotal than factual.  (it has been my experience, too)

Calcium absorption is better effected by eating leafy greens whose vitamin K content helps metabolize the calcium.  Combine with a non-dairy milk like Ripple or Silk, and anyone can try non-dairy to see if it benefits, without concern about losing calcium.

I suppose I take too much pleasure in dissing milk, but it's a reaction to the way Big Agri pushes it at you relentlessly in my country.  

 

 

 

 

Oh, such a pleasant read for somebody who cannot eat any dairy and who grew up in a greens eating culture. Thank you!

[exchemist]

42 minutes ago, TheVat said:

Milk is not so great for humans.  It's for baby cows.  It's murder on the prostate, blocks absorption of iron, has a fermentable oligosaccharide that gets harder to digest in middle age (or never is digested well), sours the breath, amps up some allergies, and increases lethargy.  Pretty much all the nice stuff you hear about milk is sponsored by the dairy industry.  I know a fair number of singers and they tend to avoid milk, though the common belief that it weakens the voice may be more anecdotal than factual.  (it has been my experience, too)

Calcium absorption is better effected by eating leafy greens whose vitamin K content helps metabolize the calcium.  Combine with a non-dairy milk like Ripple or Silk, and anyone can try non-dairy to see if it benefits, without concern about losing calcium.

I suppose I take too much pleasure in dissing milk, but it's a reaction to the way Big Agri pushes it at you relentlessly in my country.  

 

 

 

 

I hadn't heard about the prostate. What does milk do to it? As a 69yr old man, I have an interest in this. 

[zapatos]

1 hour ago, TheVat said:

Milk is not so great for humans. 

But it is Sooooo good!

I buy milk two gallons at a time and my wife only drinks it in coffee or with the occasional bowl of cereal. Plus cheese, yogurt, ice cream... Maybe I have a dairy problem! 😀

Everything I've read about it suggests it is neither all that great nor all that bad.

[TheVat]

15 hours ago, exchemist said:

I hadn't heard about the prostate. What does milk do to it? As a 69yr old man, I have an interest in this. 

Well, there have been studies like this one

https://news.llu.edu/research/new-study-associates-intake-of-dairy-milk-with-greater-risk-of-prostate-cancer

and other research, summarized here

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8255404/

and then the usual agglomeration of anecdotes (from me, and others I've talked with, including my papa) that dairy consumption seems to tighten the flow a bit.  

I've also heard some (possibly flawed) reports on casein, the main protein in milk), as a possible inflammatory factor for some people who are prone to autoimmune issues.

I get the feeling this is all dependent on body chemistry and not necessarily a problem for everyone.  Like a lot of these food warnings, you can experiment with it, making sure to just change the one thing in your diet and nothing else, see what happens.  Placebo effect is definitely a factor, too.

15 hours ago, zapatos said:

But it is Sooooo good!

I buy milk two gallons at a time and my wife only drinks it in coffee or with the occasional bowl of cereal. Plus cheese, yogurt, ice cream... Maybe I have a dairy problem! 😀

Everything I've read about it suggests it is neither all that great nor all that bad.

It is delicious.  I still indulge in some cheese.  Gotta have the parmesan when there's pasta.  LOL "dairy problem."  As I said, if it works with your system, and the river flows freely, you might be among the fortunate.

16 hours ago, Genady said:

Oh, such a pleasant read for somebody who cannot eat any dairy and who grew up in a greens eating culture. Thank you!

YW.  Who really needs cow mucus, anyway?  The Cro-Magnons did just fine without it.  😀

[Michael McMahon]

On 6/18/2023 at 9:24 PM, TheVat said:

I suppose I take too much pleasure in dissing milk, but it's a reaction to the way Big Agri pushes it at you relentlessly in my country.  

Maybe once you reach older adulthood then the older you become the more greasy foods can leave a harsher aftertaste. In other words an elderly person’s stomach isn’t as effective as a young person’s stomach. Hence healthy eating as a child is great preparation for older adulthood when by that age you might not have a choice but to eat more healthily!

[Peterkin]

On 6/19/2023 at 9:11 AM, TheVat said:

I get the feeling this is all dependent on body chemistry and not necessarily a problem for everyone

It never used to be a problem for me when younger. At brunch buffets I'd feast on practically nothing but the breads and cheeses and my favourite restaurant meal was linguini Alferdo. I did figure out a moderately skinny version that's not bad.

Now I have to be careful of the quantity and kind: okay to put three slices of processed on the macaroni, but only two fingers of the real cheddar; 1% milk for cereal is fine. Otherwise, I get terrible heartburn. 

2 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

Maybe once you reach older adulthood then the older you become the more greasy foods can leave a harsher aftertaste.

In my experience the taste is unaffected by what happens in the stomach. More's the pity - I still like the taste! The pain comes an hour or two later.

But I don't think it's about fat content, either: I get the same reaction to some vegetables: cabbage is dangerous; onion, pepper and tomato are impossible.

Edited June 20, 2023 by Peterkin

[Michael McMahon]

47 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

In my experience the taste is unaffected by what happens in the stomach. More's the pity - I still like the taste! The pain comes an hour or two later.

But I don't think it's about fat content, either: I get the same reaction to some vegetables: cabbage is dangerous; onion, pepper and tomato are impossible.

Food not only serves a metabolic function but also a neurological function in recreation. Our choice of food has an artistic quality that can aid our creativity. Hence the way taste can change for the same food type relates to the function of consciousness. Our psyches are distinct from one another meaning some people will disagree about when a fruit is most ripe. Some people find old milk nice and creamy whereas others find milk close to the sell-by date to be stale. Another factor is that to consume a lot of a food type means that it has to be in optimal condition. Hence to drink a lot of milk on a daily basis might mean that it has to be fresh. Perhaps your subconscious gives you more leeway to eat poorer quality food if you don’t eat it too often. For instance I always find cardboard containers of milk taste slightly nicer than plastic containers. I can drink from the odd plastic carton but if I drank it constantly then I might consume too many toxins. Hence each of our conscious minds is a specialist at our own diet. There’s no objective way to rate chefs where the taste of food relates to our own beliefs in asceticism and indulgence. A well-baked pain-aux-raison is nice only relative to someone who didn’t want to meditate on healthier ingredients or who didn’t want to glorify the dish with a sweeter taste! The value of expensive wines or of michelen star restaurants depends on the state-of-mind you seek to achieve. For example tea in a café might taste better than tea at home simply because you’re surrounded by so many acquaintances. 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Michael McMahon

[Peterkin]

7 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

Food not only serves a metabolic function but also a neurological function in recreation.

**SIGH!** If only! My taste buds were run over by radiation treatments some years ago. Some regained consciousness but lost their memory; some have changed, many are gone forever. That's why I mourn any food I can still enjoy tasting, but shouldn't eat because they'll hurt me later.

I know what you mean, though.

"Does this taste slightly off to you?"

"It does now!"

Edited June 20, 2023 by Peterkin

[Michael McMahon]

We are sometimes told to eat up all of our dinner in light of people starving in Africa yet we don’t owe such ethics to sweets where we need only eat half a packet of crisps!

[Genady]

Food is an important element in building the human body.

[Peterkin]

8 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

We are sometimes told to eat up all of our dinner in light of people starving in Africa

Children are told that because they need it brought to their attention that nutritious food, and its ready availability, is the privilege not afforded to all the people in the world; that it should be appreciated and valued, not despised and wasted. (I think a lot of adults in well-off countries need to be reminded!)

 

8 hours ago, Michael McMahon said:

we don’t owe such ethics to sweets where we need only eat half a packet of crisps!

No -  it's quite all right to indulge less in the foods that make us fat and ill.