← Back to context

Comment by socalgal2

2 days ago

Few ingredients is code for white people’s ideas of food.

Example: Curry has and average of 10-15 ingredients. Malaysian 15-20. Thai: 15–20. China: 10–16. Indonesia: 20–25. Mexican Moles 20-30. Etc…..

note: I expect this is unintentional. The authors of the new recommendations think more ingredients = processed. But it still ends up being an accidental judgement against other cultures.

Indonesia — 20–25

Malaysia — 15–20

Thailand — 15–20

India — 12–18

Mexico — 12–18

Ethiopia — 14–18

China — 10–16

Vietnam — 10–16

Morocco — 10–15

South Korea — 10–15

Italy — 4–7

Japan — 5–8

France — 6–9

Spain — 5–9

Greece — 6–10

United Kingdom — 5–9

Germany — 5–9

Austria — 5–9

Switzerland — 5–9

2 comments

socalgal2

Reply
maerF0x0  2 days ago

It's an interesting point. I would suggest the its kinda recursive.

Good food ingredients are those which are or composed of Good food ingredients.

We can intuitively realize that A salad composed of Tomatoes, lettuce, radish, kale, cucumber, figs etc is at least as good as just eating Tomatoes. But each of those ingredients is a simple good food. IMO the issue is fractionation and concentration (and is weighted by dose). Corn on the cob, good. Corn syrup, bad.

Lots of the traditional dishes from the places you mentioned would be using very whole foods. Like a traditional, non industrial, mole is pretty much a gravy/sauce of very nutrition whole foods. But it's notable there is a highly processed equivalent in a jar.

Michael Pollan interestingly noted that when people cook food for themselves more or less from scratch they usually default to high quality whole foods because we often cannot make the low quality ultra-processed food in our own homes, they can only be made with industrial/factory equipment.