8/20/2018 0 Comments The role of Spices—the PresentIn another blog post I talked about how the cultural difference in the usage and prevalence of spices may be partly accounted by the original region of growing spices and the history of spices. That may only be part of the story because, as the world is becoming increasingly globalized and modernized, transportation of goods from different regions is more frequent, more expeditious, and less costly than ever. Today in most industrialized societies you can easily buy spices from all over the world, not only from grocery stores, but also online. If people in Western cultures have just as easy access to spices as people from Asian cultures, why is it still the case that spices are not used as much in Western cuisines?
I imagine there might be two reasons. On one hand, the past shapes the present in that our tastes are greatly influenced by the foods we used to eat when we were kids. What we ate as kids were most likely foods that our parents cooked often, or foods that were readily available in the culture that we grew up in. I don’t mean that people’s tastes never change (sometimes they do—one of my friends had never eaten any spicy food as a kid since his mom has no tolerance for spiciness, yet he grew up to be so fond of spicy food that he happily devoured the top 3 spiciest ramen in the world!!), but tastes are not randomly formed. If you think about the type of food you like today, and compare them with the food you usually ate in your childhood, you may find a lot of overlap. In other words, our tongue may “remember” a certain taste and be used to it. The taste associated with childhood brings a sense of nostalgia and comfort, enticing us to go back to it again and again. So what does this mean? It means that although most people in Western cultures do get a lot more access to a variety of spices nowadays, if their tongues have not been used to these spices when they were younger (because their parents didn’t use these spices; and their parents didn’t use these spices because their grandparents didn’t, so on and so forth), they are less likely to truly enjoy the spices and have emotional attachment to them. The spices may still feel exotic to them, despite the fact that they can find it in the same grocery store that they frequent. If my above analysis is valid, then we will probably see this cultural difference in spice usage persists for some time, but the difference may be diminishing over time due to more open-minded young generations. On the other hand, I have a bold hypothesis: is it possible that the different cuisines in Western cultures and Asian cultures actually ask for different levels of spices? Many Asian cultures have long histories of agriculture, and agriculture is main source of food. In these societies, due to the availability of different food, the cuisines are composed of a small amount of meat (usually cut into small pieces) and a large amount of different types of vegetables, as well as starch (e.g. rice, noodles). Most vegetables have a slightly bitter-ish taste, and small pieces of meat tend not to be very flavorful by itself, so cooks in Asian cultures need to add spices to both weaken the unpleasant taste of the ingredients, as well as enhancing the good taste to make the dish palatable. Starchy food is usually plain, so spices are added or combined with other ingredients to make sauces that add flavor to the dish. In contrary, Western cuisines boast of cooking relatively larger cuts of meat as a whole, such as roast or steak, partly because the herding cultures provided more access to meat. These dishes are already flavorful by themselves—a top-quality steak in a fancy steakhouse requires no seasoning other than a little bit of salt and pepper, and it does taste very good, a rich flavor difficult to concoct with spices. I have even heard that people of Western heritage tend to have more sensitive palate for meats since their taste buds are used to detect subtle differences in different meats, so maybe Westerners even enjoy steaks more than people who are not used to eating steaks? What is your opinion on this?
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