Comment on This is real
FishFace@lemmy.world 1 day ago“asian food” covers billions of people from hundreds of cultures across dozens of countries. I am not convinced that reducing to it in this way is especially productive.
Some ingredients do carry more than others, but like… garlic is one of them. Or bacon. No-one should feel like they need to take special measures to prevent people from smelling perfectly ordinary food, because to do so is an unreasonable imposition on day-to-day activities. Why should I have to keep my steamed-up windows closed so that someone walking by can be protected from the scourge of cumin?
There are super-stinky foods that this doesn’t apply to, recognised even in the cultures which consume them as especially smelly and warranting special treatment, but “asian food” is way too broad to be that. And when it’s imposed by one culture on another it starts to sound discriminatory to me.
Do they not feel a bit weird broadcasting what they’re eating to the entire neighborhood?
No.
It’s kinda like those crazies that play videos on speaker on transport. It never even crossed my mind since childhood to use headphones to not disrupt others - the primary motivation was always that randoms have no business knowing what I listen to.
That’s weird. It’s definitely more important not to disturb people with what you’re listening to. It’s also much easier to keep the volume down with earphones than it is to keep smells confined, and much more disruptive - I never found it difficult to sleep or hold a conversation or concentrate because I could smell soy sauce.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 hours ago
What a weird hill to die on.
Of course if I’m cooking so much it steams up my windows (wtf are you cooking), I try to manage the smell because I should not impose a smell on my fellow man.
Do you not wear deodorant too, because it’s in your “culture”? Ew.
Most importantly I do not want others to know what I’m eating. It’s not information I choose to share because of a fundamental basic desire for privacy, for the same reason I wouldn’t want others to hear the music in listening to, videos i’m watching, or read my thoughts or feel my emotions unless I chose to share it with them in the way I choose to share it (words of deliberate communication).
If I was going out of my way to eat something unusually super stinky and weird like garlic containing foods, or asian food, especially Indian & Chinese, where e.g. a letting agent once showed me a flat that was reduced rent because it smelled like instant ramen because someone ate it all the time there, I would be mindful of the smell it generates because to me the past resident will forever be “ramen guy” and in the unlikely event we ever met, I highly doubt that’s how he wants to be known, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be known as that or for any food I eat or information I don’t deliberately share.
Yeah, so when asian food in the west is imposed upon westerners and other immigrants who are happy to integrate with western culture by immigrants who are not, it’s a-okay, but me asking for reasonable adjustments is “oppression”?
Lol what the fuck. I never thought I’d be arguing for what feels like a right-wing viewpoint, but come on, surely you can see how this is absurd? When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
FYI: A survey in the UK found most asian takeaway is consumed by right-wing voters.
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Then we can never understand each other. If you lack the fundamental desire for privacy, from which a “treat others as you’d like to be treated” idea easily follows, thinking that maybe you shouldn’t be stinking up the street so everyone knows what you’re eating at all times, then our differences are irreconcilable and I could not begin to imagine how to even communicate with you, it is simply inconceivable.
FishFace@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
lol enjoy your unseasoned boiled wheat, troll
Brits are using on average 250 cloves of garlic per year. If you genuinely think it’s weird and are not making a weird troll attempt here, I’m afraid you’re the weird one. I guess that’s weird either way.
Demanding that everyone who comes to your country either stops cooking the food they grew up eating or keeps it a secret is not reasonable, and is oppressive. When I lived in a foreign country, I didn’t stop cooking my home country’s food; indeed, I shared it with my new friends in that country and we all enjoyed the experience. (No doubt this violation of my own privacy is strange to you…)
Most people in the UK are right wing by voting intention. What’s your point with this?
Those two things are completely unconnected. Treat others as you’d like to be treated is a moral fundamental; it does not follow from a desire for privacy. A desire for privacy follows from a selfish (but entirely legitimate) desire not to suffer consequences for personal choices that don’t affect others.
I don’t want to be punched in the face, so I don’t punch other people in the face. But there are no privacy implications of being punched in the face.
If someone looks over my shoulder at what’s on my phone and sees I’m listening to Abba, that’s an intrusion into my privacy, but the person hasn’t suffered anything that I wouldn’t wish on myself.
So as I said, these are completely separate, unrelated concepts.
This is extremely far from normal. We’re social creatures.
I’m wondering if you’re autistic - it would explain an aversion to strong sensory experiences like smelling garlic, and to social interactions that are normal to most others.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
Isn’t unseasoned grains boiled in water more of an asia thing, like rice?
But yet I’ve never heard a single Brit using so much garlic it stinks in the next apartment over, nor steams up their windows as you implied lol.
I did not make such a demand, I said manage any unusual smells you emit. You need to chill out, I eat my country of origin’s food too, I just make sure that if it’s smelly, like say sardines or something, I dont leave it out or make so much of it that it disturbs my neighbours.
Do you not understand the difference between friends and family - willing participants, and strangers, like random neighbours or passers-by on the street you don’t own?
Because consent is everything, the former are willing participants, the latter are not.
Why do you want random strangers to know what you ate?
Hence the analogy, it’s the same question as why would you want others to know what you’re watching by blasting video on speaker on the bus?
Yeah newsflash dumbass, I also share my country of origin’s food with my friends and family and they also love it. I’m not so sure my neighbours or random strangers would love it if I threw it in their face or made the neighborhood smell like it.
My point is that you accused me of oppression by demanding you hide your culture, a right-wing viewpoint which I did not state and do not advocate for.
I do support diversity - a left-wing viewpoint - but I also support courtesy, and in this instance the two are seemingly at odds, and I’m forced to pick and defend the courtesy.
I’ve seen people in the past assume that my dislike of some asian food is indication of right-wing beliefs. I linked the survey that suggests - statistically it is not so.
While yes, to an extent this is just a survey of popularity of takeaways generally, that explanation doesn’t account for the entire difference nor the variance between choices. If it was just a popularity of takeaways contest or general popularity of the political parties, all of the bar charts would have the same order.
It doesn’t account for the variance in order, e.g. Labour is currently second in voting intention, but on the chippy graph it is third, after Tories, and first on the pizza graph.
Idk, for me fundamentally treating others as you’d like to be treated is about the social contract of tolerance - which is about not bothering anyone for their innate characteristics, to me if you follow the line of thought then “bother” can be defined as disruption and interference on top of outright obvious discrimination, and that includes emitting uncontrolled amounts of disruptive smells on unconsenting unsuspecting others.
It is less severe than punching someone in the face, or being punched in the face, but it is not categorically different, if that makes sense.
You’ve got it the wrong way around:
If I look over your shoulder at what’s on your phone, and see you listen to Abba, I’m intruding your privacy.
I shouldn’t do this, because I don’t want for you to look over my shoulder and see that I’m listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s underrated album “Time” and looking kinda sad when “Ticket to the Moon” comes on.
If you do so accidentally, on say packed public transport, it’s okay, but we as a society should strive to eliminate this sort of overcrowding, IMO.
It’s the same as me being forced to smell your BO. I do not want it. I do not consent to it. Wear deodorant, and I will as well.
Basic stuff, frankly.
No. They are intrinsically connected, as I said.
Both are ultimately stemming from a desire to be left alone.
This is a bioessentialist broad generalisation that doesn’t hold true when you consider how many people hate places that have many people.
I’d even go as far as to say that maybe we are social creatures in a world of like 4 million humans, not 8 billion humans.
You don’t know me or know anything about me, you either misunderstood what I wrote - like you implying I’m telling you to hide your culture when I said nothing of the sort.
Or:
We have a fundamental disconnect that we cannot reconcile - like you implying that strangers and friends are even remotely comparable.
Notice how I never accused you of engaging in bad faith, being a troll or attempted to diagnose you with mental illness.
I don’t make assumptions of bad faith about random internet strangers and I’d appreciate it if you did the same, thanks.
FishFace@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
It sounds like you are not, in fact, constructing “don’t be horrible to people” as an imperative following from privacy, after all. Privacy is fundamentally about ensuring that other people cannot know what I’m doing, even if they want to. What we are talking about is ensuring that other people do not sense what I am doing because they may not want to. A violation of the former case harms me, but a violation of the latter case harms them. You’re right to pick up on the consent of the stranger looking over my shoulder; the consent of the person sensing the impact is irrelevant in the case of privacy, but it is everything in the case of “don’t bother other people.” So let’s come back to your analogy:
I don’t care if random strangers know what I ate. And as a privacy matter, that’s the end of it. Privacy concerns don’t exist if the person whose information it is consents to its release. I may care if they know what I’m listening to, because I think they’d be more likely to judge me for what I’m listening to. But if I agree to them finding that out, it’s not a privacy concern at all. To extend the privacy argument: what business is it of yours why I want other people to know what I’m listening to? That’s not what you’re really concerned by. Really, you’re concerned with me annoying random strangers. And my consent to annoying strangers is irrelevant; it’s them who are being annoyed, they who must consent.
The reason I interpret what you’re saying as discriminatory is because, as I already referred to, there are situations where it is not practical to keep your cooking smells hermetically sealed inside your own dwelling. Steaming up the windows is not a matter of how much garlic you’re cooking, but how much water vapour is getting emitted from what you’re cooking and how well ventilated the kitchen is - and any ventilation to let the humid air out lets out the smell of what you’re cooking as well.
I don’t disagree that there is a general principle that we shouldn’t cause other people to smell stuff, but this principle is incompatible with other principles, such as keeping a comfortable level of humidity and eating where it’s convenient (such as in public). The principle of don’t-make-people-smell-stuff should rightly be considered to be very far down the list of principles’ priorities when deciding which principle wins out, because causing someone to smell garlic is just not a big deal. It’s not a foul smell (like fart gas) so it doesn’t cause a big impact. In contrast, having to bottle up humid cooking air inside your home makes it uncomfortable and is a bigger impact. All of these principles should also be tempered by a fundamental societal determination of how reasonable activities are: cooking is something that basically everyone does, and garlic is an ingredient that basically everyone uses. In contrast, running a home chemistry set and synthesising fart gas is not something that basically everyone does; you could pick a different chemical to synthesise and get a similar enjoyment or, if you really want to synthesise fart gas, you can jump through some hoops to make sure the smell doesn’t escape.
So let’s stack it up:
Looking to restrict the release of cooking smells is therefore unreasonable. Doing so on the basis of “asian food is smelly” is therefore an unreasonable restriction that most severely impacts Asian people, which is discriminatory.
My illustration about my own experience is not supposed to be an exact allegory for the situation we’re talking about but it is supposed to illustrate that generally people are far more receptive to culinary multiculturalism than you seem to be.
What if we stack up playing music from phone speakers:
So I think it’s a useful comparison and illustrates how the two activities should have different expectations.
It could well be, but we’re talking principles here like, “you should be invisible to your neighbours.” If your principle is contradicted by a broadly true generalisation that we’re social creatures, then it’s a bad principle and you should get rid of it. And consider that maybe it’s not a general principle, but rather your own preference not to talk to interact.
I assumed bad faith because I have never heard anyone calling garlic a “weird” ingredient before and still don’t believe you think that. And I’m not trying to “diagnose you with mental illness”; I asked if you’re autistic because it would give some useful context to your perspective for both of us. I’m not going to tell you that you are if you don’t believe yourself to be.
It’s universal. Rice, yes, but also noodles, pasta, various kinds of dumpling like Grießknödel, and semolina pudding. The list goes on.