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America doesn't know tofu

asteriskmag.com

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Re: America doesn't know tofu

#101

Post by CoastalCoder »

MilStdJunkie wrote: post #56
ecshafer wrote: post #36

This is a nice article, but it does have some parts that seem off base. First you can walk into any chinese grocery store (in america) and get 20 kinds of tofu, thats really not an issue, and chinese restaurants (in chinatown) will sell many kinds of tofu. The other is that the author makes the mistake of over emphasizing the vegetarianism aspect (which i think some comments here also are). Many chinese dishes with t…

Yeah, saying you're making tofu for dinner is interpreted ideologically in the rural US. Along with your choice of beer and snack chips. I'm not surprised that ideology (and anger!) has been commoditized in the states; after all, if there's a single founding principle in our nation, it's staying out of my way unless your way involves me making a buck. But it's more than a little depressing how easily people get schno…

> Yeah, saying you're making tofu for dinner is interpreted ideologically in the rural US.

That seems like a pretty broad generation. Are you sure it's true?

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#103

Post by jnurmine »

Glench wrote: post #37
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #31

The best meat replacer really isn't tofu, it's Seitan. It has the umami quality certain meats & cheeses have, you just need to have another bite, that I've not have had with other meat replacements. I've eaten the most delicious vegetarian chicken made of Seitan over a decade ago in a monastery in Xiamen. Still not sure why it hasn't made it's way to the West. Maybe because of the fact its basically pure gluten.

My friend perfected seitan nuggets: https://bartlebysfood.com/

Still smiling here at the slogan "Causing Seitanic Panic since 2018".

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#104

Post by PoignardAzur »

Glench wrote: post #38
PoignardAzur wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asterisk magazine has much more vivid, down-to-earth writing than "bay area rationalist magazine funded by effective altruism" would evoke. One of the articles in that same issue was the one that pushed me to finally become vegetarian.

> One of the articles in that same issue was the one that pushed me to finally become vegetarian. Which article was it?

My bad, it was an article the previous issue, the inaugural one:

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/making-sense-of-moral-chan...

> C: It doesn’t require a great deal of moral or ethical insight to see that treating a human being as a thing, not a person, is wrong. Just about every sort of spiritual, ethical or moral system has described slavery in one form or another as “against nature.”

> But historically, people also thought of slavery as a product of civilization and therefore found ways to justify it. They created ways to explain, for example, why specific groups of people should be enslaved, or why a particular system of slavery is justified, even a form of progress over a previous system.

> I’ve always thought that the best analogy is how we regard eating meat. [...] We also know that eating animals is unethical. We’re doing something cruel and unnecessary. But we do it because that’s just what we do. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if 30, 50 or 120 years from now, people look back on this time period and ask, “What was wrong with these people? They must have been like moral infants. They must not have realized this is a cruel way to treat animals.” But we know it perfectly well. It’s just what we do.

> A: I don’t eat pork or chicken for animal welfare reasons. And the line of thinking that convinced me to actually do this was that if I was alive in the 18th century, I’d want to be the kind of person who’s boycotting sugar.

That line of thinking convinced me too.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#105

Post by lupusreal »

Klonoar wrote: post #85
philwelch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn’t. The stereotypical “soy boy” is a white vegan polyamorous hipster from a West Coast city, and most of the backlash to soy is targeted at processed foods than Asian cuisine. It’s more adjacent to the sort of right-wing hippie natural food scene that likes to slonk raw eggs than to any sort of anti-Asian racism.

Yeah, no, the person you’re responding to is not wrong. “Soy boy” as an insult has never been about processed foods - what are you on about?

The soyboy insult came about particularly to criticize frail tech nerds (who are white in all the memes) who eat meal replacement diets, particularly soylent. Its not about edamame. Furthermore this meme/insult is new while soy has been grown but not consumed by most people in the west for many generations. The meme cannot explain soys status in the west because it came late.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#106

Post by PoignardAzur »

Snow_Falls wrote: post #62
gwern wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good example of the difficulties with signaling and communication: anything which looks like an error is a 'thing you can't countersignal' ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ThhNvdBxcTYdzm69s/things-you... ). Snow_Falls is so contemptuous of Asterisk that he sees a blatant 'error' which 'somehow' evaded the writers and editors all this time, and assumes that this means they are that incompetent; he doesn't c…

I'm hardly contemptuous. If I had a higher opinion of asterisk, I would still assume it's an error as that's exactly what it looks like. Also, do you google the title of every article you read? Why would you say this as if that's something you expect me to do. I'm not american, Hacker News is full of us, why would you assume that a specific sentence with a grammatical error is "well known". You don't outright call me…

I'm not american and I wasn't familiar with that bush quote; but my first assumption upon reading that typo would probably have been "Oh, they're joking about making grammatical mistakes because the subject is schoolchildren". But then again, I had a higher opinion of the magazine to start with.

I don't think you were being contemptuous, exactly, but I do think the train of thought you were describing is one often found on Hacker News, that boils down to "stop at the first problem I see and declare the rest is probably not worth considering". Maybe that process works well for filtering out things you don't want to spend attention on, but it's going to have false positives, and maybe it's a little grating when you confidently present one of these false positives as a rebuttal to other people praising the overall quality of the writing.

(See also: that guy in this thread who got flagged for replying "Do they claim to?" implying they only engaged far enough to read the headline and come up with a sarcastic reply.)

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#107

Post by 9dev »

nothercastle wrote: post #43

Most Americans including myself have no idea how to cook tofu well. If you want to market tofu you need to demo it in grocery stores, show off recipes at farmers markets or host tofu fairs. Somehow you need to show what’s possible with tofu and probably adjust it to American (bland) favor pallet

Easiest thing to do: wrap the tofu in a towel, place a few heavy books on top, let it sit for a few. This will drain the water, which is the most important thing to do. Then, cut it in pieces, and marinade those pieces (I like to use soy sauce, Sriracha and fresh ginger). Let that soak for a while, rinse, then add some wheat starch to the bowl, shake a bit so the tofu pieces get nicely covered. Now you can sauté it in a pan.

This gets you tasty tofu with a crust, full of roasted aromas, and takes only 30 minutes total!

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#109

Post by throwaway2037 »

yorwba wrote: post #33
Kon-Peki wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m also building a team to import and sell these ingredients to western supermarkets Why? American farmers are great at growing soybeans. They even grow varieties that are exported to Asia specifically for making tofu. There's an old story about when Honda first set up factories in Ohio, they still shipped the engines from Japan. After a while they got tired of returning the containers back empty, and went in sear…

Someone still needs to turn those American soybeans into tofu. Either you import the tofu or you import the tofu maker. Just as with those Honda engines, it's easier to start by rerouting some of the output of an existing factory than having to stand up a whole new factory from scratch. It might very well turn out that for most of these regional specialty tofus, there's not enough demand in America to make local prod…

Ironically, in Japan, most cheaper tofu (and natto) is made from Canadian soybeans.

Re: America doesn't know tofu

#110

Post by sgarland »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #92
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #31

The best meat replacer really isn't tofu, it's Seitan. It has the umami quality certain meats & cheeses have, you just need to have another bite, that I've not have had with other meat replacements. I've eaten the most delicious vegetarian chicken made of Seitan over a decade ago in a monastery in Xiamen. Still not sure why it hasn't made it's way to the West. Maybe because of the fact its basically pure gluten.

Don’t forget TVP aka soy chunks. This twitter account uses it exclusively in their recipes for meaty dishes, https://x.com/tofumasque/status/1725857452392898849 (videos) I think the US is so meat-centric that seitan (for those who even know what it is) and tofu/soy are commonly seen as some sort of weirdo/hippy/vegan/activist food. I suspect the reason 90% of people who arrive at seitan who aren’t involved in a cultu…

I ate a ton of TVP growing up in rural Nebraska, of all places, because we were poor, it was cheap, and we were in a food co-op that ordered it in bulk.

Surprisingly not bad in a lot of dishes.

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