Unless you live in front of the sea, frozen fish is almost always better. Tomatoes can improve substantially if left without refrigeration, it's one of those fruits that continues to ripen after being picked.
I think there was a Good Eats episode, that tomatoes actually lose flavor if refrigerated - some chemical change, don’t remember the details.
Does it regain the flavour in the same way chocolate does when brought back to room temp, or does it lose flavour permanently?
Yep, the difference in taste is remarkable. I'm vegetarian and I've noticed there's an assumption made by many people that vegetarian or vegan food comes with sacrifice and is somehow lacking in pleasure. I can only assume this is because they have only tasted cheap supermarket vegetables or maybe just don't know how to prepare and cook them. I became vegetarian for ethical reasons but I stay for the flavour. I could…
India is up there because many of them are vegetarian for religious reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_religion
Religion follows reality, though. It's not a coincidence that vegetarianism is common in Indian religions and not among the Inuit.
Yep, the difference in taste is remarkable. I'm vegetarian and I've noticed there's an assumption made by many people that vegetarian or vegan food comes with sacrifice and is somehow lacking in pleasure. I can only assume this is because they have only tasted cheap supermarket vegetables or maybe just don't know how to prepare and cook them. I became vegetarian for ethical reasons but I stay for the flavour. I could…
India is up there because many of them are vegetarian for religious reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_religion
I guess the point is India can afford to be religious about vegetarian food because they can grow vegetables pretty much year round. India being a big country with all kinds of climate, there are pockets where is is much less enforced, e.g. the Himalayan states.
A friend started growing vegetables, and I got some as a gift at the end of the season. Just regular stuff like potatoes, carrots, celery root, parsnip and such. Now when I got them I was very busy, so they sat in a cool and dark place for a couple of weeks before I had time to use them. First thing I did was make a simple vegetable soup using only the vegetables I got from her, and it completely blew me away with th…
Yeah well, my parents have a garden of some 1000 square meters (a quarter acre) and lemme tell ya, there's a lot of stuff you can grow on that area. Obviously as a kid I couldn't escape being sent to attend the garden and saying I wasn't a fan of that is an understatement. Unless you do it as a hobby it's not a pleasant activity. In fact nowadays I use it to form a mental image on the enthusiasm that today's kids hav…
> read a ton as a kid and still read now but my kid wouldn't touch it with a barge pole unless forced to. Never saw him pick up a book on his own volition, that is.
My daughter didn't like to read too, until I bought her a book from Monster High universe (the hot topic for small girls at the time). She was hooked and now buys her own books from allowance.
Hmm isn't frozen food - even veggies - very close in content to fresh food? The real problem being not how the veggies are stored on their way to us, but how they're grown industrially?
It's better than days old refrigerated food, but not equivalent to freshly picked.
I grow beans in my garden. French beans and broad beans are quite good frozen, perhaps amongst the vegetables that tolerate the freezer the most. Very happy to have those out of season. But there is no comparison possible with the fresh stuff.
The home refrigerator is barely a century old When the article was written, it turned 110: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOMELRE I somewhat follow the vintage refrigeration community (owning a mid-30s Frigidaire myself) and still believe this is the only one of them known to be in existence today: https://www.coolingpost.com/features/ashrae-displays-first-e...
Here is a bit of refrigeration trivia gathered from my own interest in the subject and a penchant for collecting and reading old engineering books, so from the early days of shipping food , in refrigerated cargo ships, determining the ideal cooling temperature for each food type, was one thing, but another, facinating component, is that most food is exothermic, and this property is called "the heat of evolution", and varys with each food type, and is large enough that 50 tons
of food will produce enough heat as it ripens to
overwhelm an insuficient cooling system, so they had charts detailing the heat output of all the shipped foods, and recomendations on the design of the cooling plants, with some so specialised as to work with one food only....banana boats....
Got a 70 year old "admiral" fridge, the wiring insulation just crumbled, and it will get a new thermostat(hidden) and wire, everything else is in battered original, working condition
> we have lost “diversity and deliciousness" I sincerely doubt that the chilled stock in a local Irish supermarket makes my food options LESS diverse than they were a century ago. Grapes, blueberries, strawberries everywhere at any time of year, frozen fish from halfway around the planet, frozen pizzas, even ice cream for God's sake. Perhaps the cucumbers are worse, but I can always get them, and don't have to suffer…
The fridge door one came up some time ago on HN with actual data to back it up from "smart" fridges. Some people with kids said it was opened well over 100 times a day which shocked me. If TV/film/YouTube is anything to go by the habit of leaving the door open for extended periods is common too. That one really grinds my gears. I just can't understand a brain that doesn't tell you to minimise the amount of time the d…
When I bought a fridge for my camper I realized why nobody who cares about power usage has a common standing fridge. Every time you open the door the cool air falls out, it sucks in the warm room air and has to start over again.
While "camping coolers" just keep the cold air inside.
My fridge doesn't cool when the door is opened, not even sure if slightly longer opening times make a huge difference when the complete air is exchanged in seconds anyway.
Home refrigeration is quite a bit older than electric refrigerators though. Iceboxes, kept cool by chunks of ice, were also called refrigerators and started being produced for home use in the 1840s.
We stored meat in cold conditions back in the paleolithic. All you need really is to know how to dig a hole.
The question is what changes to the mode of production were brought by the technological advance. I think fatty tuna sushi became popular due to early refrigeration
> we have lost “diversity and deliciousness" I sincerely doubt that the chilled stock in a local Irish supermarket makes my food options LESS diverse than they were a century ago. Grapes, blueberries, strawberries everywhere at any time of year, frozen fish from halfway around the planet, frozen pizzas, even ice cream for God's sake. Perhaps the cucumbers are worse, but I can always get them, and don't have to suffer…
There is some diversity missing from my local UK supermarket. I don't know if it existing before, but I can only ever get one kind of squash - butternut. There are dozens of other varieties of squash of different shapes and colours but I can only get them at a farmer's market.