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If you know cars are problematic, the solution isn't to produce a bicycle that has a "car-like experience". The solution is to make non-car transportation more
by 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
If you know cars are problematic, the solution isn't to produce a bicycle that has a "car-like experience". The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful.
I have at least 8 vegan dishes I can make that are just amazingly delicious. A mushroom risotto, veggie tajine, chana masala, ramen, moussaka, general tso's cauliflour, cuban black beans, jajangmyeon. Make it vegetarian and I have even more; give me eggs, chicken or pork, and a whole universe opens up. It's very rare that I ever cook red meat anymore, just because there's so many recipes that don't make use of it.
My favorite fast food restaurant is Pollo Tropical. Their franchise has 140 locations in South Florida. Most of their menu is rice, beans, vegetables, salad, roast chicken, and roast pork. The white rice and black beans with sauteed onions is delicious enough (and big enough) to be a meal in itself. The fried plantains are like savory candy. It's healthy[ish], fast, and definitely not typical American fare. Yet it won't work outside of Florida, because Americans think rice and beans equals "mexican" food.
American culture simply hasn't incorporated foreign cuisines in a way that makes them actually tasty. If it's not smothered in cheese or bacon, they don't want it. It took an unbelievable combination of luck and grit for one woman to introduce America to French cuisine, allowing home cooks to stretch past the bland, canned staples of the 1960's. We have a lot more variety in restaurants today, but the home cook is still left with garbage "Americanized" recipes you find on Google Search. We need a new revolution in home cooking to introduce the people to meatless dishes, and we need restaurants (especially fast food) to push them outside the home too.
Finally, we're gonna need to clamp down on meat. There's no way around it. As long as animals can be farmed so cheaply that a few pounds of meat costs $5 or less, people will not stop buying it and restaurants will not stop selling it. Just like we need to make cars less convenient in city centers to emphasize bikes, buses and trains, we need to make meat less convenient.
- throwaway290 4y agoSpot on. Safety also matters, US meat industry is really strictly controlled and paradoxically it's safer to eat meat than veggies, especially fresh like a salad. It'd be tough to solve, this. No one would vote to remove meat controls but comparable controls over pesticide/soil/cleanness would be unpopular too as they'd increase prices and make veg tougher to sell.
- walthamstow 4y agoI'm very surprised to read this, because my understanding (from the UK) is that US chicken and egg farms have a horrendous salmonella problem stemming from high numbers of chickens per sqft and low regulation on things like clean bedding. This is the reason US eggs are washed, removing their natural antibac coating, and therefore need refridgeration whereas UK/EU eggs are not and do not. I remember reading a lot about this subject during the Brexit debate, but have forgotten a lot of it since. So, what am I missing?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoEuropean farms cram their chickens together in a pool of their own shit too. The only difference is they vaccinate for salmonella.
- rsynnott 4y agoWhile vaccination is one difference, the EU has banned conventional battery cages, and some countries have banned all cages. Where cages are allowed, the legal minimum area is 0.075m^2/chicken; the US doesn't seem to set a minimum on a national basis, but average seems to be ~0.04m^2. So there's a significant difference in density, which likely has some impact.
- rsynnott 4y agoThey're claiming that it's safer to eat _cooked_ meat than _raw_ vegetables in the US, I'm assuming. I'm not sure if this is true (it's certainly possible if wastewater from animal farming is poorly controlled there), but it's not really comparing like for like.
- throwaway290 4y agoComparing what people eat / mainstream parts of recipes. Most people don't eat raw meat but eat raw veg...
- throwaway290 4y ago
- Willish42 4y agoThis is a really great perspective. Thank you for sharing! Regarding this part: > It took an unbelievable combination of luck and grit for one woman to introduce America to French cuisine, allowing home cooks to stretch past the bland, canned staples of the 1960's. I feel like this should be obvious but I'm ashamed to know I don't know who you're describing. Can you or somebody else happening to read this please elaborate?
- MrOrelliOReilly 4y agoI believe the parent commenter is referring to Julia Child :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Child
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adastra22 4y agoWhy though? Animals can be farmed cheaply, so what’s the problem?
- Double_a_92 4y agoChicken probably yes, but not Beef...
- Fiahil 4y agoFrom a French perspective, American cuisine is bland and unimpressive. Clamping down on meat is not enough, you need to also get around cooking everything in oil, and added sugar (basically, everything about your cuisine).
- walthamstow 4y agoThat's not sugar, mon ami, it's high fructose corn syrup
- Spivak 4y agoI don’t get why hfcs gets so much hate. I bake with it all the time and use it when formulating my recipes on purpose. In an alternate universe it would be the premium and cane sugar would be the substitute. There has to be something there because people without access to it make invert syrup as a substitute.
- tecleandor 4y agoHey, Spanish here! If at least it were good oil... ;)
- Spivak 4y agoThis seems crazy to me, I can buy unimpressive because that’s a matter of taste and American cuisine is kinda samey but American cuisine is practically defined by “punch the eater in the face with massively over the top flavor.” Like if anything it’s putting too much and too many flavors without thinking too much how they interact.
- jovial_cavalier 4y agoFrom an American perspective, French food is as bland and tasteless as your people.
- Romanulus 4y ago
- a4a4a4a4 4y ago> The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I disagree with the last part on a philosophical level. Society should push forward, and that doesn't mean we need to take convenient things and make them less convenient, so that alternatives seem more attractive in comparison. We need to make the alternatives better in-and-of themselves, otherwise there will be more pushback from people who currently only use cars, as opposed to a more positive "oh, we can use our car for X and then use this other thing for Y because it offers Z advantage vs the car"
- red_trumpet 4y agoPhilosophically I agree that this would be pretty nice. Realistically though I don't see how to make bike travel safer and more convenient in an already packed city, without taking away road space from cars. Same for bus lanes.
- a4a4a4a4 4y agoI don't mean that improving other means of transit shouldn't negatively affect car travel, just that we shouldn't go out of our way to make car travel more painful. e.g. maybe we don't need to remove a car lane from every street in the city to replace it with a bike lane, but rather restructure flow so that every other block is car/bike/car/bike, or something similar.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoThere is nothing harder to change in this world than culture. Sometimes you can't just make the alternatives better. Sometimes they already are better, and still nothing changes. People are stubborn, interests are entrenched. Sometimes you have to force society to change. It's not ideal, but we don't live in an ideal world.
- nebula8804 4y agoI don't see how you are going to make this stick. Suppose some politician adds a meat tax or something like that. He will just be voted out enmass in the next election and the ruling will be quickly reversed. Furthermore with the way these things go in a country like the US, that successor will not only roll back and tax he will then tax vegetables to help subsidize the meat eaters.
- moffkalast 4y ago> Make it vegetarian and I have even more I mean... pizza.