I used to like Japanese food because it was less fattening than other foods — I lost weight eating sushi. Now I like it because the Japanese eat so much fermented food: miso, pickles, yogurt, Yakult, umeboshi (pickled plums), natto, vinegar drinks, and alcoholic beverages. A Tokyo food court might have 20 types of pickles, 15 types of miso, and 10 types of umeboshi.
Abundance of fermented food isn’t the only way Japanese food is unusual. I see Japanese food as an outlier on three dimensions:
- Use of fish. More fish-centered than any other major cuisine.
- Beauty. More beautiful than any other cuisine.
- Fermented food. More fermented food than any other cuisine.
As I’ve said, lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events could have a common explanation, they probably do. I’ve discussed before why a fish-centered cuisine could lead to better visual design: Because cooks can’t use complex flavorings to show how much they care (it would make all fish taste the same), they take pains with appearance to convey this.
What about fermented foods? Here’s an idea: In the development of Japanese cooking, lack of complex flavoring of main dishes increased desire that other parts of the meal provide complexity, which is what fermented foods do so well. For example, Japanese meals often include pickles. We want a certain amount of complexity in our food, in other words. Most cuisines provide complexity via complex spice mixtures (mole sauce, harissa, curry powder); Japanese cuisine provides it with fermented foods. (I love Japanese curry, but it isn’t common.)
This explanation predicts that desire for complexity is like thirst: It grows over time and can be satisfied. Prediction 1: Eating one complex food will make a second one will taste less pleasant, just as drinking one bottle of water will make a second bottle of water taste less pleasant. Prediction 2: Over time, the pleasure provided by complexity grows. The same complex-flavored food will taste better at Time 2 than Time 1 if you haven’t eaten anything with a complex flavor between the two times.
An ex-girlfirend always used to prefer the simple things I made over the complex. It was nothing to do with competence; even the complex things I did particularly well were not appreciated as much as what many would call ‘comfort-food’. I am the opposite. I always wondered what this was about.
Now I think of it, the TV chef Jamie Oliver made the same complaint about his wife.
Japanese curry comes via the British – it’s somewhat like the curry we used to eat in the 1970s before we began to discover more authentically Indian/Pakistani curry. That sort of breaded pork and carrot curry is the bee’s knees.
Prediction 2 makes sense from my experience. Salt and vinegar potato chips(which I ate pre-Paleo…) and Indian food were good examples. Very complex and I didn’t like it the first time. I week later I wanted it again. Strange but true.
For mention of a book called “Wild Fermentation” (which you may already be familiar with), see
https://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/13/exploding-sauerkraut.html