I dont care that your not even 100 year old recipes of wheat cheese and tomato are being ruined your food is the basis for microwave meals and uni student food gtfo your high horse. Oh and italian cars are a joke
I dont care that your not even 100 year old recipes of wheat cheese and tomato are being ruined your food is the basis for microwave meals and uni student food gtfo your high horse. Oh and italian cars are a joke
I would imagine this sort of effect is entirely cultural and based upon what sort of foods an individuals culture/subculture considers valuable.
I don’t really see any reason why any of the dishes you describe would be intrinsically more aesthetically appealing than Italian food other than ones cultural/subcultural standards for what good food ‘should’ look like. It is not as if any of these dishes, Italian or not, are somehow closer to some platonic ideal of Human Food. If such a platonic ideal did exist it’d surely be the cuisine of an African hunter-gatherer from a very, very long time ago - which probably didn’t look like gumbo or xiaochao stir fry.
I grew up in a context where Italian-American food was prized as the best and according to my brain that stuff ‘looks’ good in a way that the dishes you describe do not. It’s all just cultural programming at the end of the day, with individual variation, naturally.
I think it’s due to the fact that outside of some tomato dishes and pesto, Italian food mostly seems to vary from beige to brown while having a homogeneous texture, while the others I mentioned are vibrant or has large colour contrast and/or different textures.
This might be whats activating our monkey brains, what our hunter gatherer ancestors look for. Evolutionary pressure into seeking a diverse diet instead of eating the exact same berry or the exact same animal every day. Why tide pods look like they would taste good. Why a candy with food colouring tastes better with one without even if they have the same identical taste.
It’s a reason why garnish exists, its first goal is to add visual contrast to a otherwise monotonous dish. The taste a garnish adds is secondary, if the taste was more important, it would have been added to the cooking process earlier to infuse more flavours like a bay leaf. And quite often traditional Italian food is finished with fresh parsley or fresh basil or gremolata in a restaurant setting.
This may be a circumstance in which I underestimated the effect of my Autism, if you are correct. The garnish stuff is a good point, that is basically universally done.
It is possible that, in addition to the cultural context of my raising, I just in general prefer more homogeneity in my food aesthetically in addition to generally preferring to eat the same few things all the time. Wouldn’t be super surprising, now that I think about it.