We had a ridiculous heatwave recently so I took to making iced coffees in the morning.
...they are definitely a lesser form of coffee.
OT: The Food & Drinks Thread
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We had a ridiculous heatwave recently so I took to making iced coffees in the morning.
...they are definitely a lesser form of coffee.
Tighthead
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- Nov 9, 2016
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Are there two famous siblings so different than Rick and Skippy?
They are at opposite ends of the mensch/d bag spectrum.
groovejuice
Without deviation progress is not possible
Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
Sigh.
You're right.
But you're also wrong.
You wanna talk addictions, but it's a complex subject that will derail this thread, so i'll try to make this as quick as possible, in layman terms.
It's not the drugs themselves that cause the addiction, but a susceptibility in the individual to self-medicate by a form of behavior that will soothe them. That's why some addictions are excusively behavioral, whilst their brains react the same way and have the same patterns and neurobiological susceptibilities as those who are substance dependant. Susceptibilities are caused epigenetically In Utero or post-natal and the formative years.
All you need is a massive surge of dopamine while doing something which is already in an attraction pattern in your cues AND the trauma based susceptibilities of low treshold of activation of the stress response or inversely, high treshold of activation of the reward cascade of hormones.
Shopping can be an addiction.
Sex can be an addiction.
Food.
Every behavior that becomes compulsive and obsessive. It all goes through the same motivation reward system.
I know this subject exceedingly well as it was what first got me into behavioral biology.
Alcohol is a known stress reducer.
And yes, a salient part of the multi-facated expression of attraction with alcoholic beverages, is indeed due to the higher activation of dopamine that comes from drinking alcohol. But that doesn't make anyone an addict.
Addiction is characterized by the behavior becoming/being problematic.
Everybody ****s, yet not everyone is addicted.
As an aside, i'd argue that cheese might be loved by wine lovers because of the correlations they share, especially regarding their bitterness and taste. Chicken and the egg. Which came first, love for wine or love for cheese? Love for coffee, maybe?
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Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
They're pretty close, neurobiologically speaking.
You might not see them as such, but they use/act/react on the same basic functions in your brain.
I like Greek ice coffee. Frappe. I never drink hot instant coffee but for this you use Nescafe instant. I like it. I got hooked grabbing one in the morning heading into Manhatten.
I can understand an intersection point where our taste for food, sex, type of music, and mind-altering chemical all meet in some psychological pleasure-lounge, but there must be stark physical differences between items when they're withdrawn. I've yet to have a Greek olive hangover.
Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
His point is right though. What you call acquired tastes is from experience. If those experiences become pleasurable, you then usually have a motivational cascade for your next try.
When it comes to pleasurable (wide definition) substances like coffee, alcohol and anything else that can be ingested and has a psychoactive substance which will boost the dopamine activation, you can be sure that a good part of your autonomic attraction will be due to that surge of dopamine being associated with the rest of the cues, like smell and taste (and social interactions, mind you, we most often do this socially).
Other acquired tastes work the same way, but with a lower activation of dopamine, but an activation nonetheless, even though there's no psychoactive substance spiking it up, making it even more pleasurable, like in the case of alcohol.
You know the chemistry better than I do, but the original point was about addiction. In that context, wouldn't there be a vast difference in addictive qualities between how the body craves nicotine or alcohol versus how it craves tasty food? How much escalation or experience is required to love a milkshake or bacon? Most palates immediately say yes to both, without any experience or escalation. And on the flip side, no amount of experience can create an addiction to a food you simply don't like.
Would it be accurate to say that food addictions are activated via our palates, versus traditional drug addictions which go directly to our chemical receptors? Apologies if the descriptors are wrong.
Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
When I spoke of addiction to food, I meant addiction to excessive eating.
What we like and what we are addicted to are the same things, yet we aren't addicted to everything we like. We become addicted when a behavior becomes compulsive.
I don't think you would compulsively eat every S0ufflé you see even if you like them very much, over say, a Banane Flambé. (or maybe the other way around, for me)
Some of those tastes that seem pre-acquired are probably due to what our moms were eating while we were in utero. Every cue that comes into you will serve to pull you towards one thing more than another, they stack-up from the moment of conception to the day you die.
He's wrong about the addiction part.
He's right about alcohol playing a salient role in how attracted your brain will become to an alcoholic beverage. It's not just acquired taste.
He's also right about social pressures and conformity playing a role.
People don't like to hear that, but it's true.
All of you would seriously flip if you read all the neuro studies on human volition.
We are NOT in control.
It's a great discussion because there's no precise demarkation separating where the signals are coming from and what they're telling us. And of course there's no exact formula governing which signal becomes addictive and which bounces off. Every social cue I've ever had should make me love oysters, yet I never acquired the taste. On the other hand, I learned to like scotch and bourbon through repeated social cues. But I can go weeks without a drink and not miss it. Sex is the strongest primal drive we have, yet I desperately missed my first girlfriend even after finding another woman to sleep with.
It seems we spend a great deal of our intellect rationalizing our bodily needs.
About coffee, I love coffee (except French coffee, in France, which is gross), I generally drink de-caf as I have an atrial fibrillation which is a shame but I HATE iced coffee, coffee ice cream etc etc (although if you’re talking cake, which I’m not a fan of, coffee and walnut is my favourite). I do not get the Tim’s summer drinks coffee at all, it’s like having a cup of coffee and leaving it to go cold then you remember it and take a swig and yuk. I dream of an espresso but unfortunately with my AF it would just send my heart crazy. I worked in an Italian bar in my younger years and learnt never drink cappuccino after midday, useless bit of information for you.
Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
You might've had thousand upon thousand of cues early in life making you disgusted at anything slimy, evenmoreso, slimy critters often also activate our fear (amygdala) which can override almost anything positive you might have from the perceived object.
Most people will react like you do, with an anecdotal story which seems to go against this notion. Thing is, we're talking about millions of registered cues stacked up together which compete or cooperate to create our tastes.
And there's absolutely NO volition in our tastes. You can stick someone on a brain scan (an experiment which has been replicated), where the person answers a myriade of questions while the program scans and correlates reactions in the brain and pinpoint certain attraction and aversion cues.
What happens after that, is the person is then shown choices between objects or persons, and the computer can spot the limbic correlative to answer even before the person is conscious of his or her choice.
This means we have no agency over our tastes. We can only inhibit our behaviors. Anything else that comes out of your limbic system is part of who you are, but is there before you are even aware of it. It's this sorta homunculus of the entire collection of all your life cues.
That scares the living **** out of most people, myself included, because of what it means.
We do have volition though, just not the way we are used to think of it.
- Jun 24, 2012
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Care to share some of the food and drink products that you've come to enjoy in Holland and where Canada doesn't compare as favorably?
Also, would like to hear more about what you like about living in Holland in general vs. your Canadian experience.
groovejuice
Without deviation progress is not possible
I'll jump into the shallow end - my ex was born in Utrecht. Genever (yeh-nay-veh) There are young and old varieties. It's their version of gin, which isn't all junipered up like English gin. For me, it's closer to a schnapps. The young variety borders on vodka with some subtle flavour additions. Dutch beer is also really good.
I remember taking a vacation in Germany and then driving from Berlin to Holland (unless you’re the driver it’s incredibly boring, drivers get to go as fast as they can along the autobahn, lorries were overtaking us as I kept telling husband to slow down as we had kid in the back, he was very pissed as he was enjoying himself), Holland is really expensive compared to France and Belgium. Schnapps reminds me of real Russian vodka, ie like gasoline. Hendricks is my favourite gin but I’m not a connoisseur like my best friend. Dutch people are great they nearly all speak English as Dutch is a hard language, they are very tall too. Our holidays usually comprised of a mobile home campsite in France and there were lots of Dutch there, they like to drive long distances. When sister in law lived in Belgium everyone drove to Spain. I yes thought that was a long way until I moved to Canada and husband drove to Ottawa
It's actually mostly been the other way around. Holland's not a great country for the culinary experience outside of the beer and cheese. Dutch cuisine is plain and simple. Most people don't really cook and so finding an apartment that has a proper oven was actually a challenge. The average dutch lunch is a couple slices of bread and a slice of cheese.
However, if one thing is unilaterally better here than in Canada it's the dairy products. Canadian milk tastes like water to me, even the fancy grass fed hormone free hippy milk that costs $5/L. Yogurt, Kwark, sour cream, creme fraiche, butter, cheese you name it: it's all extremely good here, and that's just the basic stuff available in any grocery store. You can get pretty special stuff - for example, cheese made from a farmer just down the road - with very little effort and money, whereas I can't import a lot of this stuff to Canada due to our pasteurization laws (strange that the Dutch don't experience constant epidemics of listeriosis with such cavalier regulations).
And of course, the best thing to enjoy with dutch cheese is BELGIAN beer lol. There are a few great dutch breweries (La Trappe in Tilburg, and Brouwerij de Molen in Bodegraven, for example) but the majority of the good stuff is brewed in Belgium. Being that Belgian beers are readily available in Canada these days the big difference is price and availability. You can find La Trappe Quadrupel, for example, in the grocery store for 1.50, and a few rounds at the proeflokaal with a friend won't break a 20. There's also still a lot of stuff available here that won't import to Canada, even if it's not from Holland, but I imagine this will continue to change with time. As I mentioned earlier, a fantastic combination is geuze (sour beer) and old cheese. In Holland they'll serve a bowl of big chunks of old cheese with a side of whole grain mustard. I find it too cloying without the sour beer
I see that there's a place to get rijsttafel in Montreal. If you haven't had it, I would really recommend checking it out. Make sure you bring an appetite. You're going to need it.
I'm aware that we're the sum of our own conscious and subconscious experiences, not to mention the culture we were part of and the region of the planet in which we live. We can consciously choose the broad strokes -- eat healthier, drink less booze -- but within each choice are dozens of subconscious sub-choices governed by familiarity. My healthy choices would include veggies, quinoa, fish and leaner meat, but I wouldn't make grasshoppers, mealworms or dog a regular part of my menu, for no other reason than I haven't been socialized that way. I've tried regional foods unusual to North Americans but typical for Asians, Africans, Mediterraneans, etc., but lack of availability in grocery stores and restaurants have kept me from craving them.
So we're on the same page when it comes to the premise of or lack of control. But are there deeper consequences? When you say these subconscious cues scare the **** out of you, are you implying we're vulnerable to a deliberate manipulation of our tastes? If so, is there anything more diabolical than your grandmother pushing food onto your plate, or decades of ads for McDonalds? North Americans already love sugar, fat, and carbs -- what the hell else can anyone do to us?
Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
That description is very apt and precise.
Although I have to add, which I haven't done and which I should've pointed out already for this not to sound too much like behaviorism, is that all our attraction and aversion cues are mitigated by strong biological and genetic presets and also mitigated by the set of cues already absorbed. We are malleable to a certain degree. We can indeed do it wilfully, but most of what we are has been created way before we actually acquire the will to change ourselves.
I'd also add, what does that say about our egos and judgements. Our moral value judgements. Towards criminals, towards mental illness, towards addiction, depression and social status. Sociological research on violence shows the same main predominant factor than with health, social inequality; poverty. Our entire culture of law and punishment are based on inaccuracies and presumptions made a long time ago. All the most violent criminals have also been victims of extreme abuse and neglect as children, and this vicious circle is caused by poverty. Their misadaptation is our responsability as a society much more than it is theirs, yet we act high and mighty towards those who act uncivilly because of our own nature, because of our social constructs, our empathy and sense of fairness that have arose because of our evolutionary adaptation as the most social creature on earth.
In an age where we believe ourselves to be higly civilized, we have yet to attain the maturity to see the fundamental reasons why most problems in our society occur. That we can go to space, have all the tools to create sustainbility and basic abundance on a wide scale, yet there is still institutionalized poverty by the very fundamental basics of our socio-economic system.
/rant
justafan22
Registered User
- Jun 22, 2014
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What are some of the easiest meals to make for a student/worker who also works out a ton. Asking for a friend.
Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
Korean beef (jsut because it's easy and has a lot of salt)
Korean Beef and Rice Recipe | Six Sisters' Stuff
Salmon, lot's of salmon and fish, if you're working out.
I'd suggest you give a shout to our resident expert, @Kriss E
He'll help you better than anyone else here that I know of.
justafan22
Registered User
- Jun 22, 2014
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Grate n Colorful Oz
The Hutson Hawk
Mrb1p
PRICERSTOPDAPUCK
Look up a monster mash. You can get away
With meals for three days for like 15 dollars
Chili is also amazing, cheap and nutrient heavy.
Cuban black bean soup
I can PM you some recipes if need be.
groovejuice
Without deviation progress is not possible
I was going to mention rijsttafel. Like England and India, Indonesia was a colony of Holland, and similarly adopted that exotic cuisine. Some of the best Indian food is available in England as is the case with Indonesian cuisine and Holland.
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