Tonight’s dinner was homemade Pizza Margherita and Peperoncino Pasta, made by my wife. As I’ve mentioned many times, she is an amazing cook and we eat like kings at home. The other night we went out to a local Italian restaurant which was rated pretty highly on Yelp, but the food was just too salty for our tastes. I think maybe that left my wife unsatisfied since she really wanted Pizza Margherita. So, she made us a homemade pizza pie! It was great!!!
It got me thinking a little about how American and Japanese palettes are different. I’ve come to realize that I don’t like too much salt on my food anymore, but here in the States it is common for food to be pretty salty. There are always salt shakers on the tables in restaurants, and they get used really often! After eating Japanese and Japanese-style food for years now, my taste buds are not used to so much salt, so lots of times the standard restaurant fare is just too much for me. To be more specific, the type of saltiness I am used to comes from shoyu and miso, and not regular table salt, so it is a more complex flavor. I guess it is rare for us to say about a Japanese meal that it is too salty, but we might say that there is too much shoyu in it. I hope that make sense.
What is also a little uncommon about our meals is that often times there is no meat in the meal at all. Honestly, I don’t notice much of the time because the food is really delicious. It is such a normal thing to have a meat component to a meal in America and I think we’ve been conditioned by the meat industry that we need to have meat as a main component for every meal, whether it be breakfast sausage or bacon, turkey or ham in our sandwiches, or chicken in our pasta. It might be hard to believe, but there are delicious meals without any meat in them! I don’t mean to be preachy, but I do think we as humans should realize the impact our over-consumption of meat has on our environment, as science is showing us more and more in studies. I think it is really good, though, that people are becoming more aware of these studies and are choosing to be more mindful of where their food comes from, and the resources that are required to produce our food. The sharing of information on the Internet has a lot to do with that.
