Everybody in their right mind would choose D.
A is a non-starter because is there any food there at all except rotting shark heads?
H and G are obesity-inducing vile slop.
F can be passable but that’s about it.
B has a few nice things.
C and E are third-world nasties.
Everything that’s good foodwise is in D.
Curiously, of all the carby foods, the potato is the only one I can eat with my diabetes without any bad repercussions. A teaspoon of rice, on the other hand, sends me high up on the blood sugars.
So yes, potatoes are luvvies.
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Do you still have diabetes? My brother had a tiny continuous glucose monitor installed on his arm and it has changed his life. Now he knows exactly what foods hurt him, when to eat, etc. Listening to him gush about it reminded me of what you have been saying about the neoliberal self and the obsession with constantly wanting to improve oneself, creating new metrics and goals, and so on.
but if you can’t eat rice with the korma…that’s just sad to me.
My instinct was also D but B at second glance is mighty close because has Italy and Poland, my two ancestral cuisines.
D has Indian, Chinese, and South East Asia which has so many of my favorites (Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian…), even most of Japan. How can anyone choose anything else?
i guess if you really like dairy you might be unhappy with D
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I really like dairy, but I could definitely go the rest of my life without a manchego, if I had perpetual access to SEA food– fresh veg, fish, meat, etc all the time. Wish I could get any of that here.
F contains Lima, Peru, as well as all of the pampas, so… could also for sure go forever on just Peruvian food and SA beef. That’d be a good life.
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I now use lettuce instead of rice, and it’s actually great. I don’t get the heavy, sleepy feeling I used to get after rice in Indian dishes.
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Well Kid, I will tell you a sad, sad story food story that you can understand. The dependable Desert King espaliered against my back fence had many hundreds of figs. My new neighbour came over and picked three or four dozen to eat and dry, then a couple of days later came over crying because the mother racoon and her three kits had eaten all the rest.
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That Mercator projection may be leading you astray, plus centering the dividers in the Mediterranean makes the choices artificially harder.
Thus, your comment on A is applicable to Iceland and Greenland I suppose, but it looks like France is in A (mostly) and could claim a worthwhile cuisine. And Italy seems to be chopped up in many parts, so how could we choose a wedge to include it?
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Yes, sacrificing France hurt, I won’t deny it. But when it’s between that and a korma, the choice must be made.
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D, no question. F runner up.
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I guess I am thinking of this not as finished products but as what is grown in those regions, in which case I am perfectly happy with the products of the American south, Mexico and Central America. I can eat beef, chicken, bananas, mangoe, coffee, sugar etc.
I think cuisine or finished products is a different question.
Amanda
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You’re crazy. It’s G.
Mexican food is supreme. Undebatably, it has conquered the the world. Whatever “obesity-inducing vile slop ” other regions produce, Mexican food makes up for it.
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You are being funny on purpose, right? Please somebody tell me it’s a joke.
Mexico produces fine literature but absolutely nothing else worthy of interest in a positive sense. Sorry, Mexico, but you know it’s true.
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I’m choosing C, because I am an Eastern European peasant at heart and in metabolism. Give me carbs and cheese and I’ll walk to the end of the Earth. I’ll miss French and Indian, but I can live without them. I can’t live without sheep’s cheese mixed in polenta, or grated on fries with a fried egg on top (we can do adjika instead of ketchup). Or the saltier spicier local feta diced with good tomatoes and a bit of onion, juices soaked in good bread, on a day when it’s too hot for anything else. Turkish coffee like my grandma used to make it eg not Turkish at all. All the rococo bullshit you can find on the New Year’s table. Clarissa’s borscht recipe. My mom’s chicken liver. My lover’s sort-of-sushi that we used to cook in a dormroom 20 years ago out of non-sushi rice, cheap canned tuna and horseradish paste (the Japanese won’t be recognizing and therefore can’t claim that one for D).
Also, C has Georgia and if I had to eat one recognisable cuisine and one only for the rest of my life, it’d be Georgian as they cook it at home. I’m even sacrificing the borscht for that.
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My father loved Georgian food. My husband loves it. But I don’t get it to the degree that I can’t even reproduce any of the dishes. I can do Peruvian, I can do French. I can do a mean Irish lamb stew. But anything Georgian stumps me.
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That’s exactly it, I can’t reproduce it either. The flavor mix is amazing, but I can’t get it working even with spices I bought in Georgia :)) At this point I’m pretty sure it needs to be cooked less than 150 miles south southeast of Ushba.
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“Clarissa’s borscht recipe”
When I was in Łódź a few weeks ago I had borsht (barszcz ukraiński as it’s called here) and I finally understood what the fuss was about. I’d had it before and it was mostly an okay vegetable based soup with beets. Here, however, the broth was full and rich and the other ingredients were flavored by it but still had their own textures and flavors – one of the best soups I’ve had in I don’t know how long.
The restaurant (advertised as a pizza place!) does really excellent versions of traditional Polish restaurant/bar foods. I don’t know if they had a Ukrainian in the kitchen or what, but if I hadn’t already ordered the main (Hungarian pancakes, which are, of course, unknown in Hungary) I would have been happy with two or three more bowls as the entire meal.
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“I’m choosing C”
If they’d managed to include Romania and Bulgaria into B (or Poland and Hungary into C) that would be my choice. I’m not Eastern European by origin but I’m fine with pierogi, breaded fried cutlets, steamed dumplings with sauce poured over them, goulash (a soup in Hungary close to beef stew) and pörkölt (what Hungarians call goulash) and rakott (casseroles with potatoes, sausage, cheese and other stuff guaranteed to give you heart attacks) langos… if you supplment that with mamaliga, the potato bean dish, chiftele, banica, moussaka and I’m set.
D is… okay… but I’m mostly over Indian food (when I liked it best I had a really great and funny cook book – the restaurant versions have always been… okay…. but I can live without it. I like Southeast Asian (Thai Vietnamese and I think I like Korean but….).
My second choice would be G (US southern cooking with baked ham, fried chicken, slow cooked green beans, collard greens, grits, lima bean soup (on a ham bone), corn bread, steamboat pudding etc and Mexican – not so much the fast food stuff (love a lot of that too) and one of the best things I’ve ever eaten was in an Indian market outside Oaxaca, a kind barbecued goat ragout on fresh corn tortillas with lime juice and tons of cilantro…. and it has other stuff like yellow rice and black beans, arepas, various kinds of tortilla
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I hate tortilla. I hate the idea itself. A cuisine that revolves around a tortilla is defective by default.
Hereby concludes my daily portion of hatred of Mexican food.
Central American is even worse, though. Greasy, ultra carby, and sad.
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No, it’s a good thing because now that I’m a diabetic I wouldn’t be able to eat it anyway.
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