The simple word "crunchy" sells more food than a long list of adjectives describing ingredients and cooking techniques.

There's something inherently appealing about crispy food.

-Mario Batali, The Babbo Cookbook , Random House, 2002

We've all been attracted to crunchy food. A fine-dining restaurant chef by Mario Batali specializes in delicious (and expensive) Italian cuisine. In such establishments, the word "crispy" is not euphemistic enough to be included in the menu, but it is always mentioned, intentionally or not, when the waiter describes a dish or introduces the special of the day. But in a fast-food restaurant, where customers aren't looking for a personalized, refined dining experience, the atmosphere is much more casual, and the word "crispy" is everywhere, an ace in the hole to get diners to shell out.

In the early 1970s, KFC added a new chicken item to its menu, which the store called "Crispy Chicken". The success of this little marketing trick was twofold: first, it made it clear to customers that the chicken wasn't just crispy, it was "doubly" crispy; and second, it reinforced the fact that the chicken recipe was already crispy, and that anything other than crispy was unacceptable.

Why do we humans love crispy foods? Their appeal is as self-evident as our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone loves crunchy foods, and the love of crunch knows no boundaries.

A colleague of mine in cultural anthropology complained that the late flights from New Zealand to Samoa always smelled like KFC because Samoan passengers always buy a lot of KFC on their way to the airport to take back as gifts for friends and family. There are also examples of potatoes.

While the potato, a root vegetable, spread from the New World to Europe in the pre-industrial era, it was only in the industrial era, when crisper potato foods (mainly potato chips and french fries) were mass-produced and marketed, that the potato really "took off". The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has also designated 2008 as the International Year of the Potato.

Even though the potato is no longer a staple crop in some countries, its crunchy, easy-to-eat texture and popularity have not changed.

Crispy food has the ability to penetrate the strongest cultural barriers. Japan has intentionally isolated itself from the outside world for much of its history, and Japanese cuisine is often seen as a symbol of its island culture. Yet some of the most celebrated crunchy foods in Japanese cuisine have their roots in other cultures.

Batter-fried tempura was invented or introduced to Japan by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in the 15th and 16th centuries. These missionaries were still allowed to enter Japan before the country was completely closed in the 1730s. The breaded pork cutlet in Japanese cuisine is derived from slices of veal fried in Austria, Germany and other European countries, while the flour- or cornstarch-coated chicken nuggets are called "donjan" in Japanese, which originally meant "Chinese deep-frying.

So when you walk into a Japanese restaurant for wings, pork cutlets and vegetable tempura, remember that only the California sushi rolls that accompany your meal are truly traditional Japanese food.

Scientists like evolutionary psychologists and biocultural anthropologists become very excited when they see patterns of behavior or cognition that transcend cultural boundaries.

They have good reason to make the assumption that such patterns may have some underlying biological or evolutionary basis, rather than being merely a product of the local environment or culture. In other words, the frequency of certain patterns across many different cultures is unlikely to be a function of convergence *or* borrowing from other cultures. Being attracted to crunchy food is just such a phenomenon; crunchy food itself may be interchangeable between cultures, but many cultures accept such imports with enthusiasm, as if pre-adapted.

This hypothesis is emphasized by the words of Batali at the beginning of this chapter: there is an innate attraction to crunchy food. It seems plausible at first glance, but "innate" is a loaded term that can stir up controversy in some areas of the social sciences. Like "instinct," "innate" implies that there is a set of fixed programs in the human brain that produce a particular behavior or tendency, regardless of the environment.

It's widely recognized that language is an instinct, but is the love of crunchy food also an instinct? Is it really as y rooted in our evolutionary history and as culturally transcendent as the language instinct? It seems too heavy to characterize crunchy in terms of "innate" and "instinctive", or perhaps we should take the meaning of these two words "lightly" in the context of human behavior and cognition. or perhaps we should take the meaning of these two words "lightly" in the context of human behavior and cognition. I have a comprehensive bio-cultural theory of human eating and eating behavior, of which the exploration of crunchy foods here is an example.

To understand why we love crunchy foods, we must first understand how we perceive the attribute "crunchy.

Source: Internet

Edited by Dan Ye?

Related articles

Click the image to enjoy the book purchase discount

"Gut, Brain, Cook: The Evolutionary Relationship Between Humans and Food"

Author: [U.S.] John S. Allen Tao Lingyin Translator

Published by Tsinghua University Press

Summary

Behind the dazzling array of recipes and food cultures, is there a secret about food? Behind the dazzling array of recipes and food culture, is there a hidden instinct about food, a taste experience that all human beings **** have? Is there a "food theory" that determines what we choose to eat, how much we think is enough, and what we like to snack on? Neuroanthropologist John Allen thinks so. Neuroanthropologist John Allen thinks there is. In this book, he explores the evolutionary basis of taste and how each culture has built a unique food culture based on the ****same cognitive foundation.

Humans consume a wide range of plants and animals, but unlike other omnivores, we use not only our stomachs but our brains when we eat. The relationship with food that makes us a unique species like humans also makes the food culture unique. Even the most closely related primates don't see food the way Homo sapiens do. Taste buds can reflect the natural history of humans, and we are super omnivores.

The book draws on material from food history, chefs, anthropologists and neuroscientists, and Allen begins by charting the recipes of our most primitive ancestors, exploring the role of cooking in the evolution of the brain, before turning his pen to a range of issues of concern to contemporary eaters. The book explores food aversions and preferences, the compulsive need to label food as "good" and "bad," the dietary biases of the healthy food pyramid, and cross-cultural comparisons of the matter of eating.