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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

Jul 17

A meandering thread about one of life’s most enigmatic and joyful foods: ice cream. A minor pet peeve of mine is that when ice cream is served in big events in India (at weddings or aboard Vande Bharat/Shatabdi), Nassim Taleb’s “Minority Rule” applies, and we end up getting eggless ice cream

Taleb’s Minority Rule suggests that an inflexible minority can impose its preferences on a flexible majority. It may take only a small, stubborn, uncompromising group, perhaps 3–4% in Taleb’s illustrative example, for everyone else to accommodate them

You can see this wherever making two versions is expensive and the majority can tolerate the minority’s version: vegetarian-only food at many large events, halal meat becoming the usual supply option and, in the context of ice cream, eggless by default.

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

Jul 9

One unfortunate side effect of short-form social media content is that it has manufactured a hard binary between science and tradition. One is supposed to pick a team. But the real world has never been that tidy, and the history of vitamin deficiency diseases is a truly illustrative story of why trying to understand the world through social media and assuming content is knowledge is one of the silliest things we do

This is what I remember from my high-school-textbook: there used to be deficiency diseases, then scientists, armed with the shiny new scientific method, peer review, double-blind trials etc figured out the real cause and designed the cure. So, science rides in, and tradition is the dark ages we escaped.

PS: Perhaps the textbooks have changed, but at the very least, this is how this was taught

The real version has multiple moving parts. Tradition had actually encoded the fix for these deficiencies centuries before humans knew that molecules, let alone vitamins existed. The fact is that industrialization deleted that fix at population scale, and then science arrived to explain what the problem was, design the fix, explain why the fix worked, and hand it back to everyone. Let 's walk through 4 such diseases

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

Jun 5

You can read your entire evolutionary history in what your body does to food. Every gene you carry is a note your ancestors left about what they ate. And what we eat today has left no note yet, because we haven't had time to adapt to it

Start 100 million years ago. Our monkey ancestors ate insects. We still carry chitinase, the enzyme that breaks down insect shells, except ours barely works now. The leftover capability is also why people with shellfish allergies also tend to have dust-mite allergies

60 million years ago, our monkey ancestors started eating fruit. Almost every animal makes its own vitamin C. We don't. A gene called GLO broke in our primate ancestors and never got fixed, because fruit gave us vitamin C for free. That broken gene is why scurvy exists and why we need citrus in our diets

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

May 10

India makes more milk than any country on Earth. Italy has 400 cheeses. India has roughly zero aged ones. Ever wondered why?

What India does have: paneer (acid-set, fresh), chhena (softer, fresh), khoa (reduced milk solids), dahi, lassi, buttermilk, ghee. So, it’s either fresh acid coagulated, fat-preserved or liquid ferments. No aged solids.

Aged cheese exists because European peasants needed calories in winter. It’s a way to preserve a nutritionally complete food (milk) when plant sources of food are scarce. The idea is to concentrate nutrients 10x, reduce water, and store for months. India, on the other hand, had year-round milking and no winter to speak of

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

Apr 25

India has a strange blind spot when it comes to eggs. For starters, we have, against all common sense, declared it non-veg, which automatically comes attached with moral baggage, and then on top of that, even in families that eat meat, the idiotic idea that eggs are “heating” (taseer) reduces its daily/weekly consumption.

From first principles:
An egg is a complete biological starter kit. Protein, fats, micronutrients, packed in a self-contained, cheap, scalable unit.

If you had to design a “default human food” from scratch, you’d find it difficult to find something that looks too different from an egg

In a country where the term “death by carbs” literally describes our current state of affairs when it comes to diabetes, eggs are the easiest way to fix this imbalance. It requires no fancy supply chains and no expensive inputs. Highest quality protein at the lowest price point per gram of protein

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

May 31, 2024

There is no single word in the world of food that elicits more fear and loathing than FAT. It doesn't help that the scientific establishment has thoroughly confused the layperson over the last 70 years with conflicting messages about dietary fats 🧵

For starters, the sugar lobby shifted the blame to fats in the 1960s nytimes.com/2016/09/13/wel…

Then the food industry got reckless with partial hydrogenation that resulted in trans fats, and interestingly enough, "trans fats are bad" is pretty much the only thing almost everyone agrees on when it comes to fat. Funnily enough: most people don't realise that the actual level of the problem is quite small now pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34342900/

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