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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

13 May

During the Raj, rich Indians adopted the eating habits of the colonial masters to the point where they would serve British dishes to guests at the start of the meal and then serve Indian dishes. This continues to this day in the custom of serving soup before the main course

The abolition of slavery posed a huge financial risk to existing imperial sources of revenue. The British therefore shipped Indian indentured labour to all sugar-growing places they won from the French in the Napoleonic wars - Trinidad, Guyana etc.

Most of the indentured labourers of Indian origin were weavers whose industry had been destroyed by protectionist laws in the UK that made Manchester-made cotton textiles cheaper than Indian-made ones.

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

28 Apr

A general reminder that you can't solve a scarce supply problem with technology. All it does is mislead people into thinking that it's the tech that's the proximate problem, not the supply and logistics.

Just so we are clear, tech can disintermediate & enable efficient information discovery through network effects - which is exactly why so many have taken to social media to find oxygen cylinders & life-saving drugs for which thousands of suppliers exist. Doesn't work for vaccines

If you want a tech solution for scarce supply, an online lottery works, but rather obviously, the optics are terrible. If you don't have a supply problem, you don't need appointments cos people can walk into their nearest PHC. Local knowledge & coordination are always better

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

17 Mar

According to the folks at Noma, a Garum (a fermented sauce typically made from seafood originally) made from grasshoppers, moth larvae and koji (for the digestive enzymes) is the most astonishingly nutty, toasty and umami laden sauce imaginable.

Roman garums/SE Asian fish sauces are made by letting the seafood’s own digestive enzymes break down the proteins in their bodies and liquefy over weeks and months. Salt keeps microbes away and the glutamic acid content at the end is off the charts.

It is glutamic acid (one of the amino acids) and its salts (like monosodium glutamate) that our tongues (and even stomachs!) detect and lend that lingering feeling of deliciousness and satiation that is called Umami.

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

25 Feb

It still blows my mind that the largest superfamily of genes in the human genome is dedicated to...the sense of smell. One would have assumed that it might be something more critical but it does indeed suggest that we have significantly underestimated olfaction for a long time.

Also, this seeming truism about dogs having a better sense of smell than human beings is, it turns out, only partially true. Dogs are fantastically adapted to orthonasal olfaction (smelling things from the outside) while human beings are absolute gods at retronasal olfaction

Dogs have fantastic external smelling apparatus but very limited brain capacity to process those smells. But human beings experience smell as a pandimensional experience in our brains, and that's what makes cooking such a uniquely human endeavour

Read 9 tweets

Krish Ashok

@krishashok

14 Jan

Happy Pongal இனிய பொங்கல் நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள்

@krishraghav

One advantage of @krishraghav & @krishkarthik not being in India is having complete monopoly over raisins and cashews

In case a still photo does not do justice, here is a video of ghee dripping down Mount Sakkaraipongal

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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

5 Jan

If you have wondered how electric rice cookers know when to stop cooking, the engineering behind that is some of the most minimalist brilliance I’ve seen, brilliance that keeps the cost of these appliances down to ridiculously cheap levels.

So 2 high school physics concepts to revise before we understand this
1. Latent heat of water - you can raise the temp of water pretty quickly to close to 100C but then it takes extra heat to actually get past 100 cos of the energy required to actually turn water into vapour

So you can observe this by bringing some water to a boil and checking its temperature. It will rise to 95-96 at a reasonable pace and then slow down because as long as there is liquid water left in the vessel, the temp can’t go above 100C

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