Why is it that some sorts of food are served in huge quantities and other sorts in small quantities? Chinese food lovers, for instance, get massive amounts of fried rice and noodles but chocolate cake lovers get little portions. Why don’t chocolate cake lovers get a big plateful? Don’t tell me it’s because cake has more calories. Pasta has calories and that’s served in large amounts and meat dishes can be quite massive. Why are cookie lovers expected to eat one cookie at a time? Why are dessert pie lovers expected to eat one slice when meat pie lovers get a whole pie? If cake was served in the same quanities as savory food you’d get a whole cake each time. I’m not fat. I’ll be perfectly thin by Christmas.
I don’t know if this explaination will hold up to scrutiny, but maybe it’s because pasta and Chinese food are main courses, and are supposed to be the bulk of the meal, while cookies, cakes and pies are dessert, just meant to be a sweet treat at the end of the meal.
But hey, if you want dinner to be a bowl of chips ahoy followed by a spoonful of chow mein, more power to ya!
It could also be because chocolate cake is much richer and more filling than Chinese food. If I had to sit and eat a carton of cake, I wouldn’t be able to finish-it would be too heavy and I’d get full too soon.
Cake is pasta with a bit of sugar in it. Cake and pasta largely consist of flour. Essentially they’re the same things but if you have a large helping of cake you’re a pig. Gnocchi are dumplings made of potatoes and flour and served in large portions. Biscuits and scones are little cakes made of flour and butter and served one at a time.
Why is it so wrong to like sweet food? According to evolutionary psychologists liking sweet food was once necessary to survival. We are alive today because our ancestors liked berries and nuts. It’s time to make a stand for evolutionary psychology!! A whole carrot cake please and hold the chocolate chips. I’m on a diet.
I think sweets look more appetizing in small portions, but that’s just me.
Cake is a pain to make. Rice and pasta dishes can be banged together in ten minutes or less.
If you want sweet food, just dump more sugar on your chow mein, buddy. 
I find that I can’t stomach too much “sweetness” and that one slice of chocolate cake is enough. With foods that are more bland, you can eat more.
heh…well, evolutionary psychology also posits that the preference for sweet foods in the modern era of refined sugar and easy accessibility is <u>maladaptive</u>. humans evolved with a preference for sweet foodstuffs because the nutrients packaged alongside sweet tastes were necessary for survival in the pleistocene…but they were in very short supply. in order for ancestral hominids to have a sufficient motivation to seek out difficult-to-find sweet foods, a taste-preference evolved. this taste preference is no longer essential for survival, because a vast assortment of nutrients are readily available in the contemporary industrialised diet. however, there is no strong selection pressure against the preference for sweet foods. even though high-sugar, high-caloric diets have been linked to diseases-of-civilization, such medical problems tend to not interfere with life until after the person-afflicted has reproduced, thus replicating a genetic preference for sweet tastes.
then again, i’d like some larger chocolate cake servings myself. mmmm, cake.
starkyld: I thought this thread had ended at the post above yours. Sorry about that.
Athough what you say seems in accordance with everything sociobiological you seem to regard 21st Century sweet food in puritanical terms. Sweetness is bad. It means high calories and high sugar. Hunters and collectors didn’t consider themselves decadent and I can’t see why that’s necessary now. Why not consider salty or sour tastes as decadent?
Food sweetened without sugar is considered wholesome. It’s only “bad” if the sweetness comes from sugar. There’s no reason cakes made from vegetables and nuts and fruits and honey (or even a little sugar) shouldn’t be eaten as first courses or only courses as far as I’m concerned. It seems the perfect food to me and the thinking that suggests sweets are treats is outmoded and unscientific.
Let’s compare cake and bread.
Bread, as a minimum, is flour and water and yeast. You could add butter or some other fat, like lard, but it’s not required and would usually be in small proportions. If there’s any sugar in bread, it’s usually a small amount.
Cake, on the other hand, has a lot of fat. And more than a little sugar. And eggs, which add more cholesterol. Very rich cakes are made with little or no flour.
Cake and bread are not as similar as they appear at first. And calories are not the sole factor in determining whether food is nutritious or healthy.
I used to have the recipe for a chocolate cake made with zucchinis. It tasted so great. A moist, rich chocolate taste. The main ingredients were yoghurt, wholemeal flour, zucchinis, nuts, cocoa powder or chocolate and, if I remember correctly, half a cup of sugar. One of the more well-known American dishes would be pumpkin pie which is also a vegetable. You can make cakes and pies with a wide range of vegetables and fruit. The fat content can come from an olive or nut based product and the liquid can be soya based. If you do it right stuff like that tastes better than a crispy creme donut.
Goya, My crazy old aunt Bea cooks crap like that. I ain’t saying you’re wrong, but I challenge you to make me something out of zucchini, yogurt, and soy that’s better than Krispy Kreme. I’ll give you a crisp new dollar, in fact. Blergh. I find that as my mom gets older, she’s pulling this trick on us, too. My sister and I discovered reduced fat sour cream in her fridge last weekend after we both complained that her famous Cold German Potato Salad tasted a little off. And she’s got some spray-on amino acids in the cupboard. Pretty soon she’ll be juicing 50 pounds of organic carrots a week and we’ll be avoiding Sunday dinner like the plague.
I think it’s great that desserts are served in small portions. That way I can have one slice of cake, one brownie, a hunk of cheesecake, and some ice cream for dessert.
I’d have a lot of confidence in my idea that nutritious food can taste as good as fast food.* I’d send you a cake tomorrow but every time I send something to the U.S. something bad happens (refer to a thread of mine with the word Antichrist in the subtitle).
I don’t have a strong stand against GM food because genetic modification will have such huge benefits for people with horrible illnesses. In the words of Billy Bragg, you have to take the crunchy with the smooth. But having said that I do believe that organic foods and wholefoods are extremely worthwhile and that disregarding the hippy approach to nutrition is just plain foolish. The thing is, scientists tend not to disregard it. They just steal the ideas and philosophies of health food gurus and legtimise them in the name of science. ABC news had a story last week about Black Cohosh and how research scientists have discovered it’s great for menopausal women. So what? It’s been used for thousands of years as a medicine by people known to the science community as cranks. I suspect that good nutrition based on organics and wholefoods has an impressive aphrodisiacal effect. When scientists can put that out in the name of science they will.
*When did double chocolate soya milk not equal or better a McDonald’s shake in deliciousness?
I find that large quantities of sweet food are cloying. I don’t think i could eat desserts in the same quantity as main dishes. In terms of calories, though, I think people get upset about eating lots of dessert because culturally, dessert presupposes that you’ve already eaten dinner, and eating a full meal plus all the added calories of a big dessert is excessive.
If all you’re eating is dessert, doesn’t seem like there should be a calorie problem. However, desserts don’t tend to have as much protein or (even including zuchinni cake) include enough fruits and veggies to make a healthy diet. And a lot of them are very heavy on the fat. Oh, and isn’t refined sugar intake linked to onset of diabetes?