Okay, Matt, I’ll bite. What’s a falafel?
well, excuuuuse me, murphy. as i said, i’ve been thru the same odor thing w/ dozens of new arrivals from india. & altho i don’t wish to offend because they simply are not aware of it, ‘just be aware that it is apparent to people who don’t eat the same diet.’ i wouldn’t attempt to tell someone i have just met that their body odor is offensive, but either one of their compatriots tells them, or they change their diet.
now, if you were to tell me that you had personal experience w/ every indian citizen who came to this country to live, & personally knew what each of them ate, i would be able to take more seriously your claim that ‘we avoid switching to an american diet if we can help it.’
the upper caste indian engineers (of both sexes) i meet even learn how to drive, get their own apartments, date, & do anything allowed our u.s. citizens, whether or not they did those things at home. & you can bet yer sari they eat @ macdonalds.
& if it isn’t entirely that their bodies finally clear themselves of the spice resins (you are aware, of course, that spices are toxins? that’s why you are able to cool your mouth after something spicy by taking something milk based.), then some of them just get acquainted w/ deoderant.
i’m not trying to pick a fight w/ you, but i’m not talking speculation about what i smell. & if you are around your own relatives all the time, you would not be expected to notice anything. the nose works that way.
special:
Or, better yet, if you knew better you’d trust my judgments of Indian culture. Do you honestly think that, say, Chinese people who move here stop eating Chinese food regularly? Or that Russian people, or Thais, or Palestinians, or Italians stop eating the foods they know and love and automatically switch to your artery-clogging fried chicken, hot dogs, etc.?
special:
You’re kidding me. And all this time the rest of us from the low castes have been walking to work and living in the streets. Whooooee! Personally, I prefer Arby’s. McDonald’s fries are revolting and Burger King’s are worse.
special…you know that there are vehicles in India, right? And that people can drive them? That my friends and relatives still living there even live in houses or apartments with (gasp) electricity? And…that there’s even a McDonald’s (they serve lamb, not beef) near my brother’s apartment complex in New Delhi?
The caste system is just about irrelevant here in the good ol’ USA, and it’s often irrelevant in urban India. Don’t matter whether you’re high caste or low caste (like me, I believe).
special:
Capsaicin CAN be an irritant. Certain species of birds can subsist entirely on chili peppers and whatnot because the capsaicin does not affect them. However: the reason milk cools your mouth is because it contains a protein that breaks down the oils in most spicy foods. Bread helps, too, because it absorbs the oil.
My point being that whether or not you think your colleagues smell, we don’t automatically change our dietary habits upon arriving fresh off the boat in our rags and turbans.
Getting back to the OP:
I personally bathe every day, but use soap only on an as-required basis. I must wash my hair daily, mainly because my scalp itches and flakes if I do not, a condition which worsens with neglect).
Are we cleaner? Well, a lot of us are more obsessed with cleanliness, and I think I’ll leave it at that.
–Baloo
DEBAUCHEE, n. One who has so earnestly pursued pleasure that he has had the misfortune to overtake it.
–Ambrose Bierce
Come Hither and Yawn…
On the subject of cleanliness:
There is indeed such a thing as too clean. I assume y’all know about antibacterial soaps? Well, the folks who wipe down every square inch of their homes are not doing us a favor.
Hopefully this won’t turn into a religious debate, but let’s take a brief look at the process of evolution. When you use an antibacterial soap, you’re wiping out all the bacteria that can be killed by antibacterial soaps. But remember that .1% the companies won’t make any promises about? They’re resistant to the soaps, and now all their competition has been obliterated.
So in one fell swoop you’ve taken a germ that can’t be killed with conventional weapons of cleanliness and given it a free range with no pressure from others. What you’ve got there is a house full of supergerms.
The same sort of thing happens when you prescribe junior antibiotics for his cold. It’s caused by a virus, but your ** sure ** it’ll help, and you browbeat the doc into giving you some pennicillin. Now, of course, your little darling is carrying only pure-grade germs that are immune to pennicillin.
Of course, there’s precious little we can do about survival of the fittest. So may I please put the request to the teeming millions: Don’t use anitbiotics and antibacterials unless it’s really necessary. The little bastards evolve fast enough.
–John
look, murph, i’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt; but you don’t seem to get it. 3 other posters said similar things; look around.
the point about caste is this: the young people we have come into the office are all at least masters, many doctorates. they lived privileged lives where they came from, not in some calcutta slum.
they become quite independent here, including those who came from very protected situations, & once they change to the point where they are wearing jeans instead of saris & turbans (& probably eating a lot less tumeric & curry), they also become easier to stand next to.
the most likely big change is diet. if you choose to not believe that, that is your problem.
stay with me here. i know i’m driving toward a point but i’m not going to stop for directions now.
(paraphrase of baloo)
YUE HAN:
AH HA! A GODLESS, UNWASHED ‘FERRINER’!! 
Actually, you are somewhat right about the antibiotic soaps, but the biggest problem has come from farmers dousing their chickens and beef with tons of antibiotics, which has produced immune strains and we eat the antibiotic loaded meat, which gives us a portion of the medication.
HOW EVER! Regular soap in bathing is just fine. The emulsification it produces rids the body of oils, loose skin and dirt. (YYYEEEEEWWWWWW! You don’t use soap on your BOD?) Various glycerin based soaps or those ‘solid clear’ soap bars are just fine also and milder. Ivory Soap, absolutely neutral, is often the best and doctors often suggest bathing with it if you have a staph infection that you are being treated for.
Even the American Indian used a slippery, soap-like bark of a tree to clean themselves with. Ancient peoples sometimes took hot baths and then lathered up with olive oil and SCRAPED it off, along with the dirt. (Good for the skin, but they must have smelled like a salad on a hot day.)
It has been proven that people became healthier when they started bathing frequently. Now, no one should be given antibiotics unless they actually need them and no good doctor will force them on a person, knowing that many forms of bacteria have begun to evolve resistant strains. There has been some question as to the good the practice of adding antibacterial drugs to various soaps because of the potential for making the person immune to them.
Farmers, however, stubbornly insist on adding antibiotics to their feed, especially bulk farmers who keep their animals closely penned up for mass production and don’t give them much fresh air or chances to step out of their own wastes. (Like chickens, who are now resistant to staph and need to be washed before cooking and require almost surgical technique when fixing them.) Then some enterprising idiot discovered that their shit can be processed and added to their own food and to cattle feed, which transmits the resistance to uninfected fowl and beef along with a few diseases.
What? Me worry?’
Yue Han says:
In a word or three, you are wrong. Antibacterial soaps work by lysing the bacteria on contact. The reason they only claim 99.9% effectiveness is that no one can be sure to contact all the bacteria on a surface with any surety, so the companies don’t claim 100% killing to keep the feds off their case. No soap uses antibiotics for killing bacteria because 1) Antibiotics are expensive B)it would take too wide a spectrum of antibiotics to get the results claimed iii) lysing agents are not subject to resistance, thus the soaps do not have to keep re-inventing itself to maintain that 99% claim.
“You can be smart or pleasant. For years I was smart.
I recommend pleasant.”
Elwood P. Dowd
special:
My father grew up in what you might call “slum” conditions. My mother was slightly more fortunate, but was still never in an affluent family. My father and mother are both practicing physicians today. Regarding my Indian friends, acquaintances, etc. we all come from a wide range of backgrounds and a wide range of professions that may or may not have anything to do with our childhoods. There is no general statement you can make about the Indian families and professionals that I meet for the first time at conventions or reunions around the country.
special:
Here’s the thing, though. You don’t know about their diet. I probably know more than you do, considering that I have been in their situation and considering that I know personally easily hundreds of other Indian immigrants across the US who have also been in that situation. We all go through pretty much the same thing. Granted, in the years that I’ve been here I’ve started eating pizza, takeout etc. a little more frequently than I used to eat it in India (I’ve never really been fond of pizza), but we generally don’t drop our cultural foods. To do so would be hell for most of us. I wore jeans in India, I wear jeans here. I’ve never worn a turban (most of us don’t), so scratch that. I drove a car in India, I drive one here. I wore deodorant there, I wear it here. Whether or not your colleagues smell, I don’t care, but I honestly don’t think it’s due to our “gradual change to an American diet.”
To be honest, special, plenty of what you say sounds absolutely ludicrous to me, especially your comments about “they even get to drive, own apartments here, wear jeans” etc. Do you think we don’t do these things or never did these things at home? It is astonishing how you seem to make assumptions about what we do or don’t do, and what I know and don’t know about Indian culture.
PUNdit & Rainbow: What the hell?
a) I’m living in Indiana and always have. I shower daily unless I REALLY need to sleep in. I believe in God but often skip church Sundays for that same precious sleep. So
-not unwashed, -not godless, -not a foreigner.
b) Of COURSE there are no antibiotic soaps. I never said there were. I made two similar statements, one about antibacterial soaps and one about antibiotic medicines. Rainbow conflated them, then PUNdit objected to what Rainbow thought I said.
c) I read about the dangers of overusing antibiotics & antibacterial soaps in Discover magazine. More emphasis was placed on antibiotic abuse.
d) Of COURSE washing dayly is healthy. That wasn’t my point. I said that scrubbing your house with antibacterials would only create healthier, stronger germs, and they should be used sparingly.
–John
Yue Han said:
My point here John, is that you are wrong saying anti-bacterials used in household cleaning will created stronger bacteria. The way these soaps work do not allow for a survival of the fittest. If you flood your counter top with chlorine bleach, you will kill 99.9% of the bacteria. The 0.1% that survive are not RESISTANT to the bleach, they were just lucky and didn’t get a lethal dose. Their offspring will not be more resistant than the wild population. So if you have an intestinal bacterial infection, I could pretty well eliminate it in one swell foop by giving you a Clorox high colonic. That would kill the bacteria in your gut with no chance of producing resistant strains. However, it would probably cause more harm than good overall, a classic case of "The treatment was a success, but the patient died.
PUNDITLISA:
Falafel is a middle-eastern food. I think it’s made from mashed chick-peas, but I’m not sure. It’s mixed into a thick paste (about the consistency of Thanksgiving Day stuffing) and formed into little balls (about an inch and a half round) that are deep-fried. They may be served on a plate with tahini (a cold, yogurt-based sauce) but a lot of people like to eat them in pita bread with lettuce, tomatoes and tahini.
Out here (L.A.) most falafel stands are indepentently-run; but there is also Falafel King and Zankou Chicken, which have a few stores.
Personally, I like the little stand across from Santa Monica college. They have good falafel and really tasty shawerma.
Close, Johnny. Falafel is made primarily from fava beans. They are close in consistency to what Americans call “hush puppies.” Hummus (or hummous, or humus, or any of a bunch of variant spellings) is made of chicekpeas. And tahini is sesame paste.
“It’s my considered opinion you’re all a bunch of sissies!”–Paul’s Grandfather
Sorry PunditLisa, I completely forgot I’d posted here.
Go with what pldennison and Johnny L.A. said.
I never touched him, ref, honest!
pldennison:
Thanx for the correction. I wasn’t sure what kind of bean it was made from.
Now, tehini is the white yogurt sauce, isn’t it? Flavoured with sesame?
I dunno. I just like to eat it. L