Gourmet?

[wei yau]

To be fair, NoVa does have access to pretty damn good country ham. And it's at a good price or at least better than NYC. Every few months, we get a whole country ham for my parents. They use them in soups and stocks and so many good things. They also give them out to friends.

What's I'm really amazed by is how my Dad can slice that ham without a saw. That shit is hard.

[Megatron]

True story: I have been legit fooled by imitation crab meat. Granted, I'm from the south, and even with all the traveling I've done (and 3 years now living in NY) I've eaten actual crab maybe 20 times in my whole life.

Hell, if you want a real laugh, I'm pretty sure I can count on my fingers the amount of times I've had lobster.

Originally Posted by wei yau

Red Lobster. Every few years I end up there to remind myself why I don't go there.

Eh, I hear that a lot, but I have to give them one slight bit of credit: They do cool shit with shrimp that I'm too lazy to do at home.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Megatron

True story: I have been legit fooled by imitation crab meat. Granted, I'm from the south, and even with all the traveling I've done (and 3 years now living in NY) I've eaten actual crab maybe 20 times in my whole life.

Hell, if you want a real laugh, I'm pretty sure I can count on my fingers the amount of times I've had lobster.

Eh, I hear that a lot, but I have to give them one slight bit of credit: They do cool shit with shrimp that I'm too lazy to do at home.

Many years ago there was a local restaurant (called Santana's) that served broiled lobster stuffed with crab meat. It was really good, but the restaurant has since closed down.

[livius drusus]

Did the customers there just pretend to like broiled lobster stuffed with crab meat?

[S.Vashti]

I pretended to like coconut cream pie once. Nearly gagged to death in subsequent recalls of the event. Unless I skim over that memory quickly, my gorge still attempts to flee in terror.

God, the things I did to fit in and be nice.

I like both imitation and real crab meat.

This post brought to you by the memory of fitting into social norms.

[Dingfod]

I like imitation, and real crab meat, but not the unholy marriage of those two.

[Janet]

I don't really like any shellfish. I can make myself eat the shrimp appetizer at hibachi restaurants and little ones in egg rolls don't bother me. But I would never order them by choice. It's a texture thing. I'm very sensitive to texture and I find them too dense. I feel the same about scallops, tried crab once and didn't like it and never bothered with lobster.

If there's one thing the Japanese Iron Chef taught me, it was to be at peace with my culinary cowardice.

[thedoc]

livius drusus, Thankyou for reminding me why I should always log-on when I browse this site.

[livius drusus]

Because lurking logged out makes you even more of a phony than pretending to like broiled lobster stuffed with crab meat?

[lisarea]

I think the disconnect probably comes from the fact that 'gourmet' foods, like a lot of other things, are usually acquired tastes. They aren't the sort of things that you try once and just immediately and fully appreciate.

So it's like pretty much everything else, where people who are unfamiliar with the nuances and subtleties of some thing, whether it's arts, food and drink, craftsmanship, or insect stings, hear people talking about it in ways that they don't grasp, and some subset of those people feel left out or insulted in some way, so they chalk it up to some kind of bullshit, like it's all just a big hoax being perpetrated against them.

Ultimately, it's kind of tragic, because people who are very early inclined to take a know-it-all position end up shutting themselves off from learning about things they don't understand, lacking the patience or humility or something to even acknowledge that anyone else might know something they don't.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, for the most part.

[Megatron]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I think the disconnect probably comes from the fact that 'gourmet' foods, like a lot of other things, are usually acquired tastes. They aren't the sort of things that you try once and just immediately and fully appreciate.

Beer works this way too, and even people who like beer won't necessarily like Guinness or IPAs or (insert other not-standard-beer-thing here) right away.

Fun/stupid story: I was at the Merry Monk down on Pearl street a couple months ago - it's one of those specialty bars that carries a lot of different beers. One of them is a really amazing IPA, but it costs $7 a pint and it's kind of a rare treat for me when I actually have the money to go there (hey, I'm poor).

So this guy next to me at the bar is all like "look at this dude drinkin' $7 beers" to his buddies and being kind of an asshole about it. I bit my tongue for a second to keep from saying "look at this dude spending $3 a glass for Bud Light" and instead told him that the whole reason I come to this bar is for this beer, and it's not often that I can afford to do it. They don't sell this shit in bottles around here.

He actually tried it, and passed it around to his friends to check it out, and all but one liked it and ended up ordering one.

[Megatron]

Originally Posted by lisarea

The Dunning-Kruger effect

Is there a counter-effect to this? If so, I've got it. The few things I know I'm quite competent in... well, I know it. I know I'm an excellent driver, I know I can destroy people in Spades, and I can probably beat Zelda 2 and Super Metroid faster than anyone here. But the other 99.99% of everything in the world, I always feel dumb and kinda estranged from.

I tend to do the exact opposite of what this study states. If I don't know something I just want to ask people about it and learn, because otherwise I just stay dumb.

[lisarea]

That was actually part of the study. As people become more competent, they start to rate themselves proportionately lower. Probably because once you start learning something about a topic, one of the main things you learn is how much there is to know.

You do almost always start feeling pretty dumb when you start learning about a given field or topic, because you realize just how much there is to it, and the vast majority of people never achieve levels of mastery where you really think you know what there is to know about something. In my experience, you usually just have to adjust your perception of general knowledge levels, rather than your own.

I'm actually OK staying pretty dumb on a lot of things, because I know there isn't time to know too much. So I don't generally bother learning a topic unless it interests me in the first place.

So I am a beer person. I love beer, I have very strong personal preferences, and while I'm not a huge beer afficionado, I cannot enjoy crappy beer, even ironically. And that can be pretty expensive, as you point out. So as far as wine goes, I'm perfectly happy with general, wide appeal wines for mostly cooking and only occasional drinking and I really sort of don't want to get pickier. Similarly, I had a bunch of friends quite some years ago who got really into single malt scotches. I went for tastings a few times, but I made a conscious decision not to make it a thing, because single malt scotches are mad expensive, and I didn't need any new expensive tastes.

So there is a whole shitton of things I don't know much or anything about, and I'm OK with that. But I try not to assume that everything that goes over my head is just bullshit because that is a really crummy thing to think about people.

I don't have very refined tastes in food, either, but that's one area that I've found that learning more almost always pays off in terms of improving my quality of life for the least amount of money, so I regularly seek out food snobs to learn new things from.

[Megatron]

I like you, lisapea. You always have some kind of intelligent insight on things.

[Janet]

Originally Posted by lisarea

You do almost always start feeling pretty dumb when you start learning about a given field or topic, because you realize just how much there is to it, and the vast majority of people never achieve levels of mastery where you really think you know what there is to know about something. In my experience, you usually just have to adjust your perception of general knowledge levels, rather than your own.

I'm actually OK staying pretty dumb on a lot of things, because I know there isn't time to know too much. So I don't generally bother learning a topic unless it interests me in the first place.

Being a librarian is actually very good at teaching that lesson. It's also good at killing the collector impulse. When you are surrounded by so much knowledge and so many topics you realize pretty quickly that you'll never learn them all. And when you can find out the obscure books owned by only one or two libraries worldwide or the many, many editions of some things, being a completist on a topic, writer or performer starts looking futile as well.

That said, I really did stop studying vampire myths because I ran out of new things to learn. So if you pick a specific enough topic, true mastery is possible.

[Megatron]

Originally Posted by Janet

That said, I really did stop studying vampire myths because I ran out of new things to learn.

Did you read the Twilight books?

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by lisarea

...I cannot enjoy crappy beer, even ironically.

PBR, it's not good beer at all. The hipsters here drink PBR because it's six-point beer and it's cheap, and all the other hipsters are drinking it too. Sometimes they dunk that horrible concoction known as Red Bull in it too. Ewww! Nasty. How do I know that? Because I'm willing to try almost anything once.

[Megatron]

Meh, if you're gonna drink crap beer (and I've had plenty of PBR) get Miller High Life and mix it with orange juice. Brass monkey, baby.

[Janet]

I read the first Twilight book because my niece asked me to. I was never as much into the fiction as the myths anyway. I gave it up in 1996, and aside from one or two moments of curiosity or excitement at having access to stuff I couldn't find back then, I've stayed away.

[Megatron]

Watch Buffy, it's fun

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by Janet

I read the first Twilight book because my niece asked me to.

One good thing has come out of the 'Twilight' stories, my daughter read the books and then saw the movies, now she really likes 'Clair de Lune'.

[Janet]

I've seen all of Buffy. I even saw the film in theaters when I was still a vampirologist. I had to get over caring about movies getting the myths right to enjoy that stuff. Sometimes I still get annoyed.

[Megatron]

Eh, the Buffy movie sucked

[Janet]

The bones of what became great in the series were there in the movie. I remember telling my roommate that it had a lot of potential if it had been played straight. Her emotionally, and actually physically, absent parents leaving a void that her Watcher and the head vampire were fighting to fill could have been really interesting. And I had always wanted to see Rutger Hauer play a serious, evil vampire.

Ironically, although I can claim visionary status on Buffy's potential, none of the things I noticed actually made it to the TV show.

[Megatron]

The TV show still owned though .

Fun/stupid story: I never actually watched the TV show until 2011. I'd seen the movie when it first came out in theaters and thought it was dumb. My girlfriend finally got me to watch the show about two and a half years ago and got me hooked. Now I've seen the whole series twice.

And I've seen that god damned musical episode at least 20 times. Shut up, it's awesome.

I died, so many years ago.. but you can make me feel.. like it isn't so..