In Search of Traditional Asian Diets

It's been difficult for me to find good information on Asian diets prior to modernization. Traditional Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese diets are sometimes portrayed as consisting mostly of white rice, with vegetables and a bit of meat and soy, but I find that implausible. Rice doesn't grow everywhere, and removing all the bran was prohibitively labor-intensive before the introduction of modern machine milling. One hundred years ago, bran was partially removed by beating or grinding in a mortar and pestle, as it still is in parts of rural Asia today. Only the wealthy could afford true white rice.

Given the difficulty of growing rice in most places, and hand milling it, the modern widespread consumption of white rice in Asia must be a 20th century phenomenon, originating in the last 20-100 years depending on location. Therefore, white rice consumption does not predate the emergence of the "diseases of civilization" in Asia.

In the book Western Diseases: Their Emergence and Prevention, there are several accounts of traditional Asian diets I find interesting.

Taiwan in 1980

The staple constituent of the diet is polished white rice. Formerly in the poorer areas along the sea coast the staple diet was sweet potato, with small amounts of white rice added. Formerly in the mountains sweet potato, millet and taro were the staple foods. During the last 15 years, with the general economic development of the whole island, white polished rice has largely replaced other foods. There is almost universal disinclination to eat brown (unpolished) rice, because white rice is more palatable, it bears kudos, cooking is easier and quicker, and it can be stored for a much longer period.

Traditionally, coronary heart disease and high blood pressure were rare, but the prevalence is now increasing rapidly. Stroke is common. Diabetes was rare but is increasing gradually.

Mainland China

China is a diverse country, and the food culture varies by region.

Snapper (1965)… quoted an analysis by Guy and Yeh of Peiping (Peking) diets in 1938. There was a whole cereal/legume/vegetable diet for poorer people and a milled-cereal/meat/vegetable diet for the richer people.

Symptoms of vitamin A, C and D deficiency were common in the poor, although coronary heart disease and high blood pressure were rare. Diabetes occurred at a higher rate than in most traditionally-living populations.

Japan

On the Japanese island of Okinawa, the traditional staple is the sweet potato, with a smaller amount of rice eaten as well. Seafood, vegetables, pork and soy are also on the menu. In Akira Kurosawa’s movie Seven Samurai, set in 16th century mainland Japan, peasants ate home-processed millet and barley, while the wealthy ate white rice. Although a movie may not be the best source of information, I suspect it has some historical basis.

White Rice: a Traditional Asian Staple?

It depends on your perspective. How far back do you have to go before you can call a food traditional? Many peoples' grandparents ate white rice, but I doubt their great great grandparents ate it frequently. White rice may have been a staple for the wealthy for hundreds of years in some places. But for most of Asia, in the last few thousand years, it was probably a rare treat. The diet most likely resembled that of many non-industrial African cultures: an assortment of traditionally prepared grains, root vegetables, legumes, vegetables and a little meat.

Please add any additional information you may have about traditional Asian diets to the comments section.

"Can I call you 'babe'?"

Recently I was chatting with some colleagues, and we were discussing a researcher joining our group. One person started to say, "And this new girl-,"  looks at me, "-Oh, or should I say, 'woman'?"

All the men in the room turned to look at me.

"Definitely 'woman'. I would only say 'girl' if I was speaking about a child."

This question actually sparked a good, productive conversation. Sometimes these situations can get awkward when one is asked to represent their entire sex, but I really appreciate it when people care enough about their language to ask.

Photo by Occhiovio

I also really appreciate when people correct me on my language usage. Lately I've been trying to not use ableist language in my speech, and am glad to be called on it. It's really difficult to deprogram yourself once you establish certain patterns, but it's worth it.

Why? Because language shapes thought. While the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is unlikely to be true in its strongest form (language determines thought), it is most certainly true in its weak form (language influences thought). Recently cultural neuroscience has been making a splash, showing things like how people raised in individualistic or collectivist cultures will respond to the same words in completely different ways. Other studies have suggested that education level affects how people differ in the way they consider concepts such as freedom and choice.  And who knows if any of the studies we've conducted over the past century have external validity outside WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations.


Words matter. So when talking to someone who represents a group that you are not a part of, it's not a bad idea to ask them what term they'd prefer you use when you refer to them or their group. Much better that then putting your foot in your mouth!

the little man....

is finally here.....and i can't get enough of him :)

we thought we had the perfect baby...the first night home from the hospital, he barely woke up to eat....the second night, a completely different story. we are a little sleep deprived (warren just made a grill cheese and forgot to put the top piece of bread on). here are some pictures of walker's room; promise to be more bright eyed later this week...well, maybe :) thanks so much for all of your well wishes for the delivery....it was very easy, thankfully.

*ps. taylor LOVES her baby brother, which is a good thing b/c he looks just like her!

KOPI Herbal - Kopi kaya dengan kandungan herbal

Kopi Herbal merupakan salah satu produk minuman untuk meningkatkan stamina dan kesehatan. Kopi ini mengandung berbagai macam herbal berkhasiat diantaranya:
1. Mesoyi, Kapulaga, serimpi, dan secang untuk mencegah masuk angin.
2. Jahe Merah dan Lengkuas merah untuk kebugaran tubuh.
3. Daun Dewa untuk melancarkan aliran darah.
4. Ginseng, dan Euricoma Radix (pasak Bumi) untuk stamina,
5. Pegagan untuk revitalisasi otak dan kulit (dimana kadarnya dibuat tepat sehingga efek sedatifnya berkurang)
6. dan Tribulus untuk menjaga organ reproduksi kita;
7. Tapak liman dan daun sendok untuk menjaga ginjal dan juga menjaga tekanan darah.

semuanya komposisi itu kita campur dengan kombinasi yang tepat dan kita extraksi sehingga bau-bau herbalnya menjadi berkurang tanpa mengurnagi khasiatnya.Disamping itu kopi yang kita gunakan adalah kopi arabica extract kita pilih agar kopinya harum, serta cream yang digunakan adalah non dairy creamer atau creamer nabati non kolesterol. Segera nikmati ....

Anda tertarik.. silakan contact : 021-96120932 (budi prakoso) untuk pemesanan. Harga 35rb/10sachet. MIn.order 4 kotak.

Object detection vs. Semantic segmentation

Recently I realized that object class detection and semantic segmentation are the two different ways to solve the recognition task. Although the approaches look very similar, methods vary significantly on the higher level (and sometimes on the lower level too). Let me first state the problem formulations.

Semantic segmentation (or pixel classification) associates one of the pre-defined class labels to each pixel. The input image is divided into the regions, which correspond to the objects of the scene or "stuff" (in terms of Heitz and Koller (2008)). In the simplest case pixels are classified w.r.t. their local features, such as colour and/or texture features (Shotton et al., 2006). Markov Random Fields could be used to incorporate inter-pixel relations.

Object detection addresses the problem of localization of objects of the certain classes. Minimum bounding rectangles (MBRs) of the objects are the ideal output. The simplest approach here is to use a sliding window of varying size and classify sub-images defined by the window. Usually, neighbouring windows have similar features, so each object is likely to be alarmed by several windows. Since multiple/wrong detections are not desirable, non-maximum suppression (NMS) is used. In PASCAL VOC contest an object is considered detected, if the true and found rectangles are intersected on at least half of their union area. In the Marr prize winning paper by Desai et al. (2009) more intelligent scheme for NMS and incorporation of context is proposed. In the recent paper by Alexe the objectness measure for a sliding window is presented.

In theory, the two problems are almost equivalent. Object detection reduces easily to semantic segmentation. If we have a segmentation output, we just need to retain object classes (or discard the "stuff" classes) and take MBRs of regions. The contrary is more difficult. Actually, all the stuff turns into the background class. All the found objects within the rectangles should be segmented, but it is a solvable issue since foreground extraction techniques like GrabCut could be applied. So, there are technical difficulties which could be overcome and the two problems could be considered equivalent, however, in practice the approaches are different.

There arise two questions:

1. Which task has more applications? I think we do not generally need to classify background into e.g. ground and sky (unless we are programming an autonomous robot), we are interested in finding objects more. Do we often need to obtain the exact object boundary?

2. Which task is sufficient for the "retrieval" stage of the intelligent vision system in the philosophical sense? I.e. which task is more suitable for solving the global problem of exhaustive scene analysis?

Thoughts?