Integrated Gastronomy

Tell me how you eat, and I'll tell you how you live.

Genuine food hydrates and nourishes, builds yet clears, grounds yet lifts … all while tasting delicious.

The Gut Universe

Life is taken care of via a taken-care-of stomach.

The food that has the greatest potential for simultaneous palate and gut pleasing, is food that’s not bound to specific culture or cuisine. You can, this way, concentrate the entire globe into a mouthful.

What the snow globe is to the globe, the gut is to the cosmos. Put differently, the gut is the universalizer. Food made from across the world becomes local the instant it enters my gut, my central microcosm, and distance dissolves in the grand scheme where locality is in question.

Going further, I feel that the gut is a kind of cosmic transformer in that everything it encounters becomes here and now. Vietnamese lychee, Spanish olive, Canadian oats … these things lose their foreignness and become one, their distances erased.

We do not fully understand space. I’m starting to feel at home with flavours from anywhere because once tasted, those flavours functionally become home. The new pantry is global, yet still beautifully seasonal, and we are transcending cuisine, what I call the Post Cuisine era. More on this shortly.

Taste reveals this directly. The gut takes a mango grown under full tropical sun, a cacao bean raised under filtered shade, and maple syrup born of winter sap pressure, and transforms them into one unified mold. This is why certain foods from far away feel strangely familiar.

Lastly, I will say this. The Human body adjusts a lot better to insufficient food than it does to too much. Energy can be synthesized elsewhere, and it goes to show that food is to be savoured in high quality but modest quantity.

Post Cuisine

I have seen spots in Seoul, Tokyo, and Chiang Mai that aren’t merely cafés but rather what I would call some kind of integrated gastronomy lab. I see it as the collapse of East and West, plant and flesh, ancient and future, nourishment and pleasure.

Lotus seed with espresso.
Seaweed with caramel.
Miso with maple.

It can all work.

As indigenous populations collapse and age-old recipes transform … you will see the rise of insanely creative foods that, unlike traditional cuisine, transcend rather than preserve identity.

But the modern pantry is global. What once took months to trade now travels overnight. Coconut meets sourdough bread, perilla leaf gets crushed into powder like that of matcha ... and mango, dark chocolate, and sea salt play together all of a sudden.

A chef in Seoul makes buckwheat pancakes drizzled with yuzu syrup.
A barista in Copenhagen folds turmeric and cacao into a creamy foam.
A baker in Mexico City makes a black sesame tiramisu.

I cal this the Post Cuisine world, and here, flavour is not enough. Every creation must also feel alive in the body, providing both nourishment and lightness whereby the gut and palate are in symbiosis.

The trap is to think tradition is truth. Indeed we have strayed from truth as generations pass. The mistake is to equate that truth, that home, that origin, to the way things used to be. Different things.

Having said all this … I will say that dishes like injera are remarkable instantiations of culture and get rave reviews from me. Korean cuisine is another survivor, and we will soon see why in our Undeniable Classics.

Contextual Cavities

It took me too long to realize that it is the context, not the content, that makes for a vital meal.

You can make a logical argument that any diet, devoid of ultra-processing, is beneficial to the body. And people have done so countless times. But what a specific body needs at a specific moment in time and space is impossible to prescribe with 100% correctness.

And so, such specificity must be felt, on a personal level.

There may be times in the past that you think back to, where you ate a certain thing and felt a prolonged jolt of vitality and energy. It is often the case that what worked back then, worked for reasons you were wholly blind to. The configuration was different in a dimension beyond you.

The adzuki (red) bean, when cooked thoroughly, plays wonderfully with sugar, yielding a grounded textured sweetness. The bosc pear is juicy beyond measure. And yet I can find ways to combine these two … and make it work … if that’s what my palate and gut ask for at the moment.

Context binds all of this. One can establish the conditions and let nature reveal itself. Every ingredient has a place and purpose. Fennel seeds create a warm and cool contrast. Hazelnut satiates with a floral touch. Or the Korean shiitake mushroom with a dressing made of apple, pineapple, and soy sauce fermented for 10 years, all sautéed with red/yellow/green capsicum … juicy, sweet, tangy with solid umami.

I think, therefore, it is about gauging the moment, not about finding the so-called perfect food. If done correctly, taste and vitality collapse into a single sensation. The correct foods for that moment reveal themselves without effort. In other words, you just know!

Lastly, a fruit, leaf, or root means nothing without context. It’s a species, yes, but the way it interacts with its environment, what variety or cultivar it is … all of this is so crucial.

Therefore, saying you need “800 chill hours” for “apple” to fruit properly is incomplete and misleading. It treats food as something that exists outside of an integrated system.

A Fuji in the Himalayas and a Fuji in central Japan are living different lives while sharing some fundamental essence.

The centralized mind wants a rule: “apples need 800 chill hours.” But altitude, soil biology, humidity, neighbouring species, wind exposure, and a hundred other threads fold into whether that tree fruits well or not.

It’s the same pattern everywhere. A nutrient on a label tells you nothing about how your body actually absorbs it in the context of the whole meal, your gut flora, your unique configuration.

The art of alive food

Alive food moves, and dead food stagnates.

Alive food tends to have a nice spectrum of colour. Multiple textures, aromas that still feel tied to soil and sunlight, diversity in all forms and as a matter of function. Spice, sweetness, lift, gentle bitterness, mineral depth, broth richness. It is eating a garden; each ingredient has its natural essence intact.

Dead food, on the other hand, is muted, heavy, too salty, overly stabilized, texturally monotone. My body slows, digestion drags, and I feel “full” but not light!

There is nuance here, for fermentation is a world unto itself, and kimchi is a fine example of food that is "old", yet still alive.

Imagine if a human were taught, at an early age, the difference between dead food and alive food, in the domain of vitality, without getting caught in the web of nutrition. Not that nutrition is total nonsense but the sprinkle is what it really is.

By the way, they call it crop yield because nature yields, by nature. But natural laws are broken by industrial agriculture and factory farming; soil is depleted and ecosystems are dead. Your vitality is shot. The elements need reciprocity.

What we experience as “vibrant flavour” was really integration in nature, not necessarily culinary complexity or fanciness.

A tomato grows as an herbaceous plant that thrives in full sun.

Carrot lives as a root miner, pulling minerals from deeper layers.

Kale is an early succession, resilient leaf crop.

Turmeric is a tropical rhizome that thrives in warmth.

Together they create a polyculture of taste and vitality in the bowl ... reinforcing, stabilizing, and elevating one another.

I don’t like commercial preservatives because it keeps the food alive but without the aliveness, and so I have to imagine it attempts to subtly steer the body toward the same configuration.

Natural preservation uses time and life: fermentation, salt, acid, sun drying. These methods intensify flavour while still letting the food breathe.

Industrial preservatives freeze food in place. They suspend decay ... but they also zap vitality. You’re left with something shelf stable. It's stable alright ... flat and without pulse.

Vegetables aren’t real

There are fruits, leaves, roots, flowers, stems, tubers, bulbs, and seeds. These are from plants. Outside of this, there is also algae and fungi.

But there are no vegetables. Nature does not produce them. It's a term we just made up for culinary purposes.

We grow up hearing that tomato is technically a fruit. Zucchini too. Eggplant, peppers, cucumbers. People recite the reason like a trivia card: it has seeds, so it’s a fruit. But it's not about labels, and such classification does not reveal anything of true substance.

To see how a thing is part of a greater integrated system ... a fruit is not just a structure with seeds, but the plant attempting to renew itself. Blossoms open, pollinators arrive, the ovary swells, and a fruit emerges to be eaten, carried, or dropped so that its seed can enter new ground.

The entire culinary map rearranges itself.

Spinach and kale are leaves.
Carrot is a root.
Broccoli is a cluster of unopened flowers.
Onion is a bulb storing energy for next year’s growth.
Bamboo shoots are stems.

A cashew nut is a seed.
Ginger and turmeric are rhizomes.

Cacao is an understory tree shaped by filtered light, matcha is a shrub shaped by shade to yield its signature flavour, durian is a sun-loving creamy tropical sitting high, and coconut is a coastal canopy tree shaped by unhindered sunlight.

Each part has a culinary role, yes, but also a natural one. And understanding this softens the boundary between nature and palate.

Stop seeing vegetables and you start seeing light, soil, water, warmth, air ... and the foundational structure of things. This changes the whole game.

Hydration

When my food has enough water content I don’t need to walk around sipping water all day. Real food nourishes and hydrates at the same time.

In bone broth lies the emblem of “no waste”. I didn’t waste the animal, for I harnessed the blood, skin, bones, and organs. I did what Nature does. And in doing so, I created an integrated system on the plate and subsequently in my body. The benefits go beyond collagen (protein), minerals, and vitamins.

Every time we isolate, we risk de-integration. We isolated not just MSG but also collagen and even protein.

But using heat, one can extract collagen from the connective tissue, minerals from the bone matrix, and nourishment from the marrow. The Korean soup dishes like 곰탕, 해장국, 청국장, & 미역국 are integrated; they are complete. They communicate with the body not just via taste, but texture, temperature, and vibes.

To eat muscle meat while avoiding the connective tissue like cartilage, marrow, and blood is a type of de-integration that may never rear its ugly head in blatant ways but, often does so subtly.

Side note: I think a chicken was always meant to be cooked whole, in its own juices, because the gelatinous bone broth you end up with is an elixir with unmatched taste, and it gives me the energy needed to perform many pull-ups at the park while sporting a light and sealed gut.

The essence of a chicken is not found in a central location, and so it must be extracted whole, through the bones and through everything else. For this, you need both Fire and Water.

You can add apple (among other things) and have its sweetness transform the overall flavour; this was done in a Seoul restaurant that made the best tori paitan (鶏白湯) ramen I’ve ever had.

Undeniable Classics

As real as Post Cuisine is, there are ... some undeniable classics. There is a reason some recipes have stood the test of time. I will tell you about some of my favourites.

Hot chocolate

Slowly acclimatize your palate to the complex fruity-bitter quality of cacao so that one day you may see it beyond a sweet treat and as the integrated, grounding-yet-lifting seed that it really is.

Hot chocolate is one drink I can think on, write on, move on, and rest on; it gets my rave reviews.

Fundamentally, we are talking just the two ingredients here, milk and cacao. I like mine with dark chocolate, sea salt, and some type of raw sugar, even maple syrup, for a woody sweetness.

A baby mammal survives on milk alone. I'm lucky that my body can make light work of milk ... so in many ways I feel I'm off to the races. Milk nourishes and hydrates at the same time. Complete protein, calcium, phosphorus, fat-soluble vitamins, potassium. A touch of sodium and magnesium. Fats that sit slow, sugars that release calm.

Plant-based and animal-based foods were always meant to work in perfect unison. Dairy elevates the plant, like milk does to cacao. Similarly, bone broth elevates the plant. More generally, the animal elevates the plant, and vice versa.

At times, I enjoy a bit of fresh cream in my hot chocolate. Cream, through its richness, creates stability within my gut that further allows the cacao to dance. If I took a picture of every hot chocolate I've ever drunk, I'd be sitting on gigabytes of gastronomy gems.

Pizza margherita

The aroma of basil in a pizza margherita combining with tomato, mozzarella, and the fermented dough to make me full yet agile is an artifact of integrated gastronomy.

Chocolate éclair

The difference between butter and egg yolk is the difference between cream and custard. One brings richness with texture; the other, with flavour.

So, a fresh-cream-filled éclair bridges both of these worlds via the eggy notes of the choux ... it’s a “hard custard” in a way … and all of this encases the silken interior. This sweet pastry made me ecstatic as a kid and it’s no wonder why.

East Asian soybean

The difference between Japanese and Korean cuisine can begin to be understood by deeply feeling the difference between a miso soup and a 된장찌개, and this requires doing the hard work of tasting both with a locked-in palate.

Both are derived from fermented soybean, both are 감칠맛, but one is more 담백한 and the other is more 얼큰 (though many would also say it’s 구수한). Some things cannot be translated and it’s more of a feeling, an integrated blend of the five senses, something that if you know, you know.

This is only a preliminary distinction but from here emerges a sensational story of East Asian gastronomy.

Now, it would be lazy to conclude that Japanese food is mild and Korean food is spicy, even if generally speaking. This is I think why the sensory perception is everything. There is an interesting flux in how a land and its people bend an ingredient in a particular way, for a particular part of a meal.

Injera

It’s unreal how much flavour and power is locked in Ethiopian (and African) cuisine.

The injera, fermented teff-grain flatbread, soaked up the juices and spices like a sponge; it had its own tanginess that added to the balance very fittingly.

In fact, after trying this for the first time, my standard for grains had gone up ~50%.

A grain should bring its own spark to the dish rather than be just deadweight or a mere salt absorber. Injera is perfect. If any part of the dish cannot be enjoyed by itself, alone, then maybe it does not belong. I can eat injera flatbread by itself, for it is tangy, spongey, chewy, and delicious. I don't know if I can say the same about plain white rice.