Integrated System ~ Field Notes ~ 2 (Gastronomy)

It hydrates and nourishes, builds yet clears, grounds yet lifts … all while tasting delicious. This is integrated gastronomy.

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 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. My gut handles them well, like it were an integrated system. The body wants food that’s alive.

Post Cuisine

As ingenious 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. Traditional cuisine was born of necessity and geography. Ingredients stayed close to where they grew; flavour was the story of survival.

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, mango, dark chocolate, and sea salt dance in unison.

A chef in Seoul makes chia-buckwheat pancakes drizzled with maple yuzu syrup.
A barista in Copenhagen folds turmeric and cacao into matcha foam.
A baker in Mexico City plays with black sesame tiramisu.

This is freedom.

In the Post Cuisine world, 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.

There are spots Seoul, Tokyo, and Chiang Mai that aren’t merely cafés but rather what I would call some kind of integrated gastronomy lab where the goal seems not to be nostalgia, or novelty. 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.

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 … allow me to quickly contradict myself and 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.

Contextual Cavities

It took me too long to realize that it is the context, not the content, that makes for a vitality-producing 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 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. Perhaps you are dealing with something spherical yet thinking in circles.

Food is not about following. 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 you can find ways to combine these two … and make it work … if that’s what your palate and gut ask for at the moment. Or combine dark chocolate with perilla. Another Post Cuisine paradigm.

Context binds all of this. You 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! This is integrated gastronomy.

A fruit, leaf, or root means nothing without context. It’s some species, yes, but the way it interacts with its environment, what variety or cultivar it is … all of this is so crucial that saying you need “800 chill hours” for “apple” to fruit properly is incomplete and misleading. It treats it as something that exists outside of an integrated system. A Fuji in the Himalayas and a Fuji in central Japan are living different lives.

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 isolated fact functions as blindness.

We are integrated systems, eating integrated systems, living in integrated systems. That is the reason every prescription, in every domain, eventually falls flat on its face.

My kind of town

One of the few things that will not only survive AI but go on to explode in significance is the growing, making, pairing, and eating of delicious food in a cozy and vibrant environment. Office buildings will be uprooted and trees will be planted in their place … and any city that does not follow suit will fade in relevance.

And the second those buildings get uprooted, everything changes. Trees bring clean air, and gardens bring biodiversity. Space opens for food, for rest, for gatherings, for markets, for small creative kitchens. We return to the Cove. Any city that fails to make this pivot becomes a zombie, slowly then suddenly.

Office buildings honestly sound like a myth to me. I’m amazed at how something so useless is so ubiquitous. They have no ecological function (obviously!) but they also are the mega enablers of degeneracy. But I digress.

I can feel it when I walk through most cities today. The artisanal cafés and restaurants are there, glowing with craft and sincerity. Yet the surrounding environment is burdened with corporate culture. I smell car exhaust. I sense stress and sadness baked into the concrete for what it’s worth.

We flourish in the presence of life. Food tastes better when the air is clean and the soil is alive. Creativity sparks when the senses aren’t numbed by noise. And so, I think something like a permaculture garden is really a template for how cities should function. An integrated system.

Cities filled with gardens and small creative kitchens will become cultural and energetic magnets, and the permaculture garden is thus infrastructure.

Artificial integrated intelligence will render white and blue collar work obsolete for a human. It will swallow every abstract layer we’ve built. Software, spreadsheets, corporate rituals, busywork, digital paper shuffling. What remains meaningful is what cannot be automated, and what is not just safe from AI, but also more valuable because of it. This is the work of human intangibles, not the least of which includes total involvement of the five senses.

The art of alive food

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. 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, salty, overly stabilized, texturally monotone. My body slows, digestion drags, and I feel “full” but not light!

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 … not the foundation.

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.

When we use 100% fresh ingredients, we are removing every interference between nature and palate. 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 leaf crop built for resilience. Turmeric is a tropical rhizome that thrives in sustained warmth, deep soil vitality, and humid, living ground. Together they create a polyculture of taste and vitality in the bowl, and this is exactly how a permaculture garden operates …. species 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 flavor while still letting the food breathe. It is a transformation.

Industrial preservatives freeze food in place. They suspend decay, but they also suspend vitality. And generally speaking, such preservatives keep a food from rotting while stripping the vitality that once made it vibrant. You’re left with something shelf stable, but also stable in the wrong direction, that is, flat and without pulse.

Alive food moves, and dead food stagnates.

Vegetables aren’t real

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

But there are no vegetables. Nature does not produce them. This is because ‘vegetable’ is a term we just made up for edible plant parts that aren’t sweet fruits. Put simply, the word came from cooking, not from nature.

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 that explanation is flat. It doesn’t reveal anything significant. It gives no texture, no sense of life.

The deeper point is this: a fruit is not just a structure with seeds. A fruit is the plant attempting to extend itself into the future. 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.

Once you see this, 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.
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 gastronomy and ecology, between food and truth.

When you realize that vegetables aren’t real, you stop seeing food as isolated shapes in a grocery store tray. Instead, you start seeing light, soil, water, air, succession, intention. You start seeing what the plant was doing before you encountered it.

The Human Touch

This, a quaint Canadian home wherein an artisanal sourdough bakery operates, is an integrated system. The property and bread have multiple functions, feeding off of each other, yet there is unity. No spare parts, no hopes for a home run, no waste. A rather innovative (yet timeless) set up in the world of gastronomy.

Delicious food grown within an integrated nature system, a peaceful home, and transportation are the “goods and services” that AI and humans must prioritize, but in a personal, decentralized fashion.

If government is to exist at all, it should be to allow for the above to happen seamlessly. Clear the runway and shut up.

Banks and multinationals, on balance, make the world worse off. We must reimagine prosperity.

Bone Broth

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

A type of Korean 해장국, made of pork bone broth, stripe, coagulated blood, and various sprouts, herbs, and spices.

Every time you isolate, you 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.

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.

Fine Dining

This basil panna cotta with tomato jam and honey mascarpone is something I must try at least once in my life. An integrated system through and through.

Personal Anecdotes

This is was my very first dish during my very first trip to Japan. It’s a beef cutlet (牛カツだ). Here, it is presented as a little integrated system. That is to say, the sharp and light qualities of tofu, lotus root, radish, and lettuce perfectly counter-balanced the dense heaviness of the cutlet, creating a harmonized whole. Integrated gastronomy.

This is mung beans and seaweed cooked in ox bone broth, seasoned with turmeric, cumin, thyme, rosemary, and sea salt … with cabbage for extra texture.

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. This is nature … integrated … where everything has function, symbiotic, in a flawless turnover. Waste approaches zero. This is how all of life, including food, was meant to be approached.

And, when your food has enough water content you don’t need to walk around sipping water all day. Real food nourishes and hydrates at the same time.

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

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 … so 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.

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 or even explained, and it’s more of a feeling, a superposition 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 why the sensory perception is everything. The flux of how a land and its people bend an ingredient in a particular way, for a particular part of a meal …

I’ve spent years living in Seoul, and there, I can take a daytime stroll and find artisan dessert cafés almost everywhere.

Tiramisu is normally creamy and soft but the basque base was so dense here that it kicked the satiety factor up a few notches. Not your average tiramisu. The coffee aroma cut through it all cleanly too.

Below, we have chestnut cheesecake with cacao nibs, almond, whipped cream, and some sweet crumbles. Malty, sweet, and rich with crunch from the nuts & nibs. Rough and creamy. Inside the base is real whole chestnut.

Cream, through its richness, creates stability within my gut that further allows the plant-based ingredients to dance.

I’m sitting on gigabytes of gastronomy gems, but I’ll give you just one more dessert combo in Seoul (for now). Below we have a mugwort latte from a cafe I chanced upon, and I paired this with the most delicious mugwort-peanut whole-grain scone made by a creative little scone shop.