I'm gonna put forth two points here. First, my younger brother once pointed out that you can sort of gauge how well off someone is by how many asinine diet restrictions they keep. The more you can afford to restrict your diet for what amount to philosophical reasons, the better off you likely are. If you can spend $40 making a dish that tastes like shit and not feel bad about it, you're doing all right!
And that segues into my second point, which is that these people have next to no functional knowledge about the foods they're cooking with. This is kind of a runner with 'hippie' food in general, but it's especially glaring when you add more rules and regulations to all the 'multicultural' ingredients being used here.
Tamari is cooked. All soy sauce is technically cooked because the soybeans used to make it are cooked before they're fermented. Even magical nama shoyu, you cheating goddamn bastards.
And let's not forget their ignorance of things like harmonizing flavors and textures and just basic shit about what makes food taste good. Minced parsnips as rice? Have you ever just taken a bite of parsnip and tasted how strong and singular the taste is? Why not use mung bean sprouts, whish are much more mild, as a base? Oh, because then it just looks like a shitty salad and you can't play pretend with expensive ingredients. That's all this is, by the way, with the spiralized zucchini and the sad minced parsnips. They're making exorbitantly expensive, technically edible mud pies in the interest of still sorta kinda having the food they're accustomed to eating.
And that's a shame, really, because there are a lot of tasty things you could eat that aren't cooked at all if you don't psychologically need to trick yourself. Diced ripe tomato with a little salt and minced fresh basil? Tuck that shit in a lettuce leaf, eat it up. Pretty all right. I'd give a much deserved shoutout to kibbeh nayeh for your meat needs, but though you don't cook the bulgur in that recipe the wheat is parboiled in the process of becoming bulgur. It's almost as if we've been eating cooked food for thousands of fucking years with no adverse effects.
Also, I'd eat that Dorito sandwich before I even touched that shit in the bowl.
