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The global dietary transition is, among other things, marked by the prominence of softer, mechanically easy-to-eat foods and simple flavours. However, maintaining children’s tolerance to adverse dietary experiences, such as eating around bones, or consuming bitter vegetables, is an important contributor to nutritional balance and cultural preservation. Re-framing the capability to eat ‘difficult’ foods as an admirable, broadly useful, life skill would go a long way towards fighting against food neophobia or predilection for ultra-processed foods. In this article, I reflect on a sub-set of data gathered in 2018–20 from interactive food literacy benchmarking activities for 12–17-year-olds in Japan and Cambodia. Among the activities were measures of eating skill and tolerating adversity involving consumption of (A) bitter green vegetables and (B) whole fish. I find that social pressures lead children to derive social recognition from their food literacy and to make cognitive leaps about the utility of being able to face culinary adversity. This presents an alternative for casting adverse foods as personal, lifelong challenges rather than as momentary gustatory revulsion. It also presents an alternative approach to conventional food education, with the possibility for simultaneously measuring food literacy deficits and creating context for their resolution.

"Pre-prepared food venues (or soup-pot restaurants) in Cambodia and other Asian countries make their decisions about what to cook in a complex food–society nexus, factoring in their culinary skill, seasonality of ingredients, and diners' expectations for variety. As such, soup-pot restaurants exist as tenuous brokers between rural food customs and the prevailing expectations of city dwellers. In urban areas, they are a transparent window into seasonality and market cycles, as well as an opportunity to encounter culinary diversity and participate in the consolidation of an everyday 'national cuisine'. Soup-pot restaurants, in contrast to other restaurant formats, craft an experience that balances the agricultural and social dynamics of rural eating customs with city comforts. Typically, soup-pot restaurants can accomplish this while also serving as a space of dietary learning, providing meals that are culturally understood to be balanced and nutritious, and garnering support for local cuisine from across the socio-economic spectrum. As a site of research, these restaurants can be seen as potential innovators for managing the consequences of industrialization on food and agriculture, facilitating democratic daily practices of food sovereignty." (author's abstract), "Restaurants in Kambodscha und anderen asiatischen Ländern, wo vorgefertigtes Essen angeboten wird (sogenannte Soup-pot-Restaurants), gestalten ihren täglichen Speiseplan aus komplexen Gesichtspunkten der Ernährung, der jeweils eigenen Kochkenntnisse, der saisonalen Verfügbarkeit der Zutaten und den Ansprüchen der Gäste an einen abwechslungsreichen Speiseplan. Soup-pot-Restaurants spielen eine Vermittlungsrolle zwischen ländlichen Kochsitten und den Ansprüchen der städtischen Bevölkerung. In urbanen Gebieten spiegeln sie die saisonale Verfügbarkeit und Marktzyklen wieder und bieten gleichzeitig den Kunden die Möglichkeit, die kulinarische Vielfalt zu erschließen und sich so auch an dem Fortbestand der 'nationalen Küche' zu beteiligen. Im Gegensatz zu anderen Restaurant-Formen, schaffen die Soup-pot-Restaurants eine Art von Ausgleich zwischen der landwirtschaftlich-sozialen Dynamik der ländlichen Essgewohnheiten und den städtischen Annehmlichkeiten. Zusätzlich dazu fungieren Soup-pot-Restaurants als Quelle für Nahrungswissen und regionale Küche für eine breite sozioökonomische Kundenschicht. Außerdem entsprechen die angebotenen Mahlzeiten den kulturellen Erwartungen für ausgewogene Ernährung. Als Forschungsfeld dienen diese Restaurants als Musterbeispiel für die Bewältigung der Folgen der Industrialisierung in der Ernährung und Landwirtschaft und für die tägliche Praxis der Ernährungssouveränität." (Autorenreferat)