Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmorris | Hacker News Reader

>> The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based.

Speaking of a group of about 1.6 billion people as if they were a monolith is not particularly productive.

Just looking at China itself, there is huge variation in the "average" diets between different provinces (e.g., Shanghainese dishes tend to be sweeter, Sichuanese dryer and spicier, etc.). And even at that provincial level it's kind of silly to lump everyone into a single average.

View on HN

I find it funny when people see China as a single country imagine if someone referred to Europe with all its cultures as a single culture who all ate the same thing. Now picture China with probably 5,000 years of culture must be immensely more diverse.

Exactly. I am kind of annoyed when people assume I speak Cantonese simply because I am Chinese. Cantonese speakers only constitute 5% of total Chinese population. Nobody assume if you are European, then you speak Italian.

Couldn't this criticism be said of the grandparent as well, who lumped all of China (and other countries) together in one statement?

I think it's the specific phrasing that becomes problematic. The GP said "can equally be found in China and Indonesia", which means that there are individuals with said diets in the those countries. This is categorically either true or false.

The parent discussed the diet of these huge countries as if they were consistent across all (or even most) individuals. In my opinion, this becomes highly subjective very fast.

Granted, this argument is pretty pedantic, and the threshold which determines when a group is too large to discuss as a single unit is squishy and highly contextual.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com