Spice up your life (and health) 🌶️

Plus: ice-cold ambient music, Japanese 'techno kayō', and ending your extremely online era.

As the 1990s drew to a close, the Spice Girls told us to Spice Up Your Life.

Most of us didn’t listen.

Surveys show the average European kitchen relies on only a handful of herbs, though each one adds thousands of unique plant compounds linked to better health.

Through those compounds, spices do more than make things taste nice. People who cook with a wider variety of herbs and spices tend to have better markers for heart and metabolic health.

If that sounds overwhelming, start small. Here are a few easy ways to start spicing up your life immediately:

1. Use spice mixes instead of single spices and use those instead of plain salt and pepper. For a versatile start, check out za’atar, garam masala, and herbes de Provence.

2. Add a bit of cinnamon and/or cardamom to your coffee.

3. Gently spice up your morning oats or cereal with cloves, cardamom, or allspice (aka pimento).

4. For your potato chips, add curry powder to your mayonnaise. Or for the Berliner twist: add curry powder to your ketchup.

5. Make your own low-effort mixes:

   1. a fresh blend to lift cold or mild foods like salads or eggs (dill, parsley, lemon zest)

   2. a warm mix for roasts, soups, and stews (cinnamon, cumin, paprika)

   3. a bright mix to add punch to dressings, sauces, and snacks (chilli, coriander, lime zest).

6. Roast some nuts in a dry pan and sprinkle chilli flakes on them when done.

7. Add warmth to your rice or scrambled eggs by stirring in turmeric.

8. Vegetables like Brussel sprouts or even potatoes are well complemented by a dash of nutmeg.

9. Alternate parsley and coriander leaves as a garnishes for soups, vegetables, or chop them and mix in with couscous, bulgur, or rice dishes.

10. Once you’re used to adding in some spice, try out a new one each month. Easy starts: mustard seeds, fenugreek, nigella, and sumac.

I think it’s incredible, almost magical, how these spices, especially if eaten variedly, nourish our bodies and brains in so many different ways.

Cooking is the alchemy we do every day. For example, did you know that when pasta is cooked and then cooled, its starch structure changes? This then has various benefits like lower glucose spikes, better gut health, and lower insulin response (reducing risk of type 2 diabetes). Small difference; big impact.

Now put on your 90s platform shoes and open that spice rack.

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જ⁀➴ for your curiosity જ⁀➴

I want to give a shout out to the book How To Build a Healthy Brain here. I read it a while back and it sparked greater awareness of my eating habits and their impact on my life. This, in turn, led to the above article. As well as my piece about blueberries:

I love blueberries 🫐

The book’s author, psychologist Kimberley Wilson, has just launched a new podcast with BBC called Complex, which does a great job at unpacking psychological terms and labels you hear every day. Find it on your fav podcasting app.

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Amsterdam’s legendary record store & label

Rush Hour Music

has launched a Substack that is well worth your time, if you’re into deep musical and subcultural dives. Their first post dives into the 1980s rise of “Techno Kayō”: a genre of poppy melodies, Kraftwerk-influenced electronic sounds, with a distinct Japanese twist:

“Japanese pop music producers and songwriters were constantly following the latest musical inventions and trends from abroad, and as a consequence elements of disco, dub, hip hop, New Wave, R&B and reggae began to be incorporated into techno kayo.”

Read more on Rush Hour’s Substack.

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An essay caught my eye titled How to end your extremely online era, which has a good analysis of how we end up spending so much time looking at screens, and what do do about it:

“The biggest problem is that you cannot just rip out three or four hours of your day you used to spend on a screen and expect to get along fine. You have to replace the online stuff with something else. Ideally, something better.”

It then follows-up with a variety of suggestions for how to spend your time. I have some suggestions of my own, too:

Eight easy ways to spend more time offline

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ᕱᕱ For your ears ᕱᕱ

I am ready for winter. So much so, that I wanted to find ambient music that reminds me of the crackling of ice and the bite of freezing cold air on my cheeks. I should have probably asked

Stephan Kunze

of

zensounds

, an excellent newsletter that dives deep into the world of ambient, and other music. Instead, I turned to /r/ambientmusic and the community certainly delivered. I got dozens of recommendations within hours of posting.

Here are three that stood out to me (and I wasn’t familiar with yet).

What I’m still looking for:

• Most of the recommendations were fairly drone-y. I like that, but I’m also curious about more melodic winter adventures.

• All the recommendations I looked into were produced by men. Surely, there must be women producing fantastic, frosty ambient.

Thomas Köner - Permafrost (1993)

Ominous. Lonely. Isolating. This is a rather minimalist album of cold drone that at times feels like the reverbs of a deep icy cave, and at others like the winds on a blindingly white arctic plain.

YouTube | Discogs

Sleep Research Facility - Deep Frieze (2007)

Inspired by Antarctic weather stations and the deeply minimalistic inhospitality of polar regions, this album has a bit more texture than Permafrost, but still feels ice cold.

Bandcamp

Pjusk - Sval (2010)

Hailing from Norway’s west coast, Pjusk do a great job of translating the “harsh weather and wild landscape” into sound. This album is the most rhythmic of the three and a good way to awaken from your brief ambient winter slumber.

Bandcamp