i often wonder how much of an impact my gustatory upbringing has had on my current, adult acuity. central in my quest to illuminate my gustatory deficiencies (and hopefully the reduction of a very uncomfortable sensation that my body is treating new tastes like potential pathogens*) is the sad realization of just how little i interfaced with the sensory and sensual aspects of my food, preferring for a more banal, droll, and predictable uniformity of size, shape, color, convenience, nutrition, and sadly, taste and smell. Take for instance the inimitable and irresistible BAGEL BITES:
do you love bagels?
do you love pizza?
do you love tiny things that look like big things?
do you have a microwave?
chances are pretty high that if you answered yes to three of the four questions, you'll love BAGEL BITES. good, now let's pre-heat the oven. BAGEL BITES, in my opinion, like many others no less imaginative, are the apotheosis of our paradoxical manufactured food culture: an increased diversity of foods, but an increased reliance on fewer sensory mechanisms (fats, salts, and sugars). these little Ballardian nuggets, arranged like soviet bloc housing facilities on a cookie sheet, while convenient and affordable, strip-mine our collective cuisine and do little, if anything at all, to challenge our minds and senses in the kitchen and at the table, unless you were to leave them in the oven too long after accidentally topping them with a generous toupe of nutella. they have no affiliation to lineage and, frankly, abuse the responsibilities of reward-based foods. devil's proxy: they do encourage my palate to play well with others, though.
so instead, if i had spent my early after school years lounging about watching zach morris finesse his way out of another problem while grazing on fresh cherry tomatoes and grilled jicama sticks, would i now have a better control of my gustatory equipment while watching tina fey resuscitate comedy? you could argue the sheer diversity of tastes from fresh, real food would have, knowingly or not, stimulated not just my amylase, but a more complete sensory response. but unless i were to have actually looked at my food, engaged with it, smelled it, talked about it, would i have created as much space for it in my long-term memory as the BAGEL BITE? would i really be twenty years ahead of where i feel like i am now? would i trust my taste like i trust my lending institution?
one of the many promising results of programs like alice waters' edible schoolyard will be an uptake of the idea of the ecology of taste into the consciousness of the youth involved, challenging their senses and their relationships to food through the earth and others. food may spring to life, and so too, their flavors! maybe one day, metrics like market share and plastic ingenuity will be replaced by the relations humans and the earth share to produce delicious food.
*from greek pathos "suffering, passion", and gignomai "i give birth to"**
**a self-fulfilling prophecy?!
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