Jun 29 2010
TASTE IT?
You may think it’s the simplest, but I believe one of the most highly complicated human activities is eating, it involves all human senses the moment you put in something inside your mouth. And one of the intensely involve sense is taste.
Contrary to what we believe as natural, taste is not, it is determined by culture, and that practically everything that we eat, when it is eaten and where it is eaten is culturally determined, in other words we learn taste and it is taught.
Others may pay for thousands of pesos for a damn snail in a posh restaurant but others my just trudge same snail in their garden. Someone’s haute cuisine maybe a pest to others.
Taste is also anatomically determined. Some people don’t have taste, not that thing you think, but some people don’t have as many taste buds as others. Some can eat chile pepper without the feel of damn smokin’ ears. But others are super-tasters and are super sensitive to taste.
Gary Nabhan said, “We are what our ancestors ate and drank”, we get our taste buds adapted to the food from our environment, thus a Filipina OFW transported to Cyprus lose weight because her body reacted to some hard bread that she is not used eating.
And the sad part is that the foods in the past do not taste the same as our food now. We maybe are seeing the same corn, but are not as safe and great tasting as those that were grown in the old times. Our taste truly has changed and has adopted what food is readily and instantly available in our grocery shelves.
