Taste and Pleasure
I probably wouldn’t be writing about food if I hadn’t had a lifetime of pleasure associated with it. This pleasure has been nourishment and comfort and inspiration for me.
I want to talk about the pleasure factor of our collective eating experiences. We all have responses to the food we put in our mouths, and often it is pronounced. We find we are “in love” with artichokes (that’s me) or scalloped potatoes or chicken soup, and then on the other hand, we’re sort of in neutral zone about some things like carrots or beef stew, and clearly aversive to other foods like Fruit Loops or rutabagas...
Since my work in this book is so founded on our sensory pleasure with food, I decided to investigate the phenomenon of tasting and discovering pleasure.
What happens when we bite into a peach, a hot dog, or a piece of chocolate? This involves a sequence of experiences like: taste, aroma, texture, temperature, “mouthfeel” and more, and they cause us to feel satisfied or unsatisfied, or indifferent...
Here’s how the process of discovering that satisfaction or its opposite unfolds: when we taste a morsel of food, we grasp with our tongues which are covered in taste papillae where the infamous “taste buds” live... All those taste buds contain taste “receptor cells” layered like flower petals. (These fall into several distinct characteristics: salty, sweet, bitter, sour, umani or savory). These cells are replaced every 9-15 days.
A signal is ultimately sent from these tiny cells to the part of the brain that controls breathing, heart rate and other bodily functions (the primitive part of the brain). It turns out that when those elements that the body needs (like salt and sugar) reach the primitive brain, dopamine is released followed by a flush of endorphins – in other words, pleasure.
Brillat Savarin, the French lawyer and gourmand and author of the highly revered food book called Physiology of Taste, wrote: “taste invites us by pleasure to repair the losses which result from the use of life”.
In other words, the pleasure we take in food seems to signify we are feeding ourselves helpful nourishment. I truly love this idea.
This mix of chemicals in the brain that signifies pleasure seems to act as a reward to man and animals for doing something that aids in his/her own survival. “Pleasure and displeasure are nature’s way of helping ensure that animals stay alive long enough to make more of themselves and pass on their genes.” (From the book Delicious)
When you think about it, this premise seems essential to the survival of the fittest... but then that’s my own little private aside here. The fact that animals over all the millenia have had the capacity to not only taste but experience “pleasure” makes me truly happy for some odd reason. Even though I’ve trekked the world and observed a great array of creatures both wild and domestic, I had never stopped to think about whether or not animals took actual pleasure in eating...
Now back to people pleasures with food.
The great Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley has written:
“Food is the easiest way for all of us to engage with beauty in our everyday lives. Any meal has the potential to crack us open to pleasure and connection and joy. Cooking and eating food together can be an everyday experience of beauty that reaches all of our senses”
To spark the imagination in the food pleasure realm I thought I’d offer up some (to me) amazing taste pleasures and invite you to consider what arises in your own imagination.
As to the infamous and seductive flavor called SWEET, I’d have to say that such foods as honey, strawberry jam, and sweet potatoes come to my mind.
Honey coats the mouth with a sticky comforting earthy flavor, sometimes making our cheeks pucker just a bit, and the other seductive thing about honey is where it came from: the great industrious honey bee.
I see strawberry jam on wonderful homemade bread and I know happiness follows eating that.
Sweet potatoes fill your mouth with a soft orange or pale yellow flesh that assures your of nourishment. Put butter in that warm potato and you know you’re going to be comforted.
I have to confess I’m a sucker for SALTY, another of our primary “tastes.” What shows up in my imagination here is: soy sauce, celery, smoked salmon, and bacon.
Soy has been in my life since my first Japanese or Chinese restaurant experience, and I’ve always doused my rice or veggies or even my roast chicken with it. It tastes like a liquor sometimes, it tastes of the earth, and it seems to elevate the flavor of whatever you pour it over.
When you bite into a stalk of celery, you taste both moisture, crunchiness, and salt. Very satisfying.
And the salty tang of smoked salmon is a perfect match for the crème fraiche or cream cheese we all usually slather over this taste treat. Bacon – what can be said of bacon except it’s savory and greasy, versatile and begs to be relished ? It’s one of the few animal derived meats I don’t have qualms about eating!
How do you feel about SOUR? Do you see it in your repertoire of foods?
For me, lemons come first, magical lemons that accomplish everything from garnishing a glass of iced tea to pouring their juice into a lemon tart. Lemons are essential on certain kinds of grilled or raw fish, they are important for my mayonnaise dip for artichokes, they are perfect over grilled asparagus and add wonderful tang to the inside of a roast chicken.
Rye bread is sour and tangy and perfect for presenting smoked fish, or just having as a piece of toast with butter.
Vinegar of course comes to mind with its amazing permutations. Balsamic, wine, raspberry, champagne, and so on... We need vinegar to balance the rich olive oil for a salad dressing, we need it for marinating vegetables and such, and flavoring soups and stews.
I have always been a fan of BITTER...
I particularly love radicchio and chicory in the vegetable family that add an astringent and crunchy experience to any salad;
I love rosemary that woody herb that I always cast on top of roast chicken; and
I find coffee’s bitterness very attractive. I’ve been a coffee drinker since I lived in Italy as a young girl, and I favor the dark roast of espresso particularly. Bitterness wakes us up, I think, and keeps us alert to what we’re eating and drinking.
These days we hear a lot about the flavor of UMAMI – this is a Japanese term for savory and rich. It covers a lot of territory in terms of foods but what comes to mind first is mushrooms, tomatoes, and seaweed. You might think it hard to interrelate these foods, and in some ways I do too. But I also get it. Umami foods seem to be to possess layered flavor that takes us back to the earth.
With the mushroom that connection is obvious – think of the forests where mushrooms live in the magnificent dampness.
When I put my nose to a completely fresh tomato, I immediately smell the sunshine and earth that it grew from.
And with seaweed, how can we not remember that it comes from our salty ocean waters?
I don’t know which of these umami flavors pleases me the most... imagining now the deep savory hit of grilled mushrooms, and the glory of the red tomato in a BLT, and the little seaweed-wrapped pieces of nigiri in our favorite Japanese bistro.
Is it about a subtle marriage of flavors or does each of these foods have an intrinsically complex quality? I don’t know. But I do know that all of these foods draw me back again and again so I may have a particularly happy and pleasurable experience. So that I can discover deliciousness.
With gratitude for food and to you for reading my words and taking my books home!
Mag
P.S. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash