Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good Read Online Free Page A

You won’t waste precious mouthfuls on food that doesn’t taste delicious to you.
    Tasting is a complex process. Your preferences actually have a scientific basis and knowing this can help you understand why you eat what you eat. Or don’t. Not only do you live in your own sensory world, your personal life history also affects what you choose to eat. Your food likes and dislikes are not simply a matter of: I like Brussels sprouts but you don’t. You love eggs, but I can’t stand them. It’s possible that, if you dislike Brussels sprouts, you are more sensitive to bitter tastes than the average taster. Or it’s possible that you had a bad experience with Brussels sprouts that unconsciously (or consciously) led you to avoid them. I once met a man who couldn’t drink coffee. In his childhood he’d been playing with a coffee display in the grocery store when it fell on top of him, covering him with oily, aromatic roasted coffee beans. The fear and embarrassment of this event had forever influenced the emotions he associated with coffee, leading him to avoid it for the rest of his life in order to avoid experiencing those emotions.
    You use all five senses when you’re exposed to food—at the grocery store, the restaurant, or the office, or when you’re inundated with ubiquitous food advertising and marketing. “The senses are so influential on each other that we often don’t know through which sense we’re perceiving the world,” says the University of California Riverside’s Lawrence Rosenblum, who studies how thesenses combine and interact with one another. Once you learn what triggers each sense, you will be more aware of why you respond the way you do. Taste What You’re Missing will give you insider knowledge of how food marketers, restaurateurs—even farmers—leverage your instinctual reactions so you can make more informed food choices.
    Mostly, I hope this book ignites a culture of taste appreciation. Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost touch with the sensory majesty of the meal. I’m not referring to special occasions when you dine at fine restaurants, but to the other 99 percent of your meals: the run-of-the-mill three times a day we eat at home, at work, at school, in the car. We put food in front of children and expect them to eat it, without explaining it to them, without using it to teach them a form of culinary art appreciation, and without encouraging experimentation. The best way to learn about food is to play with it!
    When I was in hotel school, my mentor Tom Kelly, a professor of food and beverage management at Cornell University, encouraged frequent dining out and drinking of wine to learn more about each. It worked for me, and I believe that you, too, need to experience firsthand the concepts I write about. To help with this, Taste What You’re Missing includes easy interactive exercises to illustrate the sensory concepts in the book. The exercises range from very simple (requiring only one or two ingredients) to more complex (requiring cooking). I hope you’ll take the time to do them with your friends, partners, and children.
    My taste awakening started with a tortilla chip, gained momentum with meals at great restaurants, and continues to this day. But you don’t have to be a professional and you certainly don’t have to spend a lot of money these days to have your own glorious food moment. Even now, a decade and a half after becoming a professional food taster, I still find tastes, aromas, and textures in food that imbue me with a sense of wonder: from bites in the lab to mundane breakfasts at home, sandwiches at the airport, salads at my desk, and dinner that I cook for my family—and, hopefully, at the restaurant I’m going to dine in tonight. Every bite is an opportunity for a unique sensory experience.
    Since the beginning of this century, a food revolution in the United States has been gaining momentum. We’ve become much more attuned to food, in almost every respect. We