The Taste of Food

I went to the Staples Center last week to cheer the Montreal Canadiens to victory over the Los Angeles Kings.

Larry got the tickets for Valentine's Day, and they were premier seats on a tier with higher-quality food than the average arena fare.

I ordered a veggie burger. It came on a whole wheat bun. I was impressed until I tasted it.

It was sweet. As in sugary. I have never eaten such a sweet veggie burger in my life. The fries were very salty. Thank goodness for the bitter Sam Adams to balance out the flavors.

Of course, sweet and salty are what I should have expected. Most of the food served to the public riffs on those two flavors. It’s why I eat at home - more diversity of taste.

In the world of cooking there are four primary tastes: sweet, salty, bitter and sour. And a fifth taste described as umami. It’s difficult to define, a savory flavor that gives dry-aged steak, lobster, shiitake mushrooms, soy sauce, parmesan or gruyere that certain something. Dishes that are balanced with an umami component seem to have an extra dimension of flavor.

The veggie burger and fries at the Staples Center did not have umami.

Salt and sugar are the flavors people crave. And in America, the volume is turned way up on what we enjoy: rock music at hockey games, salt in the fries, probably sugar in the soda but I managed to avoid that. We not only supersize the portions, we supersize the taste.

Sweet is a natural human addiction. Breast milk, our first food, is sweet. Herballist Susun Weed says that the plants that nourish us and that we should eat more of taste sweet, whereas the medicinal plants that we should eat less of taste bitter. Of course, sweet greens are different in intensity to the sweet taste that the flavor wizards have created for us in this era of chemical food.

I read an article in The New Yorker (Nov. 23, 2009) about the people who create flavorings for processed foods. They sounded like lovely people, but they were chemically obsessed. They stood in a Riverside, CA, citrus grove and tried to determine which of their laboratory chemicals would replicate the smell of the fresh fruit.

Why not just eat the fresh fruit? The answer is that the food manufacturers make more money selling us chemical-derived food than real food.

And as long as we are addicted to salty and sweet, we will continue to fill their coffers.