First Bite: How We Learn to Eat. Bee Wilson
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Название: First Bite: How We Learn to Eat
Автор: Bee Wilson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780007549719
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Every culture seems to have certain challenging vegetables that children find hard to love at first bite. And at second. And third. In Brazil, it is okra (the sliminess). In France, it may be turnips (the bitterness). In lots of countries, it is beetroot (the purpleness).
There are plenty of reasons to find beetroot off-putting. There’s the curious taste, reminiscent of earth and blood (the culprit is a chemical compound called geosmin). Also, the texture, which in its cooked form is neither crunchy nor soft but fleshy. Most of all, there is the shocking colour that bleeds inescapably over everything on your plate.
Yet among sophisticated adult eaters, beetroot is often a special favourite. It thus offers a case study in how we can learn new tastes. It’s not just that people learn to tolerate beetroot: they switch from dislike to adoration. Since the 1990s beetroot has been a beloved item on restaurant menus, often paired with goat’s cheese. Adult beet lovers enjoy the very qualities that children find so awful: the earthy taste and meaty texture and, most of all, the bright crimson pigment, which can dye a whole pan of risotto a joyous pink.
Between the beet haters and the lovers, there is a gulf. Some of it can be explained – as with many other dislikes – by the form in which we first encounter the outlandish purple vegetable. Childhood memories of vinegary pickled beetroot do not help. When someone learns to love beetroot, it is often because they have been given a taste of these roots in a new and more appealing form, when eating out: a fresh and vibrant beet and orange salad, say, or a moreish deep-fried beetroot crisp.
Regardless of cooking method, however, there does seem to be something in strong vegetable flavours such as beetroot that people take longer to hit it off with. In one study, seven- and eight-year-old children from the Netherlands were given tastes of pure beetroot juice every day for fourteen days, the kind of ‘exposure’ that in theory should lead to liking. But at the end of the fortnight, they continued to find the beetroot taste ‘too intense’.72
Maybe it is the sense of achievement at having conquered an aversion that makes adult beetroot fans flaunt their enjoyment so overtly. Foodies trumpet their love of the hated vegetables of childhood: cauliflower and Brussels sprouts join beetroot as dinner party favourites. But beetroot eaters are not just showing off. It is possible to reach the point where these complex, bitter flavours deliver more pleasure than the simple blandness of mashed potato.
The psychologist E.P. Köster has shown that one of the beneficial effects when children are exposed through ‘sensory education’ to a wider range of flavours is that they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.73 Given time and enough attempts, we actively seek out those foods – like beetroot – whose charm is not at first obvious.
The women have a lot to talk about;
they remember their homes,
and dinners they made.
Poem written by EVA SCHULZOVA, aged twelve, in the Terezin Concentration Camp
When Abi Millard was four, her mother Dawn started to notice that Abi was acting strangely at mealtimes. She seldom seemed hungry and often put down her fork after a bite or two. Though generally happy and well behaved, Abi was, in Dawn’s words, ‘a nightmare’ when the family went out to eat with friends, ‘messing around and not eating her dinner’. They took her to the doctor who diagnosed congenital anosmia: an inability to smell, which also means an inability to taste food properly, given almost all of what we call ‘taste’ is really flavour perception through the nose.
To consider anosmia is to see how central food memories are, both to the way we learn to eat and the way we relate to the world. When I met her, Abi Millard was nine. In most respects she is a self-assured, happy girl. She likes swimming and Tae Kwon-Do. She lives with her mum and dad in a rural village and goes to the local primary school. Yet her experience of life is different from most. Without the ability to smell or perceive flavour, Abi experiences food more or less as pure texture. Blindfolded, she can’t tell the difference between houmous and strawberry yoghurt. Salad leaves tickle her throat and tomatoes are slimy, though she will eat broccoli and carrots and peas. She has few of the drives that motivate most people to seek out certain beloved foods because she lacks the memories that would make her expect them to be rewarding. Dawn says she lacks any real enjoyment in food – except for one time when they were out at a restaurant and Abi ate a gammon steak and said, ‘That’s lovely’, perhaps because it was intensely salty (Abi can detect strong concentrations of salt or sugar on her tongue, but without any of the flavour nuances). Dawn worries that when Abi is grown up, she may forget to eat. The illness is also isolating: when Abi’s friends at school talk about favourite meals, it’s hard for her to join in. She has no idea what a batch of warm vanilla shortbread smells like; or chocolate; or garlic. She has no memory of the taste of her own mother’s cooking.
It is extremely rare to have anosmia from birth, as Abi does. What is far more common is to develop anosmia later in life, often after a head injury (though it may also be caused by sinusitis, nasal polyps, dementia, chemotherapy, stroke, liver disease or sometimes for no clear reason at all). At a conference organized by the anosmia support group Fifth Sense in spring 2014, anosmia sufferers spoke of how doctors were often dismissive of their condition: ‘be thankful you’re not deaf’ was a common refrain. But it’s hard to be thankful for a malady that separates you from the food memories that define so much of who you believe yourself to be. One woman at the conference who had been in a cycling accident talked about how her marriage had broken down after she became anosmic. Her relationship could not survive her inability to share her husband’s continuing pleasure in food. Before the accident, they had both loved throwing dinner parties, but her husband couldn’t understand that elaborate cooking now did nothing for her. Every meal was a cruel reminder of what she had lost. The predicament of those who are born with anosmia, like Abi Millard, is that they can’t share the pleasurable food memories that the rest of us have. The predicament of those who develop anosmia later in life is that they have the memories, but no means to access them. They are cut off from their own past.
It was a bright spring day in San Francisco in 2011 when Marlena Spieler, a food writer with more than twenty cookbooks to her name, was knocked down by a car at a crossing. Both her arms were broken and she suffered concussion. As the initial excruciating pain gradually lessened, Marlena – a sunny optimist with Marilyn-platinum hair – noticed another injury, which to her was far worse than the broken limbs. The head trauma had damaged the nerve connecting to her olfactory bulb – the part of the brain that СКАЧАТЬ