Smells and Bells

One of my Mother's favorite stories to tell people is that when I was little I was such a picky eater that I went through a phase that I would only eat white food. It's true, there was about a month of my life that I would refuse to eat anything that wasn't basically white in color. Why? I have no idea. Yet, I also have no idea how or when or why I got past it either. One of the great mysteries is why our tastes change as we grow older and develop into fully functioning adults. I am so glad I have been able to grow as a person and explore new flavors and foods because I would have missed out on so much in life if I hadn't. When we try a new food, that memory of whether the experience was pleasant or not stays with us for years. It will be the deciding factor in whether we eat it again or not. For example, when I tried peanut butter the last time, it made it difficult to breath and I broke out in hives. So I don't plan to eat it again anytime soon. On the other hand...

I spend a fair amount of time on the New York Times website. Its just a fact at this point. Instead of Buzzfeed, which I have previously been addicted to, I spend large quantities of time reading obscure Op-Ed articles. Imagine my surprise when I found and article that actually quotes Constance Classen, the author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch , although this article focuses on smell. Sensory perception is extremely dependent on culture. English speaking cultures are astonishingly poor at naming odors, a fact that has been agreed upon for the past thirty years. Smells like cinnamon, lemon, and rose are tough for Americans to name, while colors are extremely easy to distinguish between. However, when researchers visited foraging tribes on the Malay Peninsula, they collected different results. These individuals were nearly as good at identifying smells as they were at identifying sights. This reminded me of JBK and Betsey Dyer's article that we read earlier in...

In the article Cultures and Cultures: Fermented Foods as Culinary 'Shibboleths' by Jonathan Brumber-Kraus and Betsy Dexter Dyer, the biology and religious cultural contexts for the presence of shibboleths in food is explored. The article defines shibboleths as a food that distinguishes one culture from another. These foods generally involve a fermentation component. For this reason the culture of the food has a particularly strong biological role in its development. Two of the three biological reasons for shibboleths explained in the article are: " 1. The original fermenting communities of microbes were (and many still are) no more than the indigenous microbes of a particular region and of its human population. Microbes from local soils and waters confer a characteristic ‘terroir’ by tumbling into open buckets of milk and vats of grape juice. The indigenous microbiota dwelling in and on humans produce not only familiar body odors and  flavors but also those same nua...