Washington - It seems obvious. The flavours of fruits and vegetables draw us to the best of their kind.
Children soon learn how to turn over a strawberry to see whether its bottom is as red as its sun-ripened top, and therefore sweet. Surely that berry, picked during its window of great taste, must be better for you than an unripe one. But if good instincts follow flavour, why do we crave so many things that are bad for us? What's happened to the nutritional intelligence we received at birth?
According to Mark Schatzker's recent book The Dorito Effect, industrial flavour wizards have become so skilled at manipulating our taste buds that our food radar is scrambled. Schatzker, a Canadian journalist, is not the first to note how even items like fresh fruits and vegetables, bred for traits other than taste and raised on soil that lacks a full component of minerals and organic life, taste bland - a “dilution effect” that affects nutrients as well.
What's new is his take on what happens when lab-created flavours are attached to foods with little nutrient value - or none. We gorge on them, Schatzker says, because we're trying to cash in on a payoff that never comes.
In his well-researched book, Schatzker introduces us to the “chemical language” of flavour and how closely it is tied to secondary compounds that plants make, often for self-defence. These include antioxidants, whose health benefits have been highly touted in recent years.
For a long time, little research had been done to show whether fresh, well-grown produce might make us healthier, so it's been good to see the gut feelings of fellow gardeners confirmed, even if the end result has been to isolate such compounds, extract them and take food production away from the soil and into the chemistry lab. Apparently scientists have these gut feelings, too, even though much more work lies ahead.
Schatzker remarks, “Of the dozens of scientists I spoke to over the course of researching this book... not a single one doubted that the peculiar chemicals plants make are an important reason fruits and vegetables are good for you.” Several fascinating studies he describes at length show how both free-ranging goats and young children given a free-choice diet make surprisingly wise choices and have an inborn nutritional intelligence as long as it isn't confused by artificial flavouring.
Fortunately, no one needs a Ph.D in biochemistry to get back in sync with the way humans were meant to eat. Simply put real food on the table. You might start by eating whole, unsweetened fruit instead of the gooey mess at the bottom of the yogurt cup. Serve as many fresh, unprocessed vegetables as possible.
If you are a gardener, you have even more opportunities to retrain your palate and appreciate the differences between, say, one Brussels sprout and another. The range of vegetable and fruit varieties that seed catalogues offer to home gardeners (and enlightened market gardeners) is astonishingly varied compared with what is available to shoppers in most stores.
Now's the time to plant vegetables. Sow a few rows of naturally sweet, carotene-rich carrots. Savour their flavour. Will they give you a nutritional boost? You bet your life they will.
Washington Post
* Damrosch is author of The Four Season Farm Gardener's Cookbook; her website is www.fourseasonfarm.com.