A couple months ago, there was a giveaway on Goodreads for Taste What You're Missing. I entered this giveaway for a book about how and why food tastes the way it does because it sounded interesting. I didn't win, but the book made it on my to-read list. This summer, as I browsed my to-read list, I found it again and checked for it at the library, but as it was a popular book as well as new, I had to put it on my hold list.
I am in the middle of reading it now and I am fascinated by it, and there are so many helpful tips and information that I decided to take a break from reading it to share and record some of this information before it is replaced in my head with other information.
The first area that her book has already shown to be helpful is in getting kids (and adults) to eat things that they might not be inclined to eat naturally. We, as humans, tend to stay away from bitter flavors and many things that are good for us (namely vegetables) have a bitter flavor. We can acquire the taste for bitter things, but it takes time for some people.
Interestingly, the first way that you can help your child enjoy vegetables is by eating them when you are pregnant. This doesn't help me much, but I thought it was interesting and worth noting. They even did an experiment where pregnant moms either ate a lot of carrots, some carrots or no carrots during their pregnancy and then they tested to see how the babies reacted to carrots once they were old enough to eat them. The babies from the women with no carrots reacted very negatively to the taste, where the ones that had been exposed to the taste in the womb were able to eat them and enjoy them.
But let's say that you have no choice, like me, or you didn't eat a lot of vegetables when you were pregnant or it is your husband that is picky instead of your child. The first thing that the author recommended was that you introduce the new food in a familiar food. For example, if your family eats a lot of curry, add the new vegetable or meat in the curry. Any sauce or meal that is typical and accepted will increase the likelihood first of the pickier person eating it, and also the chance that they will eat it in the future outside of that dish.
A somewhat obvious statement that the book made in this area is to decrease the bitterness of vegetables by adding the contrasting taste....sweet. Makes sense, just like the Mary Poppins song, right? A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Adding a syrup based sauce to Brussel sprouts or marshmallows to sweet potatoes decreases the bitter flavor and makes them more likely to be eaten by people who have a strong aversion to bitter flavors.
I can personally attest to the success of starting to temper bitter tastes with sugar. When I started dating Blake, he was a huge fan of black, unsweetened iced tea. I would taste his, and hate it, and not get why he liked it. However, when someone ordered an Arnold Palmer (half lemonade, half iced tea) at the restaurant that I worked at, I tried one of them on my own, and decided I could handle that, and started drinking them fairly regularly. Over time, I was able to have iced tea with just lemon and sugar, then just lemon, and now I enjoy the black iced tea as much as he does. This wasn't even a purposeful decline, just over time I found myself not needing the added ingredients as much.
My history with coffee is very similar as well. My first experience with any coffee was a taste of a friend's ice blended mocha. Which, between the milk and the sugar, I enjoyed. After drinking those fairly often, I had coffee with cream and sugar in it at a friend's house after a sleepover, and decided I liked that as well. Coffee with cream and sugar (or latte type drinks at Starbucks) became my morning drink of choice for years. At some point after we moved into our house, Blake started preparing my coffee for me in the morning, and was genuinely concerned about just how much cream and sugar I used on a daily basis, and decided to wean me off it. I want to say that we decided... but it started with an experiment, where he would start lessening the cream, and see if I noticed, when I didn't, he kept going, and eventually lessened the sugar too. At some point, I decided to try it black, and was happy to find that with a good enough quality coffee, I could drink it and enjoy it black, without having to add the extra calories. Do I still enjoy the mochas, frappacinos, lattes, etc.? Yes, but those are a weekly treat instead of the every day caffeine boost. For the record, I do still need to add cream and sugar to some coffees if they are too bitter for me.
But I digress. The last point in this area that I have seen take place in friends' homes is pairing the picky person with someone more adventurous. This could be a friend, relative, spouse, it doesn't really matter who, as long as the adventurous person is someone who the picky person cares about. If the picky eater sees someone eating and enjoying something, they are more likely to try the item themselves as opposed to if they were just asked to try it without anyone else eating it. I have a cousin who had eaten very few foods up to his adult life because he didn't want to try them, then he married my friend who has a very wide range of foods that she likes, and now she has gotten him to try and even (gasp) enjoy many foods that he wouldn't even touch before her! (Em, like the shout out?) I have even seen this take place in my classroom, as I allow kids to bring treats from other countries as a way to learn about geography. A child that is reluctant to try it on their own is way more likely to try it after their best friend eats it and proclaims it to be good. It can take up to 5 or 6 tastes of something for a reluctant person to enjoy it, so don't give up after taste number 1 (interesting to me, because I thought I would let someone off the hook if they just tried it once... now I will keep offering).
The other main tip that prompted me to write about this book on my blog is about older people and their decaying sense of taste. It is a fact that as we age, our ability to taste foods declines after a certain point. As foods lose their flavor to the older generation, their first impulse is to add salt. However, this isn't the most beneficial solution because it can affect heart pressure and adds calories without necessarily making them able to taste the food better, just taste the salt. Apparently though, if you add a small amount of cayenne pepper to food, they are able to taste the flavor of the food again even if they weren't able to before the pepper. The example in the book was of grape jelly. It just tasted sweet to the older person, so they added increasing slight amounts of the cayenne pepper to the grape jelly until the person was able to proclaim happily that they tasted grapes! Not spicy, but the grape flavor came through after just the right amount of cayenne. The trick is though that it could be spicy if their taste buds are still working fine, so keep that in mind.
Also, citrus is another powerful wake up call for the taste buds if they are starting to decline. Adding lemon or orange on top of meat and vegetables can bring out flavors that might not be detected after all. I don't know exactly who reads my random ramblings that I post on here, but I do know that most of us are connected with someone, like a grandparent, who this might affect, and I would hate to not share information that could help anyone enjoy their food again.
I purposely only said this was part 1 because as I am only halfway through the book, I am positive there will be more to share in at least one more post.
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