Day 7
taste
To taste is to feel, with your tongue and every corner of your mouth. To taste is to smell and even, sometimes to hear, if you are eating nuts, or waiting on the sensual silence of honey to melt away.
There is a reason that when we see the most adorable baby, or come into our lover’s arms, we want to open our mouths. Our craving to give and receive love is answered only by our mouths. Imagine if instead of a prayer before eating, we kissed the bite of food on our fork. This blessing would be far more suitable than words; a kiss is the prelude to taste.
My worship of the sense of taste is why I lack discipline when it comes to diets and so-called healthy eating. I am totally down with zucchini pasta covered in creamy cashew pesto, but I will never surrender my love of pungent cheese, which can hardly be tolerated by the nose alone, but once in my mouth, I am overtaken by the earthy musk of its flavor. I do not have much love for extremely sweet foods, but a certain type of sweetness, or the right balance against bitterness will make me swoon. As in baklava or a dense chocolate cake.
I think one of the greatest pleasures of my North American experience, is the pleasure of eating foods from so many corners of this Earth. I have learned to prepare and adore Mexican cuisine because so many of the ingredients can be grown in my habitat, and truly this food brings out the most amazing gifts of an arid climate. The heat of the chilis and the depth of the flavors testify to a culture that has elevated processing plants and meats to an art form. Mexican cuisine is the earth, incarnate on a plate, with all the color, aroma and flavor I long for.
Since moving out here to the mountains and marrying my husband, I eat almost no beef, pork or chicken. Thanks to his passion for hunting and fishing, my freezer is full of fish, elk, pheasant, deer, and sometimes (when I’m lucky) squirrel. As I eat them, I taste what these animals eat, which are the plants that I see, touch and smell every time I leave my house. And through the meat of these animals I become even more intimate with the landscape and am able to conceive of how we all depend on each other and must protect our food.
Taste is the imaginative language of amateur and professional chefs, who find their muse in cold storage and spice shelves. Taste is the first language, as the baby comes to the breast. Taste is how lovers discover they can’t live without each other.
Taste bridges the liminal space between hunger and the sublime…if you have butter…
or chocolate…
or grappa…
or olive oil…
or cherries…
