To live or die by taste

I was reading Salon.com’s article The challenge facing local food and I couldn’t help but think of the Jaime Oliver situation over in the UK.

Some words of wisdom from the Salon article: “eat-local initiatives … will likely live or die by taste.” At the most fundamental level, food typically must taste good for people to eat it. And when we’re talking about provoking what amounts to a revolution in our food supply chain, we need people to prefer local food as a core driver for that change. As the article points out: “For local eating to catch on … taste must drive large-scale infrastructural change.”

I remember eating a fresh peach down in Delaware one summer, and it was nothing like the peaches I’d grown up eating near New York City. Juicy and fragrant and bursting with flavor, compared to what I immediately realized were crunchy, flavorless cardboard imitations. And a few years ago I had some amazing cherries from a roadside stand outside of Sonoma. Incidents like these have corrupted my expectations, making me in some way a more discerning customer. It’s just like how eating a couple of good meals in Italy has forever raised my standards for Italian restaurants. I will forever compare my meals, and my fruit selection, to those paragons of taste.

Once you get used to the way food is supposed to taste, the cardboard imitations in the supermarket freezer begin to lose their attraction. They may be convenient, but deep down we know they’re not as good. (And the fact that frozen food may taste good leads one to consider what exactly they’re putting in the food to make it taste that way!)

The wonderful thing about good food is that it defies any explanation or rationalization: you smell it, you taste it, and you’re convinced. There’s no need to argue about the detriments of fertilizers or genetic engineering or suchlike. You either get it in the course of that meal (pun intended) or you might as well be dead already.