ISSUE 37, TASTES, Part 2: Wholesomeness
Notes on Wholesomeness
Notes on Wholesomeness—
The scientific exploration of the mechanisms of human taste—neurogastronomy—has concentrated its inquiries upon the sensation of the chemical reception of food at the time of ingestion. It has explored the neurological dimensions of the flavors—sweet, sour, savory, bitter and umami—and noted the whole body registration of heat in eating. Because of its involvement in projects such as discovering means for cancer patients to regain a savor for food when disease or treatment has degraded a person’s capacity to taste, the focus has been on the moments of chemical interaction of foods with the neurological receptors in the mouth and body. The moment of recognition when one can tell whether something is familiar, edible, pleasurable, or desired occurs almost immediately when food is chewed. Tastes bad—spit it out. Tastes good—chew and swallow. What is this taste? I think I’ll chew a bit more.
Yet there is another dimension of ingestion and human’s response to eating that is scanted in these neurogastronomic emphases. One might call these the longer duration sense of what eating does to one. Some chemicals take time to work in the body. One’s sense of satiety, of healthful salubriousness, of recharge isn’t contained in the moments of chewing or swallowing. Nor is it tied to the savoriness, sweetness, or bitterness in any tense way. When you drink a tall coffee to keep you from falling asleep on the interstate, it takes some moments before the chemical kicks in. Several vocabularies have arisen over time to describe these longer term effects of ingestion—the language of getting high—the language of physical response to medicine—the language of nutritional wholesomeness.
The language of wholesomeness is particularly interesting. Nearly every language has words to describe the sense of beneficial effect one feels in the body after eating certain foods. At certain points in history cultures became particularly conscious of this effect. For instance, when the first global trade system developed in the 1500s around coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, capsicum, spice, alcohol, and chocolate—drugs all—cultures became aware of the peculiar penchant of these substances to generate an unsatisfied craving for more—addiction effect. There was no point in the ingestion when a consumer sensed “now I am fully, happy, and renovated.” It made people aware that that they ate certain things that did make them feel healthy and replete.
Grains, the staples of agricultural civilizations, were “wholesome”—they produced a sense of fullness and healthiness. Indeed, the farmer consumers who selected seed for generations, were cognizant of the qualities in certain strains that produced this sense. For instance, they became aware that the quality in barley, wheat, rye, rice, and oats that could be tasted (perhaps smelled retro nasally) in simple porridges. The homey taste and smell promised invigorating energy. There was no elaborated theory that governed their seed selections, but a phenomenological sense of rightness or breadth registered both in the moment of eating and in the day afterwards.
The oldest strains of grains—landraces—embody generations of decisions on behalf of wholesomeness. It is a flavor that is as much an effect as a sensation. Over the years nutritionists have determined that the body needs a complex set of minerals, vitamins, chemicals, and other micronutriments. Certain foods supply only a small spectrum of these. Those that supply more activate more of the body’s capacity to receive and process. One’s chemistry is activated. Perhaps this is a way to visualize wholesomeness/