Friday, May 18, 2018

Making It Taste Better

Breakfast

On Facebook, I said offhandedly, in re my morning broccoli, "I don't try to like it." A couple of people chimed in with helpful suggestions on how to make it taste better, which all sounded good (and all involved increasing its calorie density.) In my present frame of mind I found this odd, and telling. We go so automatically to "how do I make this taste better?" 

But I don't want my food to taste better. It already tastes so good I'm strongly tempted to eat more than is good for me. Why on earth would I want it to taste better? It's basically impossible for me to enjoy my food more than I do now. My levels of enjoyment tune to what's available and expected. Right now, my oatmeal is especially enjoyable because I like it more than my broccoli, and my boiled eggs are more enjoyable still because I like them more than my oatmeal. If I raised the baseline on the brocs, I could make the oatmeal tastier by adding, say, brown sugar and cream, and then make the eggs tastier by scrambling them in butter and adding various tasty things. I would end up enjoying the breakfast -- well, exactly as much as I do now, after the novelty wore off (which would take... two days? Three?) And I would start to get fat again. The enjoyment is a zero sum game, but the caloric accumulation is decidedly not.

2 comments:

Sackerson said...

I always eat museli for breakfast. I used to put grapes, etc, on top of it. I have only recently discovered that it "tastes better" to stick the grapes UNDER the museli. It got me thinking how how something tastes is as much to do with texture as it is with actual taste.

Dale said...

Yes! Texture and order and color -- all kinds of things go into it. It would be such a mistake to eat my oatmeal *before* my broccoli!