Many People Enjoy a
Taste of Home
Taking A Bitter
Pill could turn you into a Sourpuss
Hopefully I won’t Strike
a Sour Note with this presentation
So please stay with
me To the Bitter End
Because this is
just a Taste of Things to Come
There are so many idioms that have what cooks and chefs would call a taste
profile; I’ve only scratched the surface here. But I need to be short and sweet,
so without any salty language or whispering sweet nothings, I should probably get
started.
The average human mouth has approximately 10 thousand taste buds, and they
die and are replaced about every 10 to 14 days. When we’re young, we have more,
and as we age we lose nearly half of them which is why certain foods can taste
stronger to kids than they do for adults. Every taste bud contains approximately
50 receptor cells. These specialized receptors are stimulated by the chemical
makeup of whatever you’re eating, and they respond to several primary tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami (which
really means savory). When food
activates a gustatory cell, the receptor will synapse with neurons and send an
electrical impulse to the gustatory region of the cerebral cortex, then the
brain interprets the sensation as taste.
So what makes something taste good? That’s a bit subjective. I have a neighbor who hates olives, and I love
‘em! But what makes a great dish or recipe though is layers or levels of
flavor. It’s a lot like a really great wine that can be what is called complex,
where different waves hit your palate as you drink it, like berries then herbs
then wood then smoke… a good plate
should do the same. The recipe could be as complicated as Coq au vin or as
simple as chocolate covered bacon. What? You’ve never had chocolate covered
bacon? It has it all. First off, it’s a known fact that everything is better
with bacon, and according to my wife everything is better with chocolate (if
you haven’t tried it in chili you should). So with chocolate covered bacon, the
bacon is salty, smoky and savory then the chocolate is bitter and sweet. Almost every element is represented in this
one crazy, yet simple idea.
Adding just one taste can propel something from ordinary to extraordinary. Let’s
take simple granulated sugar. By melting
it and cooking it down, you add just a hint of bitter to it, but you also
intensify the sweetness, and the result is caramel.
It’s a lot like life…when you add a hint of bitter, you intensify the sweet
After a long winter, I look forward to sitting on my back deck in the
spring, with a cup of coffee and feeling the warm sun on my face as it rises. I
think that without the bitter winter, I wouldn’t appreciate that simple
pleasure as much.
OK, so flavors are important, sure.
But so is the sense of sight. One thing I tell my staff at the cafe is
you eat with your eyes first. How many times have you been out to eat, and the
food comes and someone says “Ooo that looks good”. Your brain is triggered to
think that it will taste good just by the appearance. I’m not saying just
because it looks good, it will taste good, but how it looks can go a long way
in determining whether a dish is good or great.
One strangely interesting fact is without our sense of smell we couldn’t
taste anything. I was watching a show called “Brain Games” on NatGeo. In this
particular episode, they took four chefs and blindfolded them, then had them
taste four things. Each person could easily identify the items. Then each cook
had their sense of smell taken away as well as being blindfolded. Out of the 16
items tasted, only one cook got one food tasting correct, and he said it was a
wild guess based on texture NOT because it tasted like anything.
For months, a few times a week a man named Bob came into my café. Bob and
his wife had opened an antique shop in Occoquan, so my café was the perfect place
for him to pick up breakfast. He worked in counter-intelligence with the CIA
for most of his life, but there wasn’t anything secret about Bob, other than
what he actually did for the CIA. He was boisterous and jovial and the Salt of
the Earth. He was fun and funny, and my staff and I looked forward to seeing
him each day. Sadly, Bob passed away last year, and he will be missed. Carol,
who lives across the street from the café, comes in for lunch a couple times a
week. Carol is not like Bob. She always seems
bitter and unhappy, and the staff all groans when they see her coming, but they
put on a happy face to greet her and take care of her. I was able to take the
time and talk to her a while back, and she said she just loves coming into my
café, and that it always brightens her day and everyone is so friendly.
What’s the difference between these two? It’s the way they look: one wears a smile. Though Carol is a
perfectly good person, she wears a scowl so our brain is triggered to
automatically think that she is not a nice person. Remember how seeing a dish placed on the
table can trigger the “Ooo, that looks delicious” response. The scowl can
trigger a similar yet opposite thought:
Oh, she’s bitter.
I mainly serve soup, sandwiches and salads at my Café. I also sell
desserts. There are days where I won’t sell a single dessert or even one salad,
and it’s not because of weather or volume of business, it’s because it only
takes a single person to order an item to sell a lot of it. Have you ever been
to a Mexican restaurant where they serve fajitas? They come out of the kitchen
sizzling and smoking, and many people say “Mmmm, I’ll have that”. It’s the same
Idea at my café. I know that once the first Cobb Salad or Warm
Oreo Brownie leaves the kitchen, I’m about to get orders for more. It’s
contagious. So is a scowl. So too is a
smile.
There is a new checker at a big box store near me: that’s the person who inspects your basket
against your receipt to make sure they match. Most of the people who do this
job never look up. They count, they mark the slip and say with a deadpan voice
“have a nice day”. That’s why I was shocked, in a good way, that this new lady
looked right at me with a smile and asked “how are you today”. I responded with
“I’m fantastic, how are you?” we had some light banter, then when she was done
with her assigned task, she said “have a blessed day!” Wow, Awesome,
Contagious.
To me, cooking—even eating—isn’t just my job, it’s my life, and life is a
lot like cooking. We need all of the flavors in life to enjoy it. People hear
about the sweet life and wish they could live it. I say you are already are living it. Life is
a gift we’ve been given, a great gift. God gives us so much every day.—things
that are seen, and many that are unseen. Sometimes we get frustrated when things
don’t turn out the way we want, but without the frustrating and bitter events,
the good simple things don’t taste as sweet.
You may not have noticed, but in the beginning I said that the mouth
contains our taste buds as opposed to the tongue. We used to think that only
certain regions of the tongue were assigned to a specific taste. What
scientists have found is that every taste bud can detect all of the tastes and
that we not only have taste buds on our tongue but also in our cheeks and soft
palate. I see all of us as taste buds. We’re everywhere, and we taste
everything. We are bombarded with life events. Traffic, weather, family, work.
People all have salty, bitter and sour experiences every day. What they need,
what they’re missing is the sweet.
So I want to leave you with this.
When you’re about to walk out into, as some see, a world of bitterness
and salty language and sour expressions.
I want you to respond to that with sweetness from within. When you see a scowl, show ‘em your smile.
When someone cuts you off on the highway, let them in. After all Mary Poppins was right, a spoonful
of sugar really does help the medicine go down. So open wide and savor all that
God has provided.
Oh, And have a blessed day!
