"To eat is a necessity, but knowing how to eat is an art." Rochefoucald
Look. I don't want to make eating great food seem like some sort of religious epiphany. I mean, it's pretty clear in my mind, that in the end it's really just food. In the scheme of life there's lots of bigger ethical issues; people struggling for survival are hardly worrying whether the meal they've just been served is flavorful as can be, nor whether it was made to traditional recipes. People who face hunger every day, who fight to find food for survival's sake need assistance, support.
For those of us fortunate enough not to have to fight for our daily bread, eating presents us with an opportunity to add color and enjoyment to our daily lives. So with that preface and perspective, let me then say that-to my taste-if we're going to likely eat two or three times a day for the rest of our lives, we might as well make our meals as enjoyable and as interesting as possible. I'm not talking about a major career change or religious conversion here. For a modicum of effort, even the least experienced eater can easily increase their eating enjoyment. The key to doing that is, first and foremost, to become what Buddhists call, a
mindful eater.
I hope you won't be put off by the Zen thing. I'm not a Buddhist and I've actually never even meditated (one day, one day). But I was struggling to come up with a term that would take what I had in my head about eating and get into some sort of understandable concept. And my friend Deborah who does do a lot of work with meditation remarked that what I was describing was quite similar to the way they teach you to eat at some Zen retreats she'd been to: mindful eating. I like it.
Being a mindful eater, at least as we'll use it here, is not really all that tough to do. As the name implies, it's mostly a mental thing. Try it some time just for the fun of it. Start out your meal as you always do. Stick to the standard supper routine. But then somewhere along the line, stop. Maybe even in mid-chew. Teeth suspended, in touch with your tongue and all its tiny tasting apparatus. Feel the food. Activate your senses. Sense it. Savor it. Enjoy it.
Hurry Up and Slow Down
I wasn't always tuned in to the pleasures of the table. As a kid, I was pretty much culinarily clueless. When I was younger, living in my parents' house, I always ate in a hurry. Or, maybe I should say, a fury. A flurry of plates and platters arrive, eat quickly, food finished, clear the table, load the dishwasher, get out of the kitchen and away from the family as quick as I could, before someone asked me a question I didn't want to have to answer. Face down, food in, finish up, ask to be excused and get back to more meaningful matters (whatever in the hell those might have been).
Having learned the error of my early ways, I'm happy to say that food has become one of the more enjoyable aspects of daily life for me. If you approach eating the way I did as a kid-as some sort of mindless chore to clear off your calendar book-you're missing out on one of the more enjoyable activities in life. I try (not always successfully) to slow myself down. Rather than racing through the meal, I've come to approach eating with energy, excitement, anticipation. Remember. I grew up on fish sticks, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and green Jell-O. So, if I can master the art of mindful eating, anybody else can too.
How do you become an mindful eater? Pretend you're twelve and you're about to go for your first roller coaster ride. Say you're sixteen and on the verge of snagging the first really passionate kiss of your life. Or maybe you've finally arrived for your very first visit to Morocco after a lifetime of longing. Getting the idea? I'm looking for that level of enthusiasm, of excited, focused, almost fixated, attention, that level of open-minded consciousness, that makes it work.
Sound like more effort than you want to invest in your eating?
It's really not that hard. Look at it like a walk through the woods. Some people just see a whole lot of trees, a great deal of dirt and a big bunch of bugs and birds. Doesn't seem like you're missing out on anything. But, of course, you and I know that if you take the same stroll and really look, you'll see a wealth of fascinating flora and fauna. Which is real? Both. But it's up to each of us to decide what we want to take out of our experience. Life goes on either way. But having now taken the time and energy to appreciate the complexities of flavor in my food, I don't want to go back to the dark dining days of my youth.
When new staff members start work at Zingerman's we ask them to actively raise their sensory awareness. Why? Because the level of detail that the average consumer notices about a loaf of bread or a wheel of cheese is really only a very limited look at what's there to be seen by someone in the know. What we want our crew to do is to really look: to pay close attention to the fine details of appearance, aroma and flavor without which they can't come up with the kind of service and quality we're committed to delivering to our customers. Granted it's a little different at home. But for all the reasons I've already listed above, I'm convinced it's well worth the effort.
So how do you go about becoming a mindful eater, Zingerman's-style? Here's some simple steps that will set you on your way:
1. Get to Know Your Food
A casual eater really needs to know little or nothing about their food to feel good about the meal of the moment. If it tastes OK, it is. If it tastes bad, don't eat it. Nothing wrong with that. Some of my best friends (you know who you are) fit comfortably into this category.
"So what's the problem?" you might think to yourself. "Why waste mental energy on eating when you could spend it on all sorts of other interesting activities?
So what would you want to know? Well, I'd start with finding out what the flavor of the stuff at hand supposed to be like? It's hard to judge whether it's good, bad, or even outstanding if you don't know what it's supposed to taste like the first place. Once you get rolling, the list is actually almost endless: Where does the item come from? How is it used in its homeland? How long will it last? How is it prepared? What should it look like? The more you learn the more you realize you don't know.
But with knowledge comes opportunity. Without some in-depth information, you're likely to miss out on many of the most savory eating experiences. I mean, if you learn little or nothing about apples, how do you distinguish brilliant from bad? How would you know if the fruit you're holding in your hand is showing signs of excess wear and tear; or is actually supposed to be bedecked with brown russeting unless you know your apples? Answer? You can't, unless you've done a bit of food homework to learn what it ought to be like in the first place. Alternatively, I suppose you could learn to live with the reality that you might be missing out on one of the tastiest apples you could have ever eaten, all the while inaccurately congratulating yourself on your "excellent eye for quality." But what a waste of a great apple eating opportunity.
Step 2: Take a Look at It
In her excellent, A Natural History of the Senses, author Diane Ackerman writes that, "Because the eye loves novelty and can get used to almost any scene, even one of horror, much of life can drift into the vague background of our attention." What that means is that when we're eating two or three or four times a day, every day of the week, it's all too easy to stop noticing the visual variations of our food, the details deemed interesting by the eye, if we don't discipline ourselves to pay close attention.
Once again, this means slowing down. Take a minute to really see what's there: the color, the shape, the size, the smoothness or roughness of the surface.
Try it with a seemingly simple loaf of bread, something we've all seen a few thousand times in our lives. Almost everyone has some mental model of what a loaf looks like. For some, what comes to mind is something sliced, along the lines of all-white Wonder. For others, it's a long, light-brown baguette. For the rural French, its a large round loaf of crusty country bread. My grandparents would gone for Jewish rye, or maybe challah. All are bread. All are basically brown. But when you really take the time to compare colors, you'll quickly notice that there's a whole bunch of browns out there in which a bread can be dressed. Chestnut, chocolate, cherry-wood, . . . the color choices are almost infinite.
Remember: there's a reason why artists have been painting still life's of food for so many centuries. Look closely and you'll find colors in your food that go well beyond the confines of the standard Crayola box. The deep purple-black of an Italian olive paste as you spread it on a pale chestnut-colored slice of toasted wheat bread. The nearly day-glo emerald green glow of newly pressed Tuscan olive oil. The topaz treat of looking at a just-brewed pot of fine Darjeeling tea. The brilliant, blood-red roasted peppers of Navarre in northern Spain. The blushing pastels-oranges, yellows and reds-of ripe peaches and aromatic apricots; a sweet little sunset of colors captured on the skin of a piece of fruit.
The same is true for every other aspect of the appearance.
Note the shape of your loaf. Round? Long? Skinny baguette?
"Who cares?" you wonder. I do. And likely, so will you. The more you learn the more you want to know.
External visuals aren't just about color schemes either. Look at the labels and see what the item at hand has been made of. If it's cheese, check the rind for the rougher look of hand made farmhouse cheese. If it's tea look for whole leaves instead of tiny bits and pieces. If it's bread check the bottom: smooth surfaces tell you the loaf was baked on a pan; rough surface says a stone hearth. The more you look, the more you learn.
Looks can be deceiving. Don't judge a cookie by its cover.
Granted, looks can, at times, be deceiving. If I put two cookies in front of you, one great one that counts butter, vanilla and freshly ground spices amongst its constituents, and another that's made with little more than shortening and plenty of sugar, it's almost impossible to judge which is which by looks alone. To figure that one out you have to taste.
Step 3: Smell It
A solid sense of smell is more telling than the that of taste. The nose knows what it's doing: it can detect something like 10,000 different smells. Aroma actually accounts for something like ninety percent of your sense of taste. Ever notice how hard it is to taste anything when you've got a cold? Try holding your nose while you taste a piece of good cheddar and you'll notice what every kid in Kansas (or anywhere else) already knows. If you can't smell you can't hardly taste a thing. In the case of kids, of course, the idea is to diminish the detrimental effect of having to smell something you don't like. For you and I the point is best applied in the opposite direction. If you don't stop to smell your food, to appreciate (or not as the case may be) the aroma, you're directly (if unintentionally) diminishing the fullness of the flavor you're going to get from your food.
Good bread for example, should always smell good, of the grain, never of yeast. Break open a bread and stick your nose right up against surface. (Breaking is better than slicing for aroma gathering since the sliced surface is so flat its hard to really get your nose into the loaf's nooks and crannies.) The perfume of a potent new olive oil as it rises from the surface of a hot slice of toasted country bread. The astounding aroma of a bottle of well-aged Balsamic vinegar. The earthy scent of chantarelles arriving at fresh from the forest. Often the aromas alone are enough to make my day. One of my favorite childhood books was Curious George, who among his other adventures once stood outside a restaurant eating the smells, for which the restaurateur tried unsuccessfully to charge him. (You're welcome to eat the smells at the Bakehouse or the Deli-no charge. It might even help you take off a few pounds. As ludicrous as this may sound I've recently read of a scientific study that helped patients lose weight by giving them scented magic markers to smell whenever they were feeling the urge to eat!
Aroma isn't everything, but it's about as close as you can get without actually eating.
4. Taste It
At last, you get to actually eat something. So go ahead, stick a thin slice of good cheese or a bite of a well made chocolate in your mouth. Don't just chew and move on. Use your newly increased sensory awareness, to take note of the numerous nuances and complexities that make the flavor of good food so fascinating. Mindful eating means that you take time and mental capacity to really notice some of the myriad small components that contribute to the overall flavor and character of whatever you're eating.
Put the product in your mouth and let it set a minute. Our mouths hold somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 taste buds around the mouth. Inside each bud, fifty or so cells relay information to a neuron which in turn sends it on to your brain. Women generally have more taste buds (and better taste?) than men. Notice that you sense different flavor components in different parts of your mouth. Sweet primarily in the front, sour on the sides, bitter in the back. Salty, they say, can be sensed equally, all over.
Age makes a difference as well. An infant's mouth has many more taste buds than an adult; children adore sweets partly because their taste buds aren't as worn down as us older folks. The taste buds tend to wear out every ten days or so and then we replace them, though in our mid-forties we start to show a net taste bud loss. Consequently our palate becomes "jaded" as we get older; hence older people are often pre-disposed to stronger flavors.
Taste is a very personal things: different people can eat the same item at the same time and still pick up very different flavors. In the end the only taste that really counts is yours.
Take note of the feel of the food as it moves around your mouth. Is it a meltingly, velvety soft sliver of very fresh goat cheese? Or a bread crust so crackly and crunchy it almost cuts your gums? Compare the feel of a close textured English farmhouse cheddar with the soft, pebbly curd of cottage cheese. Feel the heat of a habañero chile as it sears and sizzles its way across your tongue and leaves your lips aglow. Savor the sensual feel of good chocolate-the kind that's supposed to melt in your hand and in your mouth.
Finally-most importantly-how's the flavor?
For me, this is ultimately the true pleasure of mindful eating. The more interesting the flavors, the happier I am. And although I'm probably operating with a few thousand fewer taste buds than I used to have a decade or two ago, I notice so many more flavors in my food now than I ever did as a kid. The intricacies, the complexities, the character, these are the things that get my mental as well as my salivary juices flowing. The earthy, marvelously meaty flavor a good slice of dry cured Serrano ham from Spain. The silky smooth, mildly gamy flavor of a slice of oak smoked wild Irish salmon. The pleasantly salty, juicy succulence of a great corned beef sandwich. The garlicky sweetness of a spoonful of fresh pesto. The briny, salty appeal of an outstanding Italian anchovy. The great corn flavor of really good grits blended in each bite with a generous bit of soft, sweet butter melting on top.
Be sure not to stop your mindfulness too soon. Follow your new activism all the way through to the finish. Great food to me leaves a long-lingering, pleasant finish, one that makes you smile and consider asking for seconds. What's the aftertaste like? If in doubt, get someone else with more experience to taste with you.
Eating on the Edge; Culinary Head Games
All of this attention to dining detail adds up to an encyclopedia of eating activity, a flurry of footnotes to every dish, an annotated history for every plate of pasta, pepper, or potato. There's a lot of pure, interesting, intriguing pleasure on our plates, waiting to be taken up and appreciated. By now, the point has to be clear: the more aware you're of the flavor of your food, the more you use that awareness and your ever more educated palate to seek out better tasting stuff, the more you add enjoyment to your life. Good food has life. It adds life. And it tastes good too. So, live it up. Be a mindful eater.