Yes, to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But until someone comes up with a better explanation of why we like umami, sour, and complex flavors, I will continue to believe my explanation: We need to consume plenty of bacteria every day. If you fail to give such large and important systems as the digestive and immune system something they need a lot of, obviously many things will go wrong.
In the current New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni writes about a childhood in which he ate too much. He was chubby, but not because of ditto food (which I think is the main cause of the obesity epidemic). There was much less ditto food when he was young. Bruni seems to have gotten abnormal pleasure from non-ditto food. One sign of this is how clearly he remembers certain favorite foods:
I remember almost everything about my childhood in terms of food — in terms of favorite foods, to be more accurate, or even favorite parts of favorite foods. . . .
Age 7: I discovered quiche. Quiche Lorraine.
Age 8: lamb chops.
No mention of fermented food among the foods of his childhood. His family apparently ate a lot of frozen meat. If refrigerated food is dangerous, frozen food is probably worse. I suspect recently defrosted meat has less bacteria than meat that’s been in a refrigerator for several days.
I wonder if Bruni was (and is) like the squirrel who needed stronger-than-average light to entrain properly. All squirrels need light; a few need stronger light. Under healthy conditions (sunlight) the genetic diversity has no consequences. I think the pleasure we get from complex flavors and the like can vary because of these experiences:
1. On a visit to New York, as I blogged, I noticed I was far less interested in fancy restaurants than in the past. The only change in my diet is that I now eat far more fermented food.
2. It isn’t just New York. In Berkeley I notice the same thing has happened. My interest in complex food has gone way down. Fancy restaurants, apart from the social aspect, are less interesting. My back issues of Saveur are less interesting. I read food sections of newspapers less.
3. Brain injury can cause something called the gourmand syndrome, where the person becomes obsessed with food with complex flavors. In one case the person became a restaurant critic (like Bruni).
Perhaps Bruni’s forthcoming book will shed more light on this. Everyone knows about the obesity epidemic and the allergy epidemic; less mentioned is the vast rise in interest in fancy food over the last 30 years. The word foodie was coined in 1981, close to when the sharp rise in American obesity began. Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, had until recently much bigger food sections than they had 30 years ago.
I would probably ascribe the rise of the foodie to people having more leisure time and more money to spend. Since the average person isn’t exactly an intellectual or even interested in much of anything beyond what the media tells him to be, and since media has greatly expanded – cable TV especially – food seems like a natural topic for expanded interest. Same thing has happened with wine and many other things, in which consumption is partly to express how sophisticated you are.
I too crave gourmet foods. I often stay up late watching the Food channel. I never eat fermented foods. Maybe there’s a connection.
I have to agree with Mr. Mangan about the most likely hypothesis for the “foodie” phenomena. Me? I like a lot of different foods, both fermented and more richly flavored. (Must one pick?) Your fermented food hypothesis as a restrain on appetite (shall we say a “Shangri-la effect”) seems possible, and worth learning more. I for one have taken to eating more fermented foods as an immune and digestive aid is a . Why not? (Any skeptics out there?)
For most of the 1970′s I was part of a macrobiotic community of more than 200 people who lived and studied together in households in Boston. Everyone ate miso soup at least once a day. I’m sure you know that miso is fermented soy bean paste. Our diet consisted of about 75% whole grains (usually brown rice), supplemented by beans, vegetables, seeds, nuts, seaweeds, and very small amounts of fish and fruit. Sometimes people would go binge on ice cream, junk food, or favorite foods from previous years, but for the most part, folks found the simple diet satisfying. On occasion other fermented foods were part of a meal — natto, real soy sauce, rice bran pickles, homemade sauerkraut, amasake, or beer. Perhaps this adds anecdotal evidence to your theory about what fermented foods do to the appetite, curbing cravings for complexity.
By the way, not one of these hundreds of people was fat, and no one had acne. My own three children, raised without dairy foods, meat, or eggs, have grown to be healthy adults. I can only guess that brown rice, despite its presence at almost every meal at our house for 20 years, did not function as a ditto food, because it always tasted a little different. A different crop. Long, short, or medium grain. Mixed with barley or buckwheat or millet. Garnished with seeds or nuts. And, as we used to say, “the cook’s vibrations that day.”
This is very interesting.
As I understand it, some of the more bacteria-rich non-fermented foods are raw organic fruits and vegetables. (It stands to reason: they haven’t had pre- or post-harvest spraying with antibacterial/antifungal treatments, and haven’t been semi-sterilized through cooking yet, even if they’ve been washed). They’re particularly rich in fecal bacteria, which we used to be exposed to far more frequently as a society.
This leads me to wonder if some of the health benefits claimed by raw-food diet followers come from this high exposure to bacteria. Many also consume fermented foods such as unpasteurized sauerkraut. Quite a few raw-food dieters also claim that over time, their tastes become much simpler.
In my experiments personally I have found that when I eat a high proportion of raw vegetables and fruits, I eat less and have far simpler tastes. Some of that is also the non-ditto-food nature of raw produce, which can be highly variable in taste and texture.
Nobody explains it as “I’m healthier because I’m eating tiny quantities of poo” but then again, that would make a very poor selling point.