Exploring The Sense of Taste
17/03/2009

Article by Phylipa Dinnen

http://www.resourcesforlife.net/

What is there to explore about taste, I thought.  And then I noticed something pass through my head that simply said, “I’ve been relishing the moment to write this piece.”  That summed it up.  Food is my real passion; good quality, nourishing, real food, and here I was relishing the moment, savouring the taste of it!   Passion is intense and so is the sense of taste and the smells associated with it. 

I am happiest when my larder is full and I have people around my table sharing food that I have created.  Every home I’ve ever lived in, whether rented or bought, was because of the kitchen or the potential of the kitchen.  If it wasn’t perfect it would be the first thing in the house to be altered to suit my needs.  Recognising this, my mother promised me an Aga in my first home in the country; a farmhouse in Gloucestershire, which we lovingly restored.  I loved that Aga with a passion and it presided gracefully over the kitchen and asked to be made good use of.  It acknowledged and honoured my passion by enabling me to produce a quality of cooking that is hard to re-create with other ovens.  It suited my moods to cook by always being ready.  Together we nourished my large and growing family in a way I could not have done alone.

Cooking food and sharing a meal touches many of our senses.  Creating tastes that people enjoy is honouring those people and nourishing the body at the same time.  Taking the time to create good food, instead of ready-made processed food, touches our sense of smell and we savour the enticing aroma which holds the promise of a satisfying meal.   The best food prepared with the flare of colours from nature is a wonderful sight; bright red and yellow peppers, green leafy vegetables and salads, beans and pulses in all colours. Seeing this is delightful and mouth-watering, touching another inner sense which anticipates the flavour of the food.  Enjoying the chatter of appreciation that spontaneously occurs when love has been added to the list of ingredients and even touching the warm home-made breads and finger food does much to help the digestion.  Some cultures always touch their food as they eat, having no need for a knife and fork.  Somehow, honouring that food by touching it prepares the digestion to receive it even more.

Good food not only nourishes us but enhances the taste buds so that our body is receptive to what we eat. Being receptive helps the body to relax, allowing our digestive system to be more efficient.  Chewing food as much as 28 times or more helps the digestion by enabling the salivary juices to do their job of releasing the enzyme amylase which breaks down the carbohydrates.  The pH, acid-alkaline balance, in the mouth is about 7 which is correct for this enzyme to do its work.  If we don’t chew our food properly it goes down into the stomach where the starches and carbohydrates cannot be easily digested because the environment is too acidic, with a pH of 2.  Amylase is also secreted by the pancreas, so if we don’t chew our food properly we are putting a great deal of extra stress onto the pancreas.

Liking our food and enjoying the taste will always help our digestion.  It doesn’t matter whether you are eating a “healthy” balanced diet full of the right nutrients.  If it doesn’t taste good, the whole body clenches and rejects it.  Small children will gag on something that is distasteful.  We need to honour their sense of taste and let them find out what suits their own body and what does not.  Children who have been forced to eat everything that is on their plate, whether they like it or not, lose their sense of discernment.  They need time and encouragement to try new tastes; this is very different from taking too much and leaving half a plateful, which is wasteful. Taste is discriminating when it tells us what is right for our body and what is not.  If we put food into the body without discriminating, we are not listening to what it needs; the body loses interest in being nourished and we don’t digest that food properly. 

Our sense of taste can be conditioned and distorted by the amount of chemicals that are put into processed food.  If a pregnant mother feeds herself with this kind of food, the foetus will become accustomed to the food and will show a preference for this kind of food later, whether it is healthy for that baby or not.  A child that is given too much processed food will become addicted to those chemical flavours, and crave more of the same.  Everything that goes into the mother is passed through the umbilical cord into the unborn baby, including alcohol and direct or second hand smoke.  Conscious parenting by being aware of the needs and health of a growing foetus will help the development of the baby right from the start.  The spine starts to form by the fourth week of pregnancy and can start to develop incorrectly; becoming mis-shapen even at that early stage, losing potency in what will become the nervous system, as the cells become traumatised from the toxic input.  Children born from this early conditioning learn to like food that is not healthy and find good food distasteful.

What we put into the body is so important and yet we have been seduced by the fast food and supermarket hype of packaged food as we try hard to keep up with a faster pace of life.   We have lost the ability to taste what is right for our body, to delight in the mouth watering flavours of fresh fruit and vegetables and eating only those foods that nourish the body.  Instead we eat what is put in front of us, taught as children to be grateful for any food, and to remember the starving millions.  Instead of honouring the body and listening to it, we have been conditioned to tolerate and like what we are given.  Commercially prepared or institutional food, in schools and particularly in boarding schools, undermine what is potentially a very refined and discriminating sense. 

When we don’t value what we consume, we eat to fill emptiness and pain in our lives, not just when we are hungry.  Eating sugary food gives a sense of the sweetness that is sometimes missing, but sugar is one of the most addictive substances and what might have once been a “taste” of sweetness soon turns into an obsession.  Most of the western world is addicted to sugar, and anyone who eats in restaurants regularly, fast food outlets or has readymade supermarket food will be eating hidden sugars with every meal.  We wonder why we are sluggish both physically and mentally and reach for another sweet treat to give us that sugar boost to wake us up.  This happens all too often when we are already living on depleted adrenals, and is worsened by the food that is most easily available to us. 

The Chinese understand taste far better than we do.  They see that when we crave or intensely dislike a taste, then something is not quite right with the organ that it relates to.  They know the correct food to give you to correct the weakness.  If we crave salt it means that we need to work on the kidneys and find the food that balances and supports them.  We need to look at why we are afraid because the emotion that is connected with the kidney is fear.  It means that our adrenals are depleted too.  The kidney needs the salt, but an excess or too little are both extremes that alert us that all is not well.  With our busy, processed lifestyle we have lost the instinctive way of healing the body with sour, bitter, sweet, pungent or spicy, food and whether these foods should be hot or cold, wet or dry.  The Chinese also use the tongue to diagnose illness, to check if the body is too yin or too yang, the quality of the blood and which organs are out of balance. 

Chinese markets are packed with the right kind of fruit and vegetables sought out by people who really understand what the body requires.  They buy food for the colour, flavours, taste and seasons so that each organ is properly supported.  Even when we are more conscious of the food we eat, most of us do not seek out the foods that support each organ in this way.  We can only use our body to tell us what it needs and with practice we can learn to honour this innate wisdom.  Enabling each member of the family to be included in this exercise will help us seek out, buy and prepare the best food for each one.  It takes time and a great deal of effort, but our body will reward us with better health. 

Right now many people measure time in terms of money which makes us try to fit too much into a day.  If we allow ourselves to slow down, we have time to adapt to our environment and our sensations. Our body systems are grateful that they can also slow down and settle, giving us the information that we need.  Taste is a sense that is so easy to abuse; supermarkets are well aware that using cheaper chemicals that mock the tastes we like will keep their prices competitive.  At the same time it undermines our health.  All processed foods have had chemicals added to prolong their shelf life and enhance the taste.  These chemicals are often designed to make you want more and more of the processed food; creating another route to addictions. 

The success of the fast food chains is because of the sugar and addictive chemicals that are added.  We need our sense of taste to give us the truth about what we eat so that our body is properly nourished.  Distorting our senses is another way of pushing us into our head, so that we rationalise and use our mental faculties instead of listening to the wisdom of the body.  We are so open to control and fear from outside sources when we live in the mind.  Salesmen are well trained to convince people on a mental level to buy their products; commercial advertisers influence us that their brand of breakfast cereal contains important nutrients.  Even if they do, it is usually not in a state that is absorbable by the body.  More than ever now we need our body to be the resource we can trust.

Smell and taste are both chemical senses, so they are directly affected by the state of our body.  When the body is toxic our smell, our intuition and our wisdom are unbalanced and our taste is distorted.  We start to crave the food we are allergic to.  When our cells are sick they do not behave like other life forms which have a propensity towards health.  Sick or cancerous cells (cancer means creeping ulcer, from the Latin for crab) do not seek the life force of oxygen. Just as plants need a nourishing oxygen-rich soil, our cells need a nourishing oxygen-rich environment to survive.  As we fill the body with chemically prepared food, the terrain deteriorates, and the internal environment is no longer supportive to life.  Instead, this creeping ulcer slowly takes over as it feeds off the carbon dioxide held in the de-oxygenated cells.

Cancer is not a disease for which a cure will be found.  Research into a chemical or medical cure is nonsense.  Cancer is a lifestyle disease created by not understanding, or listening to the body senses.  Loving the body by touching and hugging ourselves and each other, seeing and being awake to what is going on around us, hearing and understanding each other, using our intuitive smell and knowing what to put in our body through correct taste are all ways of gaining deeper understanding of the body.  As we practice these skills the body will respond and start to heal.

There is an abundance of natural healing foods available on our planet.  If we use our sense of smell and the intuition provided by the Jacobson’s Organ located in our nose, we would learn to access this natural source of remedies.  Every herb has its own unique smell and taste.  Simply by putting a single herb on our tongue we are often capable of knowing whether or not our body needs that herb.  I tried this when I first tasted our “Inner Calm” remedy.  I was told that the taste was “unpalatable” and advised to try it in capsule form.  Being the person that I am, that was just a challenge to me to taste it.  The moment it touched my tongue, something in my body settled.  I knew it was a remedy that I needed.  The same happened when we first discovered the sea salt from Guerande, on the west coast of France.  This mineral rich salt is what the body desperately needs but we are told salt is bad for us.  And pure sodium chloride, supermarket salt, is poisonous.  Its purpose is to keep clean the valuable minerals that it holds; these minerals antidote the poison.  When our body doesn’t have the right minerals it leaches calcium from the bones to maintain an alkaline environment in the gut; the kind of environment that does not support parasites.

We are capable of listening to our own bodies and being our own physicians. Our sense of taste is very wise and an excellent indicator of what happens when we are able to raise the vibration of our own body.

Once we become used to only the best quality food it is very difficult to return to the inferior tastes that we have been forced to grow up with.  As a child I took a dislike to milk chocolate, wondering why people liked chocolate so much.  My father preferred dark, or plain, chocolate and gave me a piece to try.  At once my discriminating taste buds told me it was vastly superior to the lighter variety.  But chocolate did not always agree with me and I thought of it as an unhealthy treat, at times craving a few squares possibly because of the magnesium content.  It also contains anandamide and phenylethlamine, both chemicals released when we are in a state of bliss, or in love.  People often crave it when they are coming out of a relationship.  

When I first discovered that chocolate was such an incredible source of nutrients, and that cacao beans were once used as a form of exchange in the Mayan culture, clearly indicating their value, I decided to explore a little deeper.  I found that real, unprocessed (undutched) chocolate is positively beneficial making complete sense of its ancient venerated state.  I experimented with making my own bars of raw chocolate from raw cacao butter, raw cacao powder, a touch of real celtic sea salt, and sweetened with agave syrup or rice syrup (more or less according to my taste and my children’s taste).  I add my own crystallised ginger, or extra cacao nibs for variety.  When on holiday with friends last year (without our own home-made chocolate) they passed around some good quality shop-bought dark chocolate.  My teenage son Fred remarked “Once we’ve tasted your chocolate, nothing else is quite as good....”  I was touched that he had the sensitivity to taste the superior quality.

The discriminating quality of taste reaches wider into our lives as we reflect it through the way we dress, and the way we furnish our homes. Good taste lifts our hearts and we feel wonderful when we honour that taste, knowing that it gives us confidence.  When we feel confident and happy all the cells in our body expand.  When taste is distorted through the inclusion of chemicals that are toxic to the body, then perhaps our ability to be discerning is compromised.  Just as my body settled when I tasted Inner Calm for the first time, my body settles when I enter a room that nourishes me.  We need that sense of nourishment in our inner body and our outer life.

As we heal we notice how important it is to only use the best quality ingredients.  We seek out organic food, specifically from known sources.  We distrust the major supermarkets instead preferring to buy our vegetables directly from the organic farm where they are grown.  We get to know the growers and how discriminating they are; whether they are fair-trade or take advantage of their workers; whether the neighbouring farms use pesticides and how efficiently they are distributed. 

Becoming more global encourages us to explore and widen our tastes.  When once it was thought that we should only eat local foods we now have access to exotic foods.  It is all a part of our evolutionary process that we become one global nation instead of small communities protecting our boundaries.   Our tastes become wider and more accepting and inclusive of the differences between ourselves and our neighbours.  This kind of sharing and acceptance is heart warming and heart opening. 

Phylipa Dinnen

http://www.resourcesforlife.net

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