20 Jun Cultural shaping of food preferences
What did you eat today? How did it make you feel?
Working in the food industry makes me realise how our tastes and preferences are so shaped by our culture.
When I was hanging out at Friends of the Earth more, my tastes gravitated towards a plant-based menu. For the past few years at least, I had a mostly plant-based diet. It was yummy and it made my body sing with happiness every time I ate these meals. My body knew that they were healthy, I think, and so my mood would elevate to the delight of nourishing my body in such a healthy way.
Since I have been cooking as one of my sources of income, I have become more sensitive to the taste profiles of food. Rather than delight in the health properties of a meal, I am more interested in how tasty it is – to please my clients, I suppose. Also, because I am cooking more meat, it becomes more normalised and so I have started cooking meat at home too, which I rarely used to do for many years before now.
Food tastes and preferences change
Both of these experiences made me realise that our preferences are so vulnerable to the cultures in which we live and work.
Tonight I made a West African Peanut soup, which I ate with brown rice and baked tofu. And although this used to be one of my favourite meals just a year or so ago, it felt boring to eat tonight. Presumably, because it didn’t have meat in it.
Is this why many people find vegetarian food so boring to eat? Is it just not hitting our evolutionary-based fat, salt and sugar (or protein perhaps), receptors, and so leaves us unsatisfied?
This character of our food environment used to bewilder me quite a bit. I would spend countless hours researching and thinking about why people don’t want to eat healthy food.
Objective reality
And herein is the problem, I think. The science is pretty clear. Vegetarian eaters live longer, have lower BMIs and less chance of dying of any cause than meat eaters. The fact that if we eat vegetarian food we barely need to even wear deodorant, because we are not emitting these toxic compounds out of our skin is another piece of evidence. I think the delight that my body would reward me with after eating a healthy vegetarian or vegan meal is telling. And the fact that when we eat this way our bodies can react so violently when we put heavy meat and dairy-based meals into them is another key indicator.
So meat eating is not healthy. It is not good for the environment either. OR kind.
Guiding principles
The truth at the heart of the issue is that the more we eat vegetables, the more we like eating vegetables. And currently, our food culture is overwhelmingly a far cry from a plant-based diet. I for one think that it would take a LOT of energy to shift this paradigm.
It is certainly interesting to see the whole conundrum from another perspective (a meat eaters perspective) for a change!!
PS. The featured image was one of my creations when I was under the influence of the Friends of the Earth philosophy. It makes me wonder how I got so off track somehow. I haven’t cooked like that for **yoinks.
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