Why eat?

Back when I was a high school kid, a classmate, who managed to get a hold of catchy statements from somewhere during those dark days before the internet was invented, said "eat to live, but do not live to eat."

Sounded good to me.  But at home we seemed to have struck a wonderful mix of both--we lived to eat well to live ;)

Even in this eating well, we often remarked that we tended to eat a lot more than normal if we had company, especially if our favorite relatives were visiting.  Everything seemed tastier too.

Life in these modern times is very different.  It feels like four hundred years have gone by, yet it has barely been four decades.  Our eating habits are dramatically different from the past.

One of the major changes has been that we seem to have less and less shared dining experiences and tastes.  We live in an age of ever increasing personalized food, as much as we have personalized movie-watching.  Every where we turn, the "we" and "our" are rapidly yielding to "I" and "mine."

If that is the way we prefer, then the market delivers:

Nick Popovici is one of the entrepreneurs seeking to take advantage of these firm expressions of preferences. He founded Vita Mojo, a small London chain offering ultra-personalised healthy meals to busy workers in the City of London in 2016. Popovici argues that we will soon reach the point where special diets are the norm, and the food businesses will succeed by accommodating them.

Ultra-personalized meals, as if mere personalized ain't enough!

When Vita Mojo first opened, Popovici and his colleagues didn’t know to what extent customers would embrace the personalised meal. The café also offers pre-assembled dishes and Popovici, who was inspired to set up the business after suffering from debilitating food intolerances, imagined that around 10% of customers might go for a fully personalised meal. He was staggered to find that, from the start, more than 90% of customers chose that option. He reckons that the desire for personalised meals was there all along, “It’s just that no one asked people whether they wanted it before.”

Sure, it appeals to our unique tastes.  But, eating all things including what we don't like much is pretty much a lesson about life itself.  In life, we have to deal with all kinds of unpleasantness, right?  We cannot really ultra-personalize our life!

Popovici told me that he recently got in a big argument with René Redzepi, a Danish chef, who felt that personalised nutrition contradicted food’s true purpose, which, as Redzepi sees it, is to bring people together in a kind of communion.
We are fed by more than food when we sit down and break bread. When we eat the same food at the same time, we are brought a little closer together. A human alchemy occurs. Maybe you wish the sauce contained a fraction more garlic and I would like it more with an extra pinch of chilli, but to pay too much attention to these tiny selfish differences would be to miss the bigger transformation, which is the unifying of flavours, of conversation and of company.

Indeed!

Blue ketchup?

Like me, you too have surely seen kids reach for blue-colored drinks, right?  The blue colored Gatorade or one of those semi-frozen drinks from the convenience stores, ... And haven't you had kids come to you and extend their tongues out to show you the blue streaks there because they sucked on candies that were blue?

While you are not as regimented as I am, chances are that as adults you don't gravitate towards blue sweets, unlike kids.  Because, you and I are old!  Seriously, because back when we were kids, they didn't have blue sweets for us:

several decades ago, it was a truism in the food industry that you couldn’t sell blue foods, given their rarity in nature. Yet now, shelves bristle with “cool blue” Gatorades and “blue raspberry” Icees. Those associations, he says, were taught—and it helps when the flavor is novel, or indeed invented. Candy and beverages seem particularly amenable to color experimentation, suggests Delwiche. “They are like the evening wear of the food world—not what you wear to the office.” But strange colors have also crept into food marketed to children

Why do kids go for those strange colors?  Simple.  "Learned associations" are less rigid when we are kids.

There is little evidence that color-flavor relationships are hard-wired. We are all born liking sweet things, but we are not born knowing what sweet things look like.

Interesting, right?  We slowly program our brains to associate colors with tastes.  And, once programmed, well, no wonder those blue-crazy kids avoid the green veggies!

“The primary taste cortex is one of the first stops after the tongue,” says Spence. But “even activity there is modulated by your expectations.” Where the thinking used to be, notes Spence, that “all this information comes from outside through our eyes, ears, and tongue and works its way up through the cortical hierarchy, at each stage being condensed, it turns out that there are more pathways going from the inside out.”
The brain acts like a prediction engine: If bright red fruits usually taste sweeter, the next time you eat a fruit that looks bright red a top-down “back projection” might be, as Spence suggests, “constraining the activity earlier in the neural system closer to the outside, to your eye or tongue.”

I am tempted to bring into this discussion the old Hindu philosophical idea of maya. What you think you see is not real, and is an illusion ;)

Are you sure seeing is believing?  Do you really want to have your eyes tell you what you are eating and tasting? ;)

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