Fat Girl Gone Thin

I think one of the things that draws so many people to food – to good food – is how many facets of our life that is touches.

Meals are a sensory parade. Taste, smell, appearance. Few things engage us on as many levels as what we so haphazardly stuff in our mouths three times a day.

In truth, food is the stuff of legends. It has been the cause of wars, of love, of death … It has shaped history in innumerable ways. Think of the lasting cultural changes left in the ruin of the Potato Famine or the way Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, led to the transformation of working conditions for American immigrants. Food is such a part of our lives that we rarely step back long enough to recognize the ways in which it has transformed the world around us.

Yesterday at the grocery store I stumbled on an interesting package of rice. Forbidden Rice. A great marketing tool to be sure, but this package had more to it than shiny lettering  and glossy images. What caught me was the description.

 ”Legend tells us that this ancient grain was once eaten exclusively by the Emperors.” In fact, it is rumored that this black grain (actually dark purple) was so highly prized that for hundreds of years it was only grown on palace grounds and fed to the emperor and his concubines as an aphrodisiac.

This isn’t the kind of thing you find on the back of the Mac n’ Cheese box.

Back at home I scoured through the fridge in search of something to pair with purple rice and faced with the choice of a jar of green olives, some hummus or half a cabbage – the cabbage won out. A cut of wild Alaskan salmon from the freezer and the meal seemed complete.

Grabbing spices from the cabinet in preparation for some braised cabbage, I lamented the fact that I had run out of the beautiful red garlic from this summer’s farmers market. Instead I was left with the common-place silver variety that adorns the isles of every produce section from here to China. Why? Because it lasts the longest. Perhaps one of the most middle-of-the-road choices one can make when it comes to this world-renown food and yet it is the only one that millions of people have ever eaten.

But like my rice, there is more to the silver garlic story than it’s non-descript packaging reveals. When you love food and you love to try new things, it’s easy to wage war against the ordinary – but there is a reason that a nothing becomes everyone’s something. In the case of the silver garlic, for thousands of years this has been the variety chosen by mothers and grandmothers for inclusion in the family dinner.

Silver garlic was so esteemed for it’s longevity that ancient Egyptians placed bulbs of it in the tomb of  Tutankhamen so that the pharaoh would continue to have sustenance throughout his afterlife. When archaeologists found the cloves during excavation, it was still easy to distinguish the item – some 3,000 years later. This is the same food that Egyptian slaves were fed while they built the pyramids. Each time we cook with an ingredient like this we are unwittingly becoming a part of the past.

And that brings me to soy sauce. Such a demure little liquid and only a tablespoon in this dish, yet the essence of this and thousands of other dishes have been the point of argument between chefs, philosophers and even physicists for more than 2,500 years.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first asked - what are flavors? It was also Democritus that decided that sweet, sour, salty and bitter were the only options out there. He believed that taste was based on the shape of the food molecule. Salty foods, when chewed, broke down into tiny isosceles triangles. Sweet foods became large and rounds atoms. Aristotle and even Plato agreed with Democritus and so for thousands of years, it was common knowledge that there were four, and only four, flavors.

In the early 1800s, a French chef (it’s always the French isn’t it?), Auguste Escoffier, the lead chef at the Paris Ritz, developed a veal demi-glaze that he said emboddied a taste all it’s own – not salty, sweet, sour or bitter. It was a fifth flavor. At the same time, a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, proclaimed that the tongue had receptors for another flavor – one that was umami, or “deliciousness.” The taste of dashi, a seaweed based soup, was deep and rich and could not be described by any of the other four flavors. Ikeda was mocked for his findings and his ideas were never accepted by mainstream chemistry.

Fast forward to the 1990s when researchers discover that the human tongue does in fact have five distinctly different flavor receptors – the fifith being a flavor reaction to the presence of glutamate, a substance that is present in almost all living things but which is transformed as it begins to die and the molecules begin to fall apart … think here of grilled meat or aging parmesian.

The fifth flavor has since been officially recognized and named umami (sometimes “savory” in the U.S.) in honor of Ikeda. One food that displays one of the strongest umami characteristics? You guessed it, soy sauce.

It was a simple Monday night dinner. No muss, no fuss. Salmon, rice and vegetables – but altogether amazing when you consider how it landed in one place, at one time, on the plate of a girl in a small town on the west coast of America.