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Food and Drink

Sensing the sensuality in 'slow'

I was rushing down the street like a mad woman the other day, trying to do everything and accomplishing nothing. The entire day had felt like a really wet, smelly wool blanket draped over my shoulders - heavy, unpleasant and soggy. I'd even taken the wrong exit and messed up an appointment. Never mind the weather, my own self-absorbed busyness and underwhelming lack of progress had ground me to a pulp.

It sounds like a cliché as worn out as I was but, suddenly, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Out of the blue, I was feeling ten times better as the pungent aroma of a well-balanced curry managed to crash through everything, pick me up by the back of my neck, give me a little shake and gently set me down again. And I hadn't even known that an Indian restaurant was nearby.

The delicious smell didn't make me hungry or want to eat, though. It was enough just to stand there and suck it up literally with my nose, as well as figuratively, and savour my own private little happy moment.

Smell, as most of us know, is a huge and powerful part of taste. It "contributes to taste grandly," writes Diane Ackerman in her classic and wonderfully readable A Natural History of the Senses .

Just how much the two are intertwined, scientifically speaking, is hard to pin down: 75 per cent of taste depends on smell, says one source; "a lot," says another. But both senses are linked dynamically. Smells connect directly with the olfactory sensory neurons in our noses through our nostrils as well as through a channel that connects the roof of the throat region to the nose.

Simply think of smell and taste as sharing a common airshaft. As we chew, food aromas rise up through this channel into our noses.

Our sense of smell is also influenced by what's known as the common chemical sense, which involves thousands of nerve endings on the moist surfaces of the eyes, nose, mouth, and throat, producing all the boo-hoo-hoo tears when you slice an onion and the cooling sensations from peppermint tea.

Then there are the components of touch and taste, texture and taste, culture and taste, ritual and taste, memory and taste, and the direct action of taste buds themselves. Ten thousand of the little guys are located in the mouth of a normal adult, which, according to Ackerman, look like volcanoes on Mars under an electron microscope. By comparison parrots have only about 400 taste buds while cows and rabbits have a surprisingly large number (25,000 and 17,000 respectively).

All of this by way of sharing one tiny little slice of how much is at work when you have something to eat - that is, if you take the time and notice.

The great and sometimes not so simple pleasure of food is a huge aspect of the slow food movement that became very apparent to Sarah MacMillan at Pemberton's Rootdown Organics when, as one of Canada's delegates, she attended the Slow Food International gathering known as Terra Madre in Torino, Italy.

"Good, clean, fair" - that's the motto of the slow food movement. Under "good" make sure you also include the idea of food that knocks the socks off your sensory self.

"What falls under 'good' is 'pleasure', and it's vital, too," says Sarah. "They are connoisseurs and very concerned about people's need to enjoy food and draw pleasure from it. Obviously, that's tied back into the idea that you're supporting local traditions, and sensory pleasure is going to come into play because [the food] is such high quality and has such flavour."

This was evident enough at the Salone del Gusto alone, which was an adjunct to the main gathering of delegates from around the world who were there to learn about food that's local, authentic, produced on a small scale and, as noted, sinfully delicious.

At the salon, hundreds of food producers, most from Italy and the rest of Europe, featured their wares. There were even stands set up to teach delegates how to taste all the flavours of food much as wine tasters are taught to taste and appreciate the full flavour of wine.

Sarah had her socks knocked off by an olive oil made from thousand-year-old trees, which can have trunks as big as eight metres in diameter - "floral and peppery and such an intense flavour, I've never tasted olive oil like it in my life," she says. Other knock-outs included a pecorino cheese produced from the milk of a rare breed of sheep, and an amazing prosciutto made with orange rind, clove, garlic, pepper and rosemary.

The thing that's been traditionally attached to the slow food concept has been its focus on maintaining traditional ways of preparing and serving food, which naturally means also using heritage plants and animals that are fast disappearing in the wake of mainstream industrialized food production. Ergo the Slow Food Foundation's Ark of Taste for heritage plants and animals worth saving.

But appealing to our collective common sense by delighting our senses is, well, somewhat novel and refreshing, especially in the West where the guilt of "guilty pleasures", including the sensory delight of food, has stuck with us since the birth of Christianity.

This is no great surprise for, according to Ackerman, Christianity arose "as a slave-class movement, emphasizing self-denial, restraint ... and the ultimate punishment of the luxury-loving rich in the eternal tortures of hell." Christianity was pitted against what was then a decadent Roman upper class prone to abusing its lower, slave class and hosting banquets filled with taste tantalizers and, yes, debauchery.

The floor could be knee-deep in rose petals. Slaves massaged guests' bodies with perfumed oils or sprinkled them with animal scents. Dishes might include lamprey milt on eel-shaped trolleys or ones that squirted saffron, rose water or some other delicacy into the diners' faces.

While all that might be just a teensy bit over the top for you, it's also a far cry from grabbing bad food that's been nuked in a microwave and gobbling it down without a thought or a breath or a moment to savour.

So go ahead, do something nice for those 10,000 taste buds of yours. Seek out something to eat that's good, fair, clean - and pleasurable. It just might deliver a lot more than you think.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who puts good food enjoyed with good company right near the top of her list.