The above quotation is from a novel by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (I believe Norwegian Wood). It's a simple and profound truth—our senses matter. Sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, these are the mediums through which we perceive the world. They are crucial to our understanding, to our emotions. A writing professor of mine once said that our senses are avenues to our feelings. Our brains react to what we perceive and register an emotional reaction. When we feel the sun on our skin, we are happy. When we see grey skies, we are subdued. Yet somehow, we often forget that our senses exist, even as they are happening. Our eyes take in images that we forget. We hear music, yet simultaneously drown it out.
Taste is perhaps the most interesting of all the senses because taste comes to us through a necessary human action—eating. We must eat and drink to sustain our physical lives. Yet it is possible to participate in the act of eating and never taste a thing. Perhaps we only see and feel our food. We eat a plum, and our mind registers the image, so our brain knows to “taste” a plum. But the experience of actually tasting is much different. We do more than see purple, smell sweetness, and feel juices. All of these other senses affect our taste, but they are not taste. Taste is rather difficult to describe. Scientists say our tongue registers four tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. In the early 2000s they finally acknowledges a fifth--umami. Technically, umami is amino acid. It's what we taste in meat and parmesan cheese. But umami, named from the Japanese language for the Japanese chemist who first did experiments to "discover" it, is translated into our language with one simple word--delicious.
And can we really describe food any other way? We see that it is beautiful. We smell that it is fragrant. We feel that it is crunchy (or smooth). We even hear it sizzling in the pan. But when it comes to taste, I think the best we can hope for is to taste that it is delicious. To be truly aware of what we are eating. It is possible to eat and not know that the food is good (and sometimes, it really isn't). The food will keep you alive. But when you eat, and know that the food is good, you can also know that you are alive.
To close, some random photos of what I've been eating this summer (it was all delicious):
Hodge-podge meal: Golden beets with ricotta salata, greens with bacon, sauteed corn with jalapeno
Summer lunch: fried green tomato "BLT", toast with roasted red pepper spread and summer sausage, ricotta salata
Summer breakfast: lemon blueberry pancakes with black mango tea
Summer happy hour: soft-ripened goat cheese, peaches with honey, glass of vinho verde
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