A number of factors were cited as a possible cause of such totally untutored palates in a group of adults, among them, the modern tendency to depend on prepackaged and processed foods. These products rely heavily on salt and sugar to make them seem flavorful, to the loss of any other distinguishing flavor that the food might have had.

We have become terrified of food! Not only is there an increasing fear of "getting fat", to the point where there is now a 33 billion dollar diet industry in the United States alone, but there have been many well publicized campaigns against various foods and substances found in foods -- cholesterol, salt, sugar, fat. The "magic bullet" philosophy kicks in. If excessive salt, sugar, cholesterol, fat, what have you is bad, then we'll just eliminate it, and then we'll live longer healthier lives!

Except to replace the fat, cholesterol, salt, sugar, what have you, we turn to chemicals and additives, which may be more potentially harmful than the original "bad guys" themselves. And when some of these conclusions are found to be erroneous, we don't hear nearly as much about the reversal of opinion.

Do you remember when eggs became the enemy during the late seventies? The humble hen fruit was responsible for heart disease, because eggs filled our arteries with cholesterol. We should have no more than a couple of eggs a week, maximum!

This panic about eggs spawned a plethora of egg replacements. People avoided eggs, turning to other breakfast alternatives -- some of them healthy, some of them just as or more fat laden than eggs (muesli and trail mix, "healthy" alternatives that were frequently laden with palm oil and coconut oil are two examples that spring to mind). Then, as further studies were performed, and the incidence of heart disease did not diminish much with falling egg consumption, the spotlight came off of "eggs are the enemy".

It was found that cholesterol, which became the buzzword of the late seventies and early eighties, is not the destroying angel it was made out to be. There are some individuals who seem to be sensitive to it, and when they consume dietary cholesterol, their livers are stimulated to secrete serum cholesterol, which clogs their blood vessels. Dietary cholesterol does NOT clog blood vessels, serum cholesterol does. If you are not one of these people who have a genetic preponderance toward the overproduction of serum cholesterol, you can (uh shuffle, shuffle, ahem, cough) safely consume one to two eggs a day with no ill effects, if your diet is balanced and for the most part, healthy.

But we didn't hear nearly as much about this reversal of opinion as we did about the original hysteria over eggs!

Or over whole milk. Do you remember the white death? It was another substance that was clogging our arteries with dreaded cholesterol. Many adults stopped drinking milk altogether, and some well meaning parents gave their infants and small children low fat and skim milk only.

Infants and small children need cholesterol for neurological development, which they would normally receive through mother's milk. In Western culture, most mothers don't nurse until a child is weaned, and baby formula becomes the alternative. In many cases, it is mixed with WHOLE milk -- except, thinking that they were sparing their children from heart disease, some parents used skim and low fat milk -- with the terrible result that their children did not develop normally neurologically, becoming subject to developmental delay and mental retardation.

And the adults who shunned dairy products turned out to be at higher risk for osteoporosis, due to lack of calcium in the diet. It is certainly possible for people to obtain sufficient calcium in the diet without dairy products (in fact, entire African tribes have diets that are completely lacking in dairy products), but few people in Western cultures knew about the rather complex dietary balancing needed to acheive this end. Sales of calcium supplements went through the roof, as the baby boomers aged. Then it was found that many of these didn't absorb readily into the system. Then it was found that cholesterol wasn't quite the deadly substance as was first thought, and (shuffle, ahem, cough, shuffle) it might not be a bad thing for adults to drink some milk, particularly if it's lowfat or skim.

We seem to be back at begin-again-Finnegan, don't we? It's the magic bullet dream -- eliminate one substance, and we will be healthy and live forever.

But things don't work that way, because the answer to a healthy diet is VARIETY!

Variety In The Staff Of Life

Though eggs are not the cholesterol bombs they were once thought to be, if you ate nothing but fried eggs, three times a day, every day of the year, you would not be healthy, because your diet would be out of balance on the side of fat and protein. Conversely, if you ate nothing but radishes, celery and alfalfa sprouts three times a day, every day of the year, you would not be healthy, because your diet would be out of balance on the side of simple carbohydrates. With the all egg regimen, you would be lacking in nutrients that you can only acquire by ingesting a varied diet consisting of protein, fruit, vegetables and grains. On the radish/celery/alfalfa sprout regimen, you would be lacking proteins and fats that your body needs for proper performance.

We need a little of everything -- and this leads us to the infinite variety we can have in our diets. But so frequently, through lack of exposure and desire for convenience, we limit our intake to a few "tried and true" staples.

A number of great cuisines have developed throughout history, as a result of man's adaptation of food to his needs. French, Chinese, Italian -- these cuisines are the three styles that have influences our food preparation today. Additionally, there are other cuisines that are somewhat derivative of them, with their own unique cooking techniques and styles -- Spanish, Indian, Cajun, Southwestern, etc. With all the variety available to us, it's hard to believe that we limit ourselves to a small number of dishes, or that adults' palates have become so untutored that they can only distinguish sweetness or saltiness!

Additionally, those of us who have ridden the diet roller coaster for most of our lives frequently develop emotional ties to food that further distort our palates, giving us cravings for certain things that are all out of proportion to our actual nutritional needs or any normal desire. When I think of eating four candy bars at one go now, I want to be ill. But there have been many many times in my life where severe dieting restrictions and long term deprivation have led me to do just that! So in our non-dieting mode, we can binge and overeat certain foods, further limiting our intake of food to a few favorites.

It seems physically possible, of course, to consume the calories and nutrients we need through a few extracts and vitamin pills. We could have an intraveous bag attached which would give us our required calories and swallow some nutritional supplements and be done with it! That would be efficient, but doesn't that sound a lot like a magic bullet to you? It doesn't work -- not long term, because humans need food!

We need the sensual experience of food -- the smells, the flavors, the textures. Have you ever been on a liquid diet (bet a lot of you have!) Did you start to dream of crunchy popcorn or chewy caramel, or a tender steak after a while? We need to experience our food, to see the colors and smell the various scents, to experience the textures, to chew, to swallow. The need for these experiences have led to the development of cuisine, of all the various ways that food can be prepared and presented.

So What's It All About?

What I would like to do is celebrate food a bit -- its variety and diversity, as well as its flavorfulness. I'm going to research and post a few favorite recipes, and I'm inviting you to do the same.

I do want to establish a few guidelines. I am not advocating any particular "magic bullet" here. In other words, these are not "low fat" recipes, or "high fiber" recipes, or "low calorie" recipes. Instead, they are recipes that I have found to be tried and true so far as flavor and quality is concerned. I'm not going to post any "calories per serving" information, because I don't know it, and am not concerned with it. After all, "serving" is a relative term! I could give you a recipe for cheesecake and claim that it was "only 50 calories per serving" -- if the serving was a quarter of a teaspoon! This has been a technique of the diet food industry for years! Not many people look beyond the claim that "this cake has only 75 calories per serving!" to see that it does indeed, if you cut it into fifty very small pieces, far smaller than what most people would consider a serving!

Remember, food is not the enemy. You might want to take a look at the Overcoming Overeating website, if you have concerns about the role that food is playing in your life (in other words, if you're afraid of it or ruled by it, or have a problem with bingeing or chronic overeating). It is the staff of life -- it literally keeps us alive. We have to have it to live -- so why not make it the best staff of life that we can, rather than getting to the point where we can only distinguish two flavors?