Our Collective Eating Disorder
What kind of creature is shunning the milk of its own females while eagerly sucking the tits of another species? Take a guess!
From Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map Collection
The term acquired taste exists in many European languages and defines food whose qualities cannot be immediately appreciated for a variety of reasons. To enjoy such meals, people often have to make a deliberate effort to get their senses accustomed to a specific smell, taste, or texture.
One can assume that, at least from a biological point of view, all tastes are acquired except that of human milk, to which babies are instinctively drawn from the moment they are born. Ironically, it is the only taste that has to be forcefully relinquished. Giving it up is an essential requirement in the process of growing up.
Milk appeared in nature specifically as food for babies. Therefore, it’s not a suitable source of nutrients for adult mammals. The vast majority of the animals that feast on milk in their infancy lose the ability to digest it after they reach maturity and become independent.
Being human, we have found a way to circumvent this evolutionary obstacle by adapting our digestive systems. But interestingly enough, we shun our own milk and prefer that of domesticated animals, to which we got accustomed simply by accident.
Yes, we would rather prefer to suck the tits of a cow than those of our own females. To make things borderline grotesque and slightly pathetic, in some puritan cultures like the American one, public breastfeeding of babies is considered a scandalous taboo. Just ask Barbara Walters!
Confusing and counterintuitive as it may be, this is just the tip of an enormous culinary iceberg. Our choice of food has more to do with our immediate environments, cultural backgrounds, and spiritual aspirations than with ordinary biological factors.
National and racial prejudices go hand in hand with culinary ones and often blend together. Ridiculing foreign cuisine is a favorite pastime of close-minded people all over the world.
But even those of us who consider themselves open-minded may occasionally fail to recognize the value of a culinary challenge. Food, just like language, has the power to directly shape our identity. Smells and tastes leave imprints in our minds. They often acquire an emotional context and become inseparable parts of our memories.
Food preparation can be a long, complex ritual passed from parents to children with the comforting hope of preserving a common legacy. There are countless legends of secret recipes shared only among very close relatives, preferably on a deathbed, after a priest has administered the last sacrament.
Food is also part of our religious experience. It can be argued that it is a central factor in our mythology. The most ancient religious doctrines started as attempts to imitative nature, or more precisely that aspect of nature which had an immediate connection to people’s nourishment.
The hunter-gatherer societies developed the cult of the animal spirits that dwelled in the forests where they found their food.
The agricultural societies of the Middle East and the Indus Valley started worshiping the plants, setting the rules of a game we continue to play today by burying our dead in the ground with the hope that they will be reborn.
All major religions in the world have strict rules about what should be considered food and when it should be consumed. Those rules are not based on pure reason but are a consequence of socio-economic demands. Some can be astonishingly absurd. For example, the Catholic Church classifies beavers as fish. This awkward decision was taken four centuries ago, after it became clear that the baptized Native Americans around Quebec wouldn’t give up eating beaver meat during Lent simply because of their newfound love for Jesus Christ. The Church had to adapt or expose itself to the risk of another wave of Protestantism, this time coming from the New World.
Yet food can be an incredibly mundane thing. After all, it’s something we put in our mouths, digest in our guts and shit in our toilets. Everything we consider special about it exists only in our heads.
The human brain is the most energy-demanding organ in our bodies. It will do everything to trick us to provide it with nutrients. Our brains will fire signals to the right neurons and pump us up with chemicals that will make us salivate. They will emotionally blackmail us with artificial concepts like comfort food or delicatessen.
Remembering this trivial fact is essential for maintaining a healthy relationship with our food. Like mythology, food serves us best when we are aware of the illusions it can inspire and the delusions it can create.
We Europeans are often proud of our national cuisines. We also tend to assume that disgusting food can be found exclusively in foreign, “exotic” cultures.
This is a gross misconception. Europe is littered with disturbing domestic meals. There’s a vast selection of fermented fish in Scandinavia, offal stews on the Balkans, deep fried pizzas in Scotland, sadistically squashed birds cooked under pressure in France, and a variety of dishes made from animal blood across the entire continent.
The top spot is reserved for Sardinia, where a special type of sheep cheese, infested with semi-transparent insect larvae, will tickle all your senses in a way you won’t forget.
The opposite is also true. You can find something delicious in every European cuisine. Good Old Britain, object of constant culinary ridicule, has its English breakfast, which even French people dare to praise, although under the condition of anonymity.
Sadly, delicious food and satire don’t mix well. Have you ever tried to ridicule a Schwarzwald cake? Go ahead and tell me how it went!
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An international bestseller, the Atlas of Prejudice has been published in English, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Italian. Its various hardcover, paperback, and electronic editions have sold more than 100.000 copies worldwide!
