Eating Paper
I was thinking....why does almost everything in my fridge taste like nothing?
Did you ever had that feeling when you go to a Biological store or directly to a farmer and buy products that they taste better? Of course you did...
There was a time in my childhood when I did not know anything else. Only the excellent taste of fresh milk, home made cheese or fresh eggs collected in the morning by myself. The good old times... My grandmother, God rest her soul in peace, gave me something which sadly is becoming more and more hard for me to give to my daughter. How Food SHOULD taste like.
What has changed? With the increase in population and the need to produce more, based on constant demand of the economy system which we live in, the quality of the food we eat decreased. Now one could argue the fact that now the groceries we buy at the Supermarket are looking excellent, live longer and have a similar taste with the product farmers grow. It is nevertheless an argument based on lack of information and experience on how food should be, not how it is presented to us. Another Label which I see thrown away more and more, in order to make people buy healthy is BIO. Think about it. A product marked as BIO, like for example Juice, which lasts for weeks even outside the fridge. Weeks...
Let's take another example:Apples
They look amazing in shop perfect shape and form, shinny and everlasting. How can you not buy them? Our brain is tricked, based on the visual feedback that these amazing looking products are also healthy and naturally grown. When you get home nevertheless you need to wash them with soap in order to remove the wax on them and in some cases even if you think you did a good job, get stomach aches after eating them. That is not BIO, that is industrialized food processing.
Coming back to my grandma and the way she grew everything. The main fertilizer was, you hopefully guessed it , shit. Not any shit, but the finest she could get. The old ways in growing vegetables were bringing such quality in taste because the emphasis was on quality not quantity. When her nephew came to visit, she did not want to give him something from the supermarket. She wanted for him fresh milk in the morning, tomatoes taken from the garden and home made ham. I am drooling just thinking of it. Her chickens were not "gym monsters" with 2kg chest. They were small and skinny for today’s standards, but when you made a soup , it tasted like chicken with no added "magical chicken taste cubes". Salt and pepper were the main ingredients in food not all kind of taste giving mixtures. She produced just a bit more for selling but that did not influenced the quality or the process. The same rules as for her nephews applied and the customers were delightful.
There were 2 declines felt by me in the quality of the food I was eating:
- Going to university in the city
- Moving to a western country
The first one was not that rough as I still got from my grandma food packages and in between the worst food I ate (pizzas, burgers, fries etc) there was a home made jam or fresh eggs or vegetables from the garden. Then I did not appreciate enough what I was about to lose completely after I moved to another country.
The second step and what cemented the paperlike taste was the complete change in scenery when moving to one of the biggest and developed countries in the EU. Nothing tastes like it should. Don't want you to think that I exaggerate here...it is true.
Tomatoes: only cherry tomatoes have a similar taste. the regular sort, are just tasteless
Watermelon: in almost 10 years did not manage to find one that tastes even remotely the same
Eggs: you can get good eggs if you go to the Farmers directly. In the stores, they simply lack the size and strong yellow which a healthy egg should have
Meat: Bigger does not mean better. Only more processing and added chemicals to sell quantity. Quality is not profitable.
In the end , the question will remain, how much quality would we like to lose over quantity? The more we produce , the less interest will be in preserving the original taste. Do we really want to eat more or we want to eat better? We need both but the gap between them should be reduced. Farmers shouldn't be forced to mass produce to survive. They should be given the opportunity to make their pay, along the mass production and selling giants.
Otherwise , we will soon find ourselves in a society where chemistry and marketing will dictate what we eat. If you give enough time, abnormal will overtake the normality and paper taste will become the new original taste. Do we really want to leave our children such a world?
Until next time, TFG