5/16/13
Perhaps it’s obvious to everybody else, but it’s not obvious
to me what the basic goals are for a food preparer relative to the attributes
(the five categories listed previously) of the food detected in our heads, to
say nothing of nutrition and harmlessness.
Some foods we eat raw, like fruit, some vegetables, sometimes meat or
fish, milk. There are people who eat
only raw vegan foods; one of my best friends from long ago was one, and he
would amaze me consuming raw potatoes and other raw vegetables which everyone
else cooked. He was incredibly healthy,
so I would assume the diet didn’t harm him.
This raises not only the question of what should a food
preparer strive for in taste, but a more general question: Why cook?
Even in salads, which are usually solely raw vegetables, we cut and mix
the vegetables together, which doesn’t interfere with tasting each one
separately, but then we add dressings of various strong flavors on top, which
tend to override the flavor of the raw vegetables.
Some possibilities stand out. In situations, most likely in the past, where
food was scarce and food which had started to go bad had to be eaten, dressings
could be used to mask any unpleasant aspects of the food ingredients. I have read long ago that this was the origin
of spices in India. If so, why do we
still do it with perfectly healthy, perfectly fresh foods? Most recipes I have read tell you to start
with fresh ingredients and then start to doctor them.
One variation of this involves food preservation. Food that is temporarily available might be
preserved, by putting it in brine, by fermenting it, by salting it, by freezing
it or keeping it at low temperatures, by refining it into parts none of which
is attackable by pests or which is easier to store and defend from pest
(bacteria, insects, worms, anything). If
food preservation came into existence long after our food detection system had
evolved, food preparation using preserved ingredients would have to have some
tricks to get it past our detectors.
A second variation of this involves some natural material
that is basically inedible, but can be transformed somehow, such as by milling
and separating it, into something that is.
And the transformed food can’t be eaten raw, but must be further
transformed before it is digestible or nutritious or palatable. This means complicated food preparation.
A third variation, not too distinct from the last one,
involves some natural material that is harmful, but which can be transformed
into harmless by some process, such as heating, marinating in alcohol, or
whatever. The harmfulness doesn’t even
have to be part of the material itself, but could be from adulteration,
biological transformation, infection or something else. If something has some chance of harming the
body, does heating it, i.e, something like pasteurization, eliminate that
chance and leave us with a useful food ingredient?
Another situation is that people might have to eat foods
they don’t like. Why would someone not
like a food that was healthy and safe – is this a failure of the food detection
system in the head, where it classifies a perfectly fine food as dangerous or
non-nutritious? Perhaps if the system is
based on familiarity, and a new food had to be introduced, it could be
disguised by adding something to it.
Perhaps it was due to imperfections in the system – a perfectly
good food is not only not familiar, but is similar to bad foods in some
attribute, and the food system tries to bar it.
Included above are five examples where the logical mind, which knows
that the food is edible, tries to trick the reptilian part of the brain, which
operates more simply and classifies the food as non-edible. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that we have a
competition between different lobes of the brain, and carry the combat out into
the physical world, where the smarter, later evolved part, fools the more
primitive one? Is this actually what we
are doing by food preparation?
Another aspect relates to something not yet discussed –
nutrition. Does mixing things together,
or heating them, or coating them, make nutrition more efficient? This discussion needs to take place after an
exploration of the nutrition system in the body.
Even further, we have feedback systems in the body that
control the amount we eat – sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Could we be trying to affect those systems,
and for example, override a food limitation signal the intestine sends out so
we can eat more, perhaps because we logically can predict that there will be no
more food after a while and we need to fatten up in the near future. Seasons in the northern and southern
hemisphere would provide a motivation for this.
Could it also be that some food preparation is designed for
alternative purposes? There are special situations,
where we want to protect the eaters from some possible harm, like infection, so
we give them some ingredients that will assist in that goal. This might be classed as a form of nutrition,
but what about inebriation? Maybe we
want to prepare foods that produce good feelings not related to nutrition being
improved, but related to some chemical change in our brains. This is principally alcohol-related, but
there might be others.
A more subtle goal might be the most powerful of all. We feel good when we eat very nutritious and
safe foods, but that good feeling comes from the food detection system
anticipating the nutrition that is underway.
The detection system can be manipulated by using ingredients that create
the great-nutrition signal without actually providing nutrition, perhaps little
or none at all. So, to have the eaters feel
good, we can use food preparation to trigger the good feelings. Since there may be hazards to blatantly
fooling a natural system like this, we need to explore this goal before taking
it as one to follow. Delicious is not a
synonym for nutritious and harmless.
So, there are at least eleven different motivations for why
we don’t just eat our food raw. If we
are food preparers, would it help to know which of the ones we were targeting
when preparing the food? If we knew the
goals exactly, could we better tailor the processes we use to accomplish it? Here are the eleven already-mentioned
possible goals, there may be more:
1. Overcome food aging
2. Use preserved foods
3. Transform inedible materials into nutritious items
4. Eliminate possible harmfulness in a food
5. Overcome food novelty
6. Overcome false bad-food signals
7. Improve nutrition
8. Override food limitation signals
9. Provide some non-nutritional benefit
10. Provoke some attitude change
11. Make the food-detection system give great nutrition signals
Could it be our chefs and recipe-writers have forgotten
exactly what it was that caused us to shift from some particular raw food only
diet to food preparation in the extreme?
Are they doing things that are non-productive, wasting time on things
that aren’t necessary, going down the wrong paths, missing what is important in
food preparation, causing some losses in nutrition unnecessarily, or encountering
other pitfalls? If we are going to try
to prepare food like good engineering teams would, we will need to sort out the
goals of food preparation better than what we see in the food literature.
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