In Which I Demonstrate my Newfound Interest in Food

Over on Digby's blog, tristero's been talking alot about food. Today's post is about how the current organic food debate is missing the point, regardless what the UK Food Standards Agency says about Organic food not being demonstratively healthier then "regular" food. Instead, we should be focusing on taste. After stating that if you eat good food, you shouldn't be worrying about nutrients (which seems about right to me), he says:

Sadly, that's not so easy in modern America. Americans have been trained since birth to eat cruddy-tasting food and think it tastes great. It's not that burgers taste bad: they don't, they can taste great. It's rather that the burgers - and the fries, and the shakes, and so on - made available to the typical American taste awful, with fake flavors that pretend to taste good. But once you have, say, really great chocolate - and, hard as it is to believe, few of us have - you'll never, ever go back to the fake or adulterated stuff currently marketed as "chocolate." Other foods are harder to taste than chocolate, of course, but the principle's the same.

Now it's not just The Man's fault. True, big corporations have done an extraordinary job of feeding us huge piles of crappy-tasting slop (and also "disappearing" good food). In doing so, they've guaranteed that their owners will make enough of the other green stuff that they'll never have to eat their own lousy products. But that's only part of the problem.

If your parents were like mine, you never knew what broccoli could taste like when it wasn't cooked down to mush, or even how awesome a simple tomato salad could be. Incredibly, if we want to enjoy good food - something other cultures take for granted (and not just Europe!) - we actually need to learn, starting from square one, what it tastes like and how to cook it. That's how clueless most Americans are about food.

I know my introduction to cooking is slowly forthcoming and it's been a long, painful process, but this, combined with our CSA and attempts to buy local produce, mean that i've been enjoying the food i've been eating more then I can remember in a long, long time.