TASTESCAPE

To give a sense of the tastescape, I thought I would eat one almond and try to describe the experience. I took it from the granola I made last week, so it was baked along with a lot of other things, including olive oil and maple syrup, lots of oats, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, some cinnamon, and a little salt. As I put the almond in my mouth, I am struck by its size. It is quite large. I can feel the skin softening up and oops, all of sudden, there are two pieces in my mouth. I can feel the wrinkled skin on the one side, and the smooth surface of the seedling that it is, now split in two, on the other. I bite into them—perceive that they are surprisingly crunchy—and start chewing, slowly. The crunchiness rapidly turns to something with the consistency of cornmeal. It is amazing how the taste floods the mouth, peaks, and then trails off. It happened much faster than I thought it would. So, to zero in on the taste again, I put another in my mouth after swallowing what was left of the first one.

Slowly, mindfully chewing, chewing, tasting, tasting. Hmmmmm. Everything that is going on in the mouth is the domain of the tastescape, but what is it like in this instant?

It is definitely sweet, but in the subtlest of ways. If I had been blindfolded and just had it put in my mouth, I would know instantly from the taste that it was an almond. But would I know, from tasting, that it was an almond that has been marinated in other tastes? I am not sure. I couldn’t really say I detect the cinnamon, but its presence probably explains in part why this almond tastes as it does. Same for the maple syrup and the oil and all the other ingredients. When all is said and done, here too, the taste itself is not readily describable—what does cinnamon taste like without using the word “cinnamon”?—but the experience of tasting is infinitely knowable if I am willing to linger with it silently. And perhaps I would know it as different if I were given an almond that had not been treated in this way, not roasted, not part of a granola made with tender loving care.

Last night at a local restaurant I ordered cilantro green curry halibut with jasmine rice. It was an amazing combination of textures and tastes, each mouthful a supernova of subtleties… the chef really knew what he was doing to be able to impart such an experience to another person through food. Every mouthful of fish, cooked so as to melt in your mouth, along with some of the rice and a small aliquot of sauce invited a silent pause of, no exaggeration, dumbfounded ecstasy during which the head instinctively inclined itself at an unnatural angle to deepen the mindfulness of what was going on in the mouth. This was followed by an exclamation of delight and satisfaction, mostly contained so as to not overdo it with my wife, Myla, who had ordered something else. There was also a sensuous lingering after each mouthful with the swirling, explosive blending of refined tastes that was the source of such pleasure, mildly sweet, a touch of coconut milk aroma, and intensely peppered, but somehow not too much. Again, ultimately it is impossible for me to describe it. I guess that is why we eat delicious food, because just reading about it, even if the writer is gifted, may conjure up hunger, but it will never satisfy that hunger or give us the actual flavor itself. For that we have to take it into our mouths ourselves and taste it in order to know it. Here the tasting is the knowing.

When we taste with such care and attention, even the simplest of foods provide a universe of sensory experience. One bite of apple, banana, bread, cheese, one bite of anything is a whole universe of surprising tastes if we can be awake to them. Maybe that is why even the simplest of foods, even canned peas or sardines, taste better, it seems, when we are on the trail or camping, outside of our normal framework for experiencing the world.

And that is why eating a raisin is usually the first meditation practice we offer people in MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction). Eating dispels all previous concepts we may be harboring about meditation. It immediately places it in the realm of the ordinary, the everyday, the world you already know but are now going to know differently. Eating one raisin very very slowly invites you to drop right into the knowing in ways that are effortless, totally natural, and entirely beyond words and thinking. It is an invitation that is unusual only in that we tend to eat so automatically and unconsciously. Such an exercise, just eating, just chewing, just tasting, delivers wakefulness immediately: there is in this moment only tasting. Everything else is merely words and therefore thinking—once removed at least from present-moment experience, from tasting itself, and knowing intimately, savoring, the tastescape in the mouth.

Yet I imagine, coming back to the green curry halibut, that the chef might have something interesting and revealing to say about his creations. Tasting this dish mouthful after delicious mouthful, it was as if I were all of a sudden at a wine tasting and had been given some two-hundred-year-old Bordeaux costing hundreds of dollars. I might enjoy it, but how could I appreciate, never mind give voice to all its ineluctable virtues, or even understand them listening to someone else, without being a connoisseur of wines?

And what would that be? Just someone with experience, who has, literally, “become familiar” through paying attention to a particular field of experience (from the Latin, cognoscere, to know). So, in attending to the tastescape by bringing mindfulness to what we are actually putting in our mouths and tasting, we are becoming connoisseurs not only of what we are eating, but of who is doing the eating in the first place. It is all part of this particular field of awareness.

Let’s actually give some thought to eating for a moment. After breathing, eating is just about as basic as it gets for living organisms. We cannot sustain ourselves without eating, and the drives to satisfy that daily need for sustenance, in particular hunger and thirst, along with the discrimination of taste, which in the wild reduced the chances of poisoning ourselves out of desperation when hungry or thirsty, require daily satisfaction.

In hunting-and-gathering societies, almost all the energy of every able-bodied person went into procuring food. In agricultural societies, where the majority of food is grown and raised rather than hunted and gathered, a huge amount of energy in the society still goes into food production. Nevertheless, agriculture and the raising of animals over time, at least in locations where the environment was conducive to it, provided surpluses of food that allowed for a growing complexity within social groups, the appearance of cities and civil society, wherein not everybody devoted their energies to food production or distribution, even though everybody in the society has to eat to stay alive. This trend has obviously continued and has become even more the case in industrial and postindustrial societies. Thus, our relationship to food over the past ten thousand years has changed dramatically, including the ease of procurement, preservation, storage, distribution, varieties of food available to us, its quality and nutritive value, and the ubiquity of it. From that have arisen many ways in which we who do not grow or catch our own food take both food and eating for granted, and we live very far from the basic need to find food when it is scarce or difficult to procure.

Nevertheless, eating is still just as basic to our survival, each and every one of us, as to prehistoric societies, so we live with a kind of tension of non-recognition and non-appreciation that can be quite bizarre. Thus eating has become increasingly separated from survival and maintenance of life in our consciousness. For the most part, we eat with great automaticity and little insight into its critical importance for us in sustaining life, and also in sustaining health. We are driven far more by desire than by need, our relationships to food shaped by social pressures, the advertising industry, agribusiness, food processing, and by conditioned taste preferences and portion sizes that, in first world countries and particularly the United States, have led to a virtual epidemic of obesity over little more than a decade.

I have eaten one raisin very very slowly with a lot of people over the years, and so have become somewhat identified in people’s minds with raisins, enough to sometimes feel like protesting: “It’s not about the raisin.” The raisin is merely an occasion to explore the tastescape and our relationship to the whole domain of eating, which we usually engage in with considerable automaticity and often stunningly little awareness of what or how we are eating, how fast we are eating, what our food actually tastes like, and when our body is telling us it is time to stop. And beyond eating, of course, the raisin is also an occasion for us to investigate the nature of our own mind and body. For that matter, what we experience with the raisin can and often does reveal important elements of our relationship with the entire world.

Our eating is often driven by rather primordial urges and accompanied by equally primordial and extremely unconscious behaviors. I know from firsthand experience that becoming conscious of how we eat, and whether we are truly tasting anything at all, is one of the most difficult of all mindfulness practices, even though at first blush it seems self-evident and easy. But the habit patterns surrounding self-feeding run very deep, and as we just observed, there really is a primordial element to them. Just think: we feed ourselves, and we have all had to learn to do it. And we do it all the time, not just to sustain our lives, but often out of sheer habit, and the urge to satisfy cravings that have little to do with real nourishment and often stem more from emotional discomfort than any actual hunger. Of course, sharing food in the company of family and friends is one of the most basic, profound, and satisfying vehicles of social connectedness. It feeds other needs that also run very deep in us.

One way we know the world and are in touch with it is through the mouth and via the tongue, through its fine-tuned ability to distinguish textures as well as through tasting. As already noted, the tongue is relatively large in the somatosensory homunculus (see The Healing Power of Mindfulness, “Homunculus”), reflecting its importance as a vehicle for knowing the world, well beyond the specialized sense of taste. As babies, we all put things in our mouths. That was a primary and very direct way to explore what things were. Rocks are hard. Sand is gritty. Blueberries are squooshy. Everything has its own unique texture and feel in the mouth.

When we bring awareness intentionally into the mouth as we are chewing one raisin, after having looked at it for some time and have actually seen it beyond our concepts and opinions about it, the very taste itself tends to explode into our mouths and into our minds with a surprising novelty that can be quite revealing… a universe of sensations, all unfolding and mixing together in every moment. And it doesn’t have to be a raisin. If we slow down a bit, we can intentionally bring awareness to tasting anything we are eating, to be with this mouthful of food and really taste it, chew it, and know it before we swallow it.

It is said that taste, perhaps closely coupled with smell, is the sense that is most unmistakably evocative of memories. One broadly known literary passage evoking this power of the sense of taste over memory comes from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it… [but] as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me… immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents.

Let’s keep this in mind, to be returned to later when we explore the intimate links between the brain, our inward and outward senses, our memories, and awareness itself.