Blog 8 - Food.. Glorious Food!!

After watching the movie "Castaway on the moon" I realized how food can possibly be a driving factor to HOPE, although its a beautiful Korean love story the message delivered through it is very deep. I decided to dig into the abyss of how food and how is the science that is associated with food.

I have travelled a bunch of places and when you travel the important part of travelling is exploring the places, the culture and the food. Food is something that drives us, a very wise person told me once that whatever we do, whatever we earn, we do it for one single thing and that is to fill our stomach with food so never prioritize anything over food. I came across the popular cuisines in my travels, I wouldn’t say I am much of a foodie but I love to cook new dishes whenever there is a chance of doing so. Somehow I realized there are a whole lot of scientific theories and reasoning behind the food items or dishes that are consumed around the world.

Let me ask a few obviously yes questions. Do you like orange juice? Do you like hot/spicy food? Do you love chocolates? Do you prefer eating sweets after lunch or dinner? And lastly does coffee tastes better without sugar?. As I said most of you would answer these questions as yes, this is where the body's anatomy comes into the picture. Our tongue is responsible for everything we taste, provided it’s sour, bitter, sweet, hot and salty. Everything else that we sense is the aroma of food. Spices that are widely used all over the world in cooking, spices are basically used to preserve food for a long time and the aromas of spices are used to increase the palatability of food. In short the spices that we taste in any food is not the taste of those spices it’s just the scent of the ingredients, for instance, if you want to test this, try eating something and hold your nose so that you cannot breathe through your nose, you would notice that the only taste that you would get is sweet, sour, bitter or hot.

Thus coming to the topic of favorite food around the world, I have observed in terms of preferences most of the people love what is tangy or sour, there are the people who like what is hot with above average use of chilly, there are the people who love to eat that is bitter and lastly the sweet eating people. Although the feeling of chewing on different meats has nothing to do with its taste, it's just something that satisfies the carnivorous instinct that we all have, some suppress it, some embrace it.

When it comes to food what I think is, people decide on what to eat depends on the craving of their tongue for any of the taste senses. The taste buds on the tongue play an important part in the whole process. As the surface area of the tongue that detects what’s sour is large anything that is sour is widely popular, be it food or drink like wine or beer or anything that would give you a tingling sensation on your tongue.

Along with this, there are other factors too that are responsible for people to select what type of food items they want to eat. It’s the feeling of chewing on something that makes us all crave for a particular type of meat or vegetable or fruit or even dairy food like cheese. So the feel of biting on something plays an important role here, too. Thus we have people who prefer red meat over white or fish over chicken. There is a type of cheese that’s consumed in Europe called the Casu Marzu. The specialty of this cheese is that it has live maggots and people are somewhat fond of the feeling they get when they eat this cheese, however, this cheese is banned.

Thus, on the nutshell, cherish all the food items, be it meat or vegetables, after all, we need all the vitamins for a better life.