Living in Manhattan, I used to think I had access to some of the best tasting food in the world and since a long time, maybe forever. With all the restaurants, chefs, and cuisines, I figured their competition and education must drive them to ever improving quality.
The longer I cook at home and shop at farmers markets, the more I find restaurants don’t compete on quality of ingredients. What they serve—more doof than food, if they even serve food—derives its main sensory pleasure from salt, sugar, fat, and convenience. They don’t showcase the vegetables. On the contrary, they hide them under salty, sweet, or oily sauces.
The more I buy and cook with fresh ingredients, the more I learn to shop for them, to find out what is in season, tastes best, and often costs less than packaged, certainly less than restaurant doof and food.
For a while I supposed chefs’ skill made food taste better than ever. Now I find the quality of ingredients matters most, especially considering how butter-happy and sugar-happy chefs are.
As for history, we can’t sense how produce used to taste. Given the direction of most grocery stores, though, I’d guess produce before industrial growing, harvesting, and preparing happened tasted better. I’m not sure how to test my hypothesis, but I’m beginning to suspect what we eat tastes worse than ever.
Given how much you like vegetables, I always wondered why you didn’t live somewhere you could grow them yourself.
I talk about why I am inspired to live in the mess in episode 284: Why not escape to nature? https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episodes/284-why-not-escape-to-nature.
In my page on Environmental Leadership Resources https://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-resources, I link to the video about the New Zealand couple who inspired me:
The Pollinators https://www.thepollinators.net/how-to-watch (on Kanopy: https://www.kanopy.com/video/pollinators)
A couple, Robert and Robyn Guyton, who converted a polluted plot in a New Zealand suburb into a food forest, saying “My philosophy in life about what to do in the world isn’t to go to a pristine area and live there and enjoy your life; it’s to find a place that’s degraded and fix it upâ€
Tour a Thriving 23-Year-Old Permaculture Food Forest – An Invitation for Wildness: https://youtu.be/6GJFL0MD9fc
Riverton Food Forest Tour with Robert & Robyn Guyton: https://youtu.be/YSsfTWW5OPs
The Essential Forest-Gardener – “don’t destroy lifeâ€: https://thestandard.org.nz/the-essential-forest-gardener-dont-destroy-life