Chacun à son Gout

As I was putting together last week’s Vegetarian Turkey Day links, I was reminded yet again how much I really don’t like vegetables.  Although I do eat seafood now, I don’t eat it that often, so as a mainly-vegetarian, not like vegetables is, well, rather limiting.  Or it would be limiting if I weren’t so desperately in love with carbohydrates.  

However, as mentioned in my explanation about Three Bowls, I do want to try to eat healthy and eating healthy pretty much means vegetables.  Is there any other foodstuff that runs the gamut of health or diet trends?  Even on Atkins you’re supposed to eat your veggies.  

(Shoulders slump.)

So I was heartened to read some information that might help me turn my tastebuds around... 

For one thing, I learned it might not just be some childish attachment to sweets or some lack of moral fiber that makes me literally shudder involuntarily when I go to wikipedia to look up the spelling of “Brussels sprouts” and see a big picture of a bunch of the green bastards.  

It might be my genes. Eating Well wrote about a recent Finnish study:

“Looking at genetic profiles of 146 adults from 26 families, they identified an area on a chromosome linked with a preference for sweet foods. People with a particular variation of this chromosome rated sweet foods as more pleasant-tasting, ate more of them and had more frequent sweet-food cravings than people with other variations.”

And in addition to a preference for sweets, some people actually have an even stronger aversion to exactly the kind of bitterness that certain vegetables have. 

Another article on Eating Well also focuses on taste.  While the author, Cynthia Sass, never uses the term “supertasters,” she describes an experiment in which several subjects are given a sample of a paper with a flavor on it and only some people detected – and strongly – the bitterness on the paper.

These two elements, like a slow metabolism’s tendency to store weight, would seem to be a genetic holdover from early man, a time when the preference to avoid bitter and choose sweet had big benefits from a survival perspective.

As the article explains,

“Sweetness is associated with foods that provide energy needed for survival (e.g., mother’s milk). Bitterness often signals the presence of a toxin…[A] built-in aversion to bitter might have helped our ancestors to survive and evolve…[but] in a world where we ‘hunt’ and ‘gather’ at supermarkets, being easily turned off to bitter may be a liability. Many phytochemicals linked with health benefits—glucosinolates in Brussels sprouts and kale, flavonoids in grapefruit and isoflavones in soy—impart bitterness. And, in fact, research shows that people genetically programmed to detect subtle bitter tastes consume fewer cruciferous vegetables, leafy greens, tart citrus fruits, green tea and soy products—all foods associated with reduced risk of chronic diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s.”

She goes on to quote a health professor who says, “We have data that show that people who were more sensitive to bitter tastes consumed fewer vegetables and had a greater incidence of colon polyps, a marker of higher risk for colon cancer…This research is preliminary but it connects genetic variations that affect oral sensations with specific health outcomes.”

GREEEAAAAT.

But!  That doesn’t mean I am doomed! (maybe)  

Sass, the author, is also a vegetarian dietician.  She offers a personal success story of changing eating habits.  Her hubby was a fried-meat lovin’ Texan guy.  However, her healthy eating habits eventually rubbed off on him (she takes care to point out she never nagged or pushed her choices on him, which is the only way I think this could work).  He learned to not only tolerate but actually enjoy things like stir-fried tofu with vegetables.  He pulled a slow but certain “dietary one-eighty” then lost 55 lbs and went from size 40 to size 34.

She also gives some excellent “Taste Tips” on ways to counteract the bitterness or strong flavors of some healthy but unpalatable (for some) foods.  I will be trying as many as I can!  Brussels sprouts, here I come.  (More shudder.)

And on the subject of taste, here is new book I just heard about on The Splendid Table.  It’s called Food: The History of Taste. 

It was included on the Thanksgiving show because apparently the Thanksgiving meal, with its mixture of savory and sweet in the same dish, has been a bit of a throwback to a time when spices like cinnamon and allspice were generally included in the main meal (and a time when the Islamic world’s take on cooking had far-reaching influence).  Later, some time after the Renaissance, such flavors were eventually relegated to the dessert course in the Western world, but have been making this once-yearly appearance on the table in the US.  Looks like a highly interesting read!

****** 

I was thinking about, and actually wrote most of this entry prior to my Saturday night dinner, which actually fit right into the theme of this entry. 

My friends Carolyn and Will (hosts of the Apple Tasting) asked me to come over and help them finish up some of the apple pie made from those apples for their Thanksgiving dinner.  Will is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic cook, so the dinner grew from leftovers and apple pie to homemade ravioli with two different sauces.

Will's skill meant that I was successfully able to not only eat, but enjoy squash, yams and sweet potatoes.  (I know if I'm saying I love sweets and carbs it might seem like I should love yams and sweet potatoes but I don't.  They've always skeeved me, and I tell everyone about how in Home Ec in 8th grade I got special permission to not have to eat the yams we made in class.  I threatened dry heaving.) 

The ravioli "we" made (meaning the ravioli Will had to work doubly hard to make since I was "helping" and most likely messing it all up) had a roasted squash filling.  When we ran out of that, Carolyn got out the leftover yams.  The blood, again, drained from my face, but I am really determined to not get cancer if I can help it, so I started an internal chant of "Beta Carotene! Beta Carotene!" and cowboy'd up.

But it turned out that no cowboying up was needed; with the scrumptious mushroom cream sauce Will also made from scratch, the squash and yams were both transformed - in different, yet equally interesting ways - into something rich, complex and, most importantly for me, thoroughly edible!

We also had a leftover kind of mashed sweet potato, which I also enjoyed.

So...maybe you can teach an old ice-cream addict new tricks...although it might be best to first lure her with pie.  Stayed tuned for more vegetable developments!