Home Body: The Six Tastes

“Everyone eats and drinks, but few appreciate taste.” - Confucius

For centuries, humans have had a confusing relationship with food. Throughout history our relationship with food, eating, and even digestion has changed and evolved. Even one of our oldest stories, that of Adam and Eve, has the pair getting kicked out of heaven for eating forbidden fruit. Although eating is essential to our existence, it has become so infused with culture, emotion, and meaning that our relationship with food is now incredibly complicated, causing a good deal of suffering and anxiety for many.

Advances in nutrition science have led to lifestyle approaches in medicine that sometimes overemphasize the health benefits of certain foods. Whereas a healthy diet will certainly enhance the quality of our lives, it is a leap to believe that the food on the end of your fork will cure cancer, build bones, or ward off Alzheimer’s. Not only is this an oversimplification of the disease process, it shifts the blame for illness to the individual. Sickness becomes a character flaw, a state that is brought on by one’s poor food choices or lack of control. Research in nutrition has greatly advanced our understanding of how certain foods can support our health, but, to date, no study has identified a food or groups of foods that can cure a specific illness. As our knowledge of the disease process expands, we have come to understand that it is multifaceted, involving numerous factors, some of which are in our control, but just as many that are not. Food can’t cure illness, but it can certainly change the quality of our lives.

The body is the great unknown. One day you feel great, but the next day you wake up with a cold. We get sick, injured, and experience aches and pains. A nagging sensation in your back suddenly turns into debilitating pain; your tiredness and achy joints turn out to be symptoms of a serious autoimmune disorder. Living in a body comes with uncertainty and change, so we search for some measure of solid ground, a reliable metric that will give us a sense of control. Unfortunately, the metric commonly used in our culture centers around weight, which encourages us to search for the perfect diet, one that will make us thin and ward off the uncertainties of the body.

Eating is our first interaction with the environment. Babies have a simple relationship with food, sensing when they are hungry and when they are full. We are born with individual preferences for tastes and textures but as we develop, we infuse food with power. Through our thoughts, fears, expectations, and desires, food becomes either “good” or “bad”, a poison that will hasten our death or an elixir that allows us to live a healthy life. Food is just food—a collection of nutrients, minerals, fiber, and water. It is we who assign its value. A person who enjoys the taste of strawberries will label them as “good”. Another person may be allergic to strawberries, so she finds them “bad”. Regardless of the reaction, a strawberry is still, essentially, a strawberry. It is we who create the drama.

Our relationship with food is intimately related to taste, texture, temperature, and odor. Eating is a rich sensory experience that includes sight, smell, taste, salivation, and chewing. In Ayurvedic medicine, the sister science of yoga, taste determines the energetic effect a food will have on the body. Certain tastes are considered “building”; they have a nourishing effect that helps to build energy when it is depleted. These tastes stimulate salivation and create a heavy, grounding effect on the body. After eating foods with “building” tastes, we feel calm, relaxed, and nourished. Other tastes are considered “reducing”. Foods with these tastes are lighter as well as cleansing and help us release energy. We typically feel stimulated and mentally alert after eating foods with reducing tastes.

There are three “building” tastes: sweet, sour, and salty. These are the tastes we associate with “comfort” foods. This does not mean they are necessarily unhealthy, but that we are drawn to them when we seek restoration or energy. Sweet is one of the most popular tastes in the U.S., but not all sweet tastes come from sugar. Sweetness is found in earthy, dense foods such as milk, cooked carrots, wheat, and rice. Many sweet foods have a smooth, soft texture and are wet, such as watermelon, or promote salivation once they touch the tongue. Eating sweet foods produces a calming effect in the body and steadiness in the mind.

Sour and salty are building tastes because they enhance our experience of other tastes. Sour starts off with an intensity in the mouth that stimulates excessive salivation, which enhances our ability to enjoy other foods. That’s why some people put pickles on a sandwich or combine the sour taste of yogurt with the sweetness of berries. When we feel depleted, the sour taste is refreshing and restorative. It perks us up, like lemonade on a hot, steamy day. Salt also stimulates saliva, making otherwise dull foods taste better. By itself, the salty taste is overpowering and can be nauseating, but with a light touch it enhances the inherent flavors of food. It gives food zest and is stimulating, which is why you may seek salty tastes when bored or depressed.

The three “reducing” tastes include pungent, astringent, and bitter. Unlike the grounding and restorative sensations of building tastes, reducing tastes produce sharper and penetrating sensations. They have a drying effect by reducing salivation. Pungent is intense at the onset and increases as it spreads in the mouth—think of the heat of jalapeno peppers. Vinegar, mustard, garlic, cinnamon, and cumin are pungent tastes that create burning sensations and increase thirst. These tastes wake us up. Astringent tastes have a drying effect that make the mouth pucker--think of pomegranates or walnuts. Since it is drying, this taste induces a sensation of lightness. That is why strong black tea is appealing when we feel sluggish or heavy. Bitter tastes are considered balancing because they stimulate our digestive juices. Many cultures offer a post-meal bitter such as espresso, dark chocolate, or dark, leafy greens to aid in digestion.

Ayurveda stresses the need for a healthy balance of all six tastes at as many meals as possible. It also encourages us to listen to our cravings, as they are a guide to what we need for nourishment. But in our weight obsessed culture in which “good” or “bad” foods dominate our choices, many of us have lost our natural sensitivity to the six tastes. We may not know what “astringent” tastes like and many are unaware of how real hunger feels. We’ve demonized our desire to satisfy the sweet taste, associating it with processed sugar. Ayurveda encourages us to listen to our cravings as they communicate the natural wisdom of the body. We need to trust our ability to nourish ourselves, letting go of the rigid rules we’ve established about eating. How much do you trust the wisdom of your body?

People will say that they wish there was a pill that would provide all their nutrition so that they could eliminate the stress of deciding what to eat. A pill would be a sorry addition to life. It would eliminate an incredibly rich sensory experience that is essential to our relationship with the world. There is so much more to eating than just calories. There is a reason the eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, and tongue are located close to each other on the face—they provide complex sensory information that makes eating a satisfying and stimulating experience. The visual appeal of food, its fragrance, mouth feel, texture, and temperature put us in direct contact with our world, influencing the way in which a meal is digested and how nourishing it will be. Perhaps we would enjoy our food more if we slowed down, chewed thoroughly, and tapped into all the sensations associated with the act of eating.

I once heard a nutritionist say that our relationship to food can teach us about our relationship with life. Are you relaxed when eating, immersing yourself in the full sensory experience of the meal, or anxious, controlling, and restrictive? Which tastes do you crave? How adventurous are you with food? Perhaps it is no coincidence that the tongue is our organ of taste as well as our organ of speech. Identifying the nuances of taste—a description that goes beyond “yum” or “yuck”--not only enhances our sensory awareness but expands our vocabulary as well. What can your eating patterns, food preferences, and sensitivity to taste tell you about your approach to life?