Palate cleanser
Lessons from the palate
A well-rounded palate is a good sign of health. As a declaration of your tastes, it affords captivating opportunities for living and learning. A thriving palate is one of your most important tools, not only for survival but for learning. Becoming active at birth and without the shadow of formal instruction, a learning process unravels. A fundamental natural method of learning. Your palate continues to advance by experiencing life’s diversity and thrives until your palate crystallises or you die.
In terms of a learning method, it is perfectly unmapped territory. However, it still reveals many fundamental truths underpinning learning. Transferable skills that can only be learnt through practical experiences. You can never truly know the sensation of a chilli until you taste it. Words lack impact, smell uninformative, texture lacking. The ultimate in engaging with applied learning. For those left disengaged by schooling, it is a testament to natural learning paths that occur boundlessly without formal process. The lessons that are learnt through developing your palate. Nothing is so effective in keeping one engaged as a discriminating palate.
A palate represents an individual collection of values, beliefs, and practices. It is something you use to discriminate sensory information, decide and determine actions. It represents character, not blindly following fashion but a display of individual style. A palate interprets taste, not just in relation to food, but anywhere choice is involved. Food, fashion, people, music, books, leisure, and learning. What’s your palate for music? 🎶. Is your music palate stuck in a generational time loop? Do you have a discerning palate for learning? Maybe factory methods of instruction, unspectacular and commercial. Maybe natural methods of stimulating sensory experiences. What’s your palate for learning? Learning should be natural, fun, engaging, and creative. It is not about the accumulation of information, rather, it should embody a refined application of knowledge. This form of refined simplicity is hard to achieve. It takes effort. Refinement requires subtractive processes. It is like when you put a lot of ingredients together and hope it created something that leaves a pleasing taste on the palate. It is more wishful thinking than wisdom. The quality and arrangement of the ingredients is more important than the quantity. Quality is repressed by being able to achieve simplicity. Achieving this shows a mastery of knowledge.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Albert Einstein
An enchanting example of simplicity can be savoured with bruschetta. A traditional Italian food with its history spanning centuries of Tuscan tradition. Initially, it may seem like just a slice of toast with topping, but it is actually one of the most flavoursome and enjoyable dishes in the Italian portfolio. The traditional dish exemplifies simplicity blended with fresh, quality ingredients. A basic structure that can be personalised with taste and tradition, not a fixed algorithmic recipe. The most common type of bruschetta is toasted bread topped with fresh tomatoes dressed with garlic, basil, olive oil, and salt. Bruschetta is best accompanied by a glass of wine. Below is a basic guide. (Not a recipe with quantity and time, but a basic guide for you to explore the territory and develop your palate).
A bruschetta
Baguette cut into pieces, ready for toasting
Before toasting, tradition calls for brushing it with a clove of garlic and drizzling a bit of olive oil (extra virgin and Italian) over each slice and then toasted, preferably over a wood-burning fire.
The topping consists basically of vine ripened, finely cut Roma tomatoes and should be added cold. (Some of the most amazingly flavoursome tomatoes come from Turkey and also my grandfather’s heirloom collection, both steeped in history)
Other ingredients can be added (paired with tomatoes depending on your palate)
Red onion finely cut
Fresh basil leaf
Grated parmesan cheese
Balsamic vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
It’s fun to do something different. Diversity educates the palate. Endlessly repeating the same traditions and constantly engaging in comfortable experiences does not help the palate develop. Instead, learning stops and the palate crystallises. It is not a formalised process with metrics, reports, standards, etc. but a simple natural method of learning.
Your palate tells a lot about who you are as a person and your approach to life. Most parents will know how demanding and rewarding it is to educate a child’s palate. Focusing mostly on the nutritional value of food, but also on the larger character traits that are being developed. Valuing diversity, risk, creativity, cultural knowledge, history, tradition, critique, discrimination, ethics and developing a picture of who you are as an individual. Not a slave to fashion, but the strength to develop individual style. A palate that is unique to the individual. The expression, ‘you are what you eat’, is more than what you consume, it reflects who you are as a person. Taste is more than an expression of flavours, it is a window into the choices you make and the contexts you make them. It is an authentic reflection of you. If you develop a demanding palate and let it guide your moral choices, that is gluttony. Something I’m told should be avoided.
When I travel, food is one of the key ingredients for understanding a culture, its heritage, practices and traditions. So many of my memories are generated by and organised around food: what I ate, what people cooked, what I cooked, cooking schools, what I ordered in a restaurant. I seek the foundations, heritage cooking techniques from a region. Not only to experience the taste flavours, but to develop a comprehensive palate in relation to food production, preparation techniques and cultural traditions related to sharing food.
Palates that get passed down through heritage. These are often the simple foods and flavours. Both travel and learning involve movement and risk. Change is part of life and it is great to recognise that you form threads in stories that are still being told. Some that are highly sensitive to risk nibble their way towards learning, whilst others jump right in, relying on hindsight to provide the lesson. Take risks at the edge of your comfort zone: if you succeed, you will be happy; if you don’t, you will learn. Either way, your palate will develop. It’s not the pufferfish that is the greatest risk, it’s what’s in the hotdog. The potentially questionable concoctions, not the obvious hazards.
“It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating.” ~ Umberto Eco
Anticipation and excitement are aroused through smell and sounds. The anticipation with the distinctive smell of roasting. Expectations when your palate is in anticipation of crunchy, roasted, garlic and intoxicating spices infused with a smoky aroma. The sensory experience and the mental blending of the approaching sensation with stored memory. When a lesson of the palate occurs and experiences diverge from memory, this is where the learning and questions start. You discover you have been eating crickets. How do I assimilate this new information with stored memories of crickets and insects. Insects are a cheap, sustainable, and easy-to-produce source of nutrients and are especially rich in protein, healthy fats, and minerals like calcium, iron, and fibre. A great lesson on how we mentally process new information. Words without a connected experience lack depth of understanding. Living it, tasting it, sensing it, experiencing it, keeps the mind active and stimulated. One remembers taste long after thoughts are forgotten. When a long forgotten taste is experienced again, it brings back a wave of memories and sensations.
“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Episodic memory is part of long-term memory, and comprises a person’s unique recollection of experiences, events, and situations. This includes details of an event, the context in which the events took place, activities experienced, and associated sensory information and linked emotions. It is a cross-modal form of perception and memory. Your mental palate is inextricably intertwined with the verbal part of your brain. Food, words, memories all twist together, becoming the obvious way to structure life and learning. Each memory of food opening an entire scene. Anticipation linking with episodic memory, the excitement, sensations all before experiencing the food. Whether the story is congruent with the mental image is unimportant, as the story is constantly being redrafted. Building and maintaining episodic memory is vital to good health, especially in old age.
Offloading stories into objects and environments is a vital skill in learning and teaching. It is a method that humans have used to transfer information through generations. The mediums are centred on the crafted products in our environments (knowledge in objects). Traditional recipes with embedded histories, traditions, cultural practices and techniques are a great example. Lessons become even more powerful when ingredients and practices become part of the story. Heirloom tomato seeds, garlic plants, and olive trees that have produced for many generations. The stories and traditions kept alive and told through ingredients. A good story, well told, makes you realise you were yearning for something you had no name for, something you didn’t even know you wanted.
I have known many gods and idols that have absorbed my attention (thank you to the travel gods). The priorities that structure life, frame values and direct actions, time and energy. It is easy to develop a blind devotion to matter and tradition without reflection. When a spiritual fervour frames traditions, thoughts and actions adopt repetitive patterns, anchored in habit and tradition, stationary and steadfast in beliefs. Frozen by devotion to maintaining a tradition. Comfortable patterns and rhythms occur when learning stagnates and starts to crystallise. Yes, enjoy your favourite indulgences, but keep developing your palate and avoid worshipping fixed ideals. Don’t get bogged down. Opportunity dances with those on the dance floor. Not just blindly following a tradition, but understanding your role in an unfolding story. You have something to contribute.
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
To make choices in life that set you apart from expectations and traditions can be a daunting prospect for many. It requires a plan and courage. Choice theory (Dr. William Glasser) is based on the simple premise that every individual has the power to control themselves and has limited power to control others. Applying Choice Theory allows one to take responsibility for one’s own life and develop your own palate based upon your choices. We live in a colourful world, full of potential opportunities. Don’t let life be experienced through the prescribed sensations of others or binding traditions. I don’t understand people when they have a choice and they predominantly chose white. Is your world dominated by white? Bland, textureless patterns, lacking diversity and flavour. Salt being your only spice. You have choices available. Don’t miss the opportunity to explore them.
Gravy hides a multitude of indulgent sins.
Educating the palate
As Lewis Carroll said, “One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.” The language of taste eliminates the confusion. It is what it is, and people interpret it in relation to the literacy of their palate. To learn the literacy, plan to expand the palate gently. Seek educational opportunities that are complementary to your palate. This is a low-risk method of advancing learning. The most important lesson to learn is; your palette develops through practical experiences, not through words. An important lesson in learning. It is also valuable to remember that negative experiences also provide learning opportunities, some hard to ignore. A good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can educate it.
“A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.” ~ Clifton Fadiman
An analysis of your palate exposes underlying values. Do you value home grown, natural and organic, hand made, crafted products, colourful, natural experiences? Commercial, cheap, branded, curated, convenient, preserved, recycled, repaired, renewable, forested, farmed or free range. Look inside to see what the palate represents. Nowadays, commercial mass production means goods and services are predominantly created to suit the palate of the people. Alas, this palate is like a dumping ground; it relishes anything that needs no mental effort. As a result, the mediocre, the ordinary, the commonplace represents the norm.
“From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be reason for a savage’s preferring many kinds of food which the civilised man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
I encourage you to expand gently, develop a deep sense of flavour. Develop an appetite for diversity and build colour into your palate; eat the rainbow. Design a connection with learning that teaches your palate through the excitement of anticipation, imagination and creative critique. A simple first step is an analysis of your palate, which can bring a renewed sense of exploration. Learning to control your palate also teaches transferable lessons in life. Restraint, resilience, planning, empathy and a connection with natural processes.
“What is more refreshing than salads when your appetite seems to have deserted you, or even after a capacious dinner — the nice, fresh, green, and crisp salad, full of life and health, which seems to invigorate the palate and dispose the masticating powers to a much longer duration.” ~ Alexis Soyer
The world is your palate.
