Just a few months ago, I was standing up in front of a room of professors, fellow students and some friends, presenting the final paper of my program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy. My paper was about the importance of unlocking the potential for culinary tourism in India, as a way to promote more diverse, more local food cultures and in turn, create local opportunities and income. For a country as large as India, how does one demonstrate the  diversity of its food cultures in a few, short minutes? I put up this picture, representing the thali, the plate from 6 Indian states, a mere handful out of India’s 28 states and 8 union territories. 

It was ten o’clock on a sunny but, cold Friday morning and until this point in my presentation, I wasn’t yet sure if I had the full attention of everyone in the room. Suddenly, the energy in the room changed visibly. A few people straightened in their chairs. I heard someone softly exclaim “wow!”, it was the voice of little Federico, 9 years old, the youngest and the most special amongst my guests that day. One of the professors stood up with her phone and asked me politely if she could take a picture of the picture. Of course, by all means, I said. All this spontaneous engagement with just a picture of some food and even before I had said anything about it. Amazing, isn’t it? What makes react us like that? 

Food is a multi-sensory experience

I’m amongst the most fortunate. I’ve always had a secure home, clean drinking water and food. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a great love for food, especially in its eating and exploration. I can also cook but, my greater interest has always been in eating. It is a love I share with my family, close friends and several people I worked with over the years. There are many people like me; food occupies a central place in their life and contributes significantly to their sense of well being and happiness. Along the way, I’ve also gathered some friends who say that they eat because they must. They’ve always politely supported my gastronomic pursuits but, they don’t necessarily identify with them. Why all the fuss, they wonder? They can eat their meals quickly, sometimes on the move, sometimes in the company of their computer or their phone; they have their favourite dishes but, on most occasions, anything will do. 

Indeed, food is subsistence and eating is essential to survival. However, M L Kringelbach wrote in his paper, The Pleasure of Food : underlying brain mechanisms (2015), that it is the pleasure involved in eating that makes it worthwhile. Eating can seem simple but, at its most basic, human food intake is rather complex. When food is available, its preparation and eating involve a multitude of processes. They are carefully orchestrated acts, enabled by significant brain processing. Food is in fact, a multi-sensory experience i.e. involving all the senses, each with different routes into the brain. We have five senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. All of them are engaged in the acts of cooking and eating, from the distant processing of the sight of food and it’s smells, to how food feels when we come in contact with it, the sounds of food and ultimately, its taste.

It is through our senses that we explore and engage with the world around us. There is abundant research and excellent reading material about how our brain rapidly processes information from our senses when we see, smell, touch, cook and eat food. It enables us to develop a perception of what we call ‘flavour’ and in turn, a decision about whether we like something or not. Our memory too, plays a significant role. My attempt in this blog is to describe simply how all our senses are ‘at work’ , through everyday experiences with food. 

Our senses at work with food 

Let’s go back to the picture of the 6 thalis. Just the sight of the food has evoked a response, an emotion, perhaps a memory of something familiar or an experience from the past. We begin to engage with food as soon as we see it, we begin to process it with our eyes. The food in those plates is colourful, vibrant, pleasing to the eye or perhaps overwhelming to someone who sees quite a bit of food on every plate. There is a bright, green banana leaf in the Kerala sadhya, different from the large metal cloche in the Kashmiri wazwan, different from the other plates. There is some sort of artwork at the bottom of the Maharashtra thali and we wonder what it symbolises.  Even if some of the food is unfamiliar to us, we make educated guesses about the setting in which such a large meal is being served, maybe a festival or some other special occasion? If we like what we see, it makes want to reach out, to touch the food, we begin to imagine its texture and taste.

When I look at one of the plates, just the vibrancy tells me that it is likely to be a tasty and a healthy meal. How do I know this? Well, yes, some of the food is intimately familiar to me because it is food from India. Our senses may be distinct but, they are always working together and they are complemented by our memory, including by what is known as our ‘taste memory’. Growing up, we were told – the more colour on your plate, the more healthy your meal. It is the easy way to get young people to eat vegetables and fruit which are full of necessary nutrients. In our Maharashtrian home, there was always a koshimbir, salad in lunch or dinner. Depending on the season of the year, it would be grated beetroot or finely chopped carrot or tomato or cucumber, always tempered with some kind of spice, probably a whole chilli, some curry leaves, maybe some grated coconut or crushed peanuts. During the summer, mango was ubiquitous; bright orange aamras, sweet mango pulp or raw mango pickled in oil, red chillies and mustard seeds. So, even before I eat a spoonful of aamras today, I know it is going to be sweet, slightly fibrous, probably cool. We know that pickle is going to be delightfully tangy and spicy. That is our sight, memory and taste memory at work…together. We also “intuitively” determine portion sizes for different foods. For example, a bowl of aamras is good and frankly, when mango is in season, it is probably two bowlfuls. But, that would not be right for pickle. Pickle must be eaten in small amounts, no more than a small spoonful, just enough for good digestion. It isn’t really our intuition though, it is mindful decision making based on our evolution and experience.

Let’s step out of the thali picture now and imagine some real food. Any food. Even a beverage like say, coffee. When we step into a cafe in the morning, we smell the freshly brewed coffee before we see it and before we sip it. The sight of food is often preceded by its aroma. Our nasal pathways intercept smells, transmit a signal to our brain and contribute quite significantly to our perception of flavour. We have a fascinating ability to recognise and profile numerous distinct smells, to know a dish or an ingredient before we see it. As I write this, I am reminded of the aroma of besan laddoos, sweets made with gram flour, ghee, powdered sugar and cardamom. My mother would make them occasionally, always in the afternoon when she had a bit of free time. They stayed well and were good for mid-meal hunger pangs. The most important thing with besan laddoo is to roast the gram flour just right in the ghee. If it is undercooked, the sweets end up with a raw, unpalatable taste and left too long on the heat, the gram flour burns. So she would roast it attentively in a large kadhaai, continuously stirring with a spoon. At some point, she would call out from the kitchen and ask, “can you smell the besan yet?” and only after she knew that the aroma had wafted out into the living room, she would turn the gas off and quickly move on to the next step of rolling the laddoos. 

I think of other familiar smells of food – the smell of ghee in dal, lentils which have been tempered with cumin seeds and dry red chillies, the smell of fresh fish fried in mustard oil, the sweet smell of ripe bananas and tulsi, basil in sheera, semolina pudding cooked that way only on the day of a festival or a special ceremony at home. A few weeks ago, I was in Mumbai, right in the middle of this year’s scorching summer. Our home is a 15-20 minute walk from the nearest beach and while standing by the window on one of the days, I recognised the distinct smell that one can recognise if you’ve lived any part of your life near the sea. It was the smell of drying fish, a few kilometres away in Khar Danda, home to a large fishing community. They were stocking up for the monsoon when fishing trawlers have to stay out of the sea for a couple of months. I wasn’t near the fish and yet, I knew. If you’re still reading, perhaps you’re thinking of the aromas of the foods you particularly enjoy…fresh bread or cake or a favourite homestyle stew?

Sight, smell and then, sound. There is sound in cooking, like the sizzling in a pan when you cook something in smoking hot oil. There is also sound in eating and the signals from sounds tell us something of relevance. Think of an apple or a salad made with lettuce. When we bite into a ‘crunchy’ apple or a ‘crisp’ lettuce, we decide that they are fresh, they are good . It is the much the same with pappadum or think even of TV advertisements for potato chips or chocolates made with wafers. When we anticipate the texture and taste of a fresh apple, we’re often anticipating the ‘crunch’. Do we relish a soggy potato chip or a wilted lettuce which has lost its crunch? Now, some of us might ask, is it a crunchy sound or does it have a crunchy texture? It is an important question and it brings us to touch – one of the most interesting sensory aspects of eating.

We touch food when we put it in our mouth. In fact, ‘mouth-feel’, a term often used while tasting something like say, wine, is an important contributor to the perception of flavour. But, there is also vital sensory information in how we bring food from the plate to the mouth. In so many communities and cultures around the world, it is customary to eat with hands, like here in India. I’ve always eaten with my hands and most of us do, especially and always when eating at home. Eating with cutlery i.e. a fork and a knife is a learned skill for many of us in my generation and earlier generations, a skill that must be learnt in order to eat with ‘civility’ when one is eating outside the home, with less familiar people and definitely when one is eating with people who only eat with cutlery. When we eat with our fingers, increasingly unknown to many of us, we are following the principles of Ayurveda. Ayurvedic texts suggest that the our hands are at the centre of tactile sensations and each of our five fingers represent the elements – fire, air, water, space and earth. When we bring our fingers together to eat, we stimulate the elements, become conscious of the temperature, texture, smell and taste of food and prepare our bodies for good digestion. In the same way that we glean information from the sight and smell of food, we do so when we touch food with our fingers. Undoubtedly, I ate well during my time in Italy last year but, I also always looked forward to cooking and eating an Indian meal in my apartment…with my hands. As we often say to each other in India, food tastes better when you eat with your hands. And to me, it tasted even better when my university companions enthusiastically ate with their hands as well. Eating in the companionship of other people is a joy in itself but, more about commensality another time! 

So, sight, smell, sound, touch and finally, taste. When we qualify a dish as ‘tasty’, we usually mean that we think it is well made and enjoyable. More simply, we like it. Taste is one of our five senses and there are at least five basic tastes – salty, sweet, sour, umami and bitter. Salty is the taste of sodium, chloride and mineral salts. Sweet is the taste of natural sugars found in fruit or honey. Sour is the taste of acidic, citrus ingredients like lemon. Umami taste is found in protein rich foods like meat or cheese. The bitter taste is perhaps one of the most interesting. Translated simply, it means an unpleasant taste and some research has indicated that through human evolution, we developed a distaste for bitter things because it enabled people to avoid accidental poisoning. However, in some Asian countries including India, bitter foods like karela, bitter gourd and even neem are eaten with relish, cooked in different ways – fried, steamed, stuffed using spices, a touch of oil or ghee and some seasoning. Mainly, they have a place in our cuisine because of their immunity enhancing properties. Several communities in India celebrate new year during the months of March and April, when it is spring. On the occasion of Gudhi Padwa, which is new year in Maharashtra, we always started the day by eating a little leaf of neem, often followed by a spoonful of bitter neem chutney before a big, festive lunch. As children, no amount of protesting saved us  from the atrociously bitter neem. Year after year, our parents calmly said, “Eat it quickly. It is good for health. One neem leaf will make sure that you don’t fall sick during the hot summer months”.

Incidentally, Ayurveda has a broader definition of taste with the inclusion of two other fundamental tastes – pungent or spicy such as the sharpness from ginger or chillies and the astringent taste which is the sensation of dryness from some foods like pomegranate or grapes or specific raw vegetables. 

Principally though, taste has two functions. It enables us to evaluate the food, to check for toxins and nutrients, helping us decide what to ingest and it prepares the body the metabolise food after it has been ingested (Science of Taste, 2013).

Are we alive to our senses when we eat? 

Many of us may be thinking, we know this and we are fully engaged when we eat. Some of us may have learnt something new. Some of us may be wondering, this is all quite interesting but, do we really need to know? Yes, we do. 

The world in which we live and work has changed considerably over the last twenty five years or so, with technology having played the most significant role. It has connected the world in an unprecedented manner, enabled the creation of new services, drawn us into relationships with our gadgets and in many ways, influenced us to design our lives that rely on door-step convenience for nearly everything, including and especially how we bring and consume food. Food has become a matter of convenience, encouraged and enabled by numerous online food delivery platforms, cloud kitchens and armies of delivery agents. But, food is not about convenience. It takes tremendous effort and knowledge to grow, it nourishes our bodies and our minds, it brings people together, it connects us to our histories, our cultures, to the rest of the natural world. 

It is important to remember that every moment and every bite of food carries within it the possibility of pleasure. The brain is built for pleasure and it is through learning to appreciate the extraordinary in ordinary experiences, that a life well-lived can be constructed (Kringelbach, 2015). So when we permit ourselves to be alive to all our senses when we eat, we are able to make the most of it – more flavour, more health, more insight, more joy.