Quotes About Sensory

CHAPTER 10 Bright flowers nodded around the apprentice as she weaved, slender as a pine martin, through the grass. She sneezed as pollen dusted her soft muzzle. Then, relishing the sun on her back, she lifted her forepaws and peered over the curving stems. Wide-eyed, she gazed at the broad green pasture and breathed the soft scent of the shimmering grass.

The air began to taste warm and furry.

Firepaw crouched down and took a large bite from the mouse. It was juicy and tender, and sang with the flavors of the forest.

Her mind flooded with an image of bounding after them to walk alongside Crowfeather, who was bringing up the rear; she drew in her breath sharply, almost able to feel his dark gray pelt brush against hers as they picked their way over the tufts of boggy grass.

In the West the word "delicious" is likely to conjure up something laced with sugar, fat and salt, whereas in Japan it signifies a flavour found in mushrooms, grilled fish and light broths.

Our olfactory bulbs have gathered endless sense patterns of foods high in sugar, fat and salt. These flavour memories have become part of the fabric of our sense of self and are not easily discarded, because the system, as we have seen, is designed 'not to forget'.

The concept of "delicious" was born in Japan in 1908 when a chemist called Ikeda discovered a "fifth taste" called umami that was neither bitter nor salty nor sweet nor sour but something more wonderful and compelling than any of these.

When children are exposed through 'sensory education' to a wider range of flavours they start to love complexity and be bored by simplicity.

When we talk of memory of food, we generally assume that nostalgia is a phenomenon that occurs late in life - like Proust being transported to his youth by a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea. But food memory is there from the start. Even babies have nostalgia!

Already, by thirteen weeks, the taste buds are mature. A thirteen-week-old foetus weighs maybe an ounce, with no fat under the skin, no air in the lungs. Yet already they can not only swallow but taste, and these sips of fluid leave memories.

Flavour is not actually in food, any more than redness is in a rose or yellow in the sun. It is a fabrication of our brains and for each taste we create a mental 'flavour image', in the same way that we develop a memory bank of the faces of people we know. The difference is that whereas faces fade when you haven't seen them in a while, flavours and smells have a way of lodging themselves in indelibly.

What you taste as a child is still there in your adult brain, even if you haven't thought of it for years.

Molecules that look near-identical to a specialist chemist lab will be easily distinguished by an ordinary person who smells them.

The experience of tasting food is far more multi-sensory than is the case with hearing, sight or touch, which is why it requires the most sophisticated part of our brain to process it. In fact, eating is influenced by hearing, sight or touch, as well as flavour: we prefer apples that crunch loudly, steaks that look blood-red, sauces so smooth they seem to caress the inside of our throats.

Every bite is a memory and the most powerful memories are the first ones.

Different meals, different times of day and different locations can all make the same food or drink seem either desirable or not. Call it the retsina effect: that resinated white wine that is so refreshing when sipped on a Greek island tastes of paint-stripper back home in the rain.

Have you noticed that when someone wants to express that something tastes extra specially wonderful, they will often invoke childhood?

Flavour has a remarkable ability to imprint itself on our memories and therefore to drive our future food choices.

something in the world it's not expressed in words ----- just feel it ......

Coffee arrived and the espresso was excellent, like an aromatic electric fence.

The air was still and tasted flat, like water that had been boiled more than once.

I don't like my bacon sandwich to be curiously snuffling at my fingers.

What if the point were not to know as much as possible but to feel as much as possible?

I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance and trying to account how I knew they were loud when I can barely hear them. Something about their shapes or their shapelessness or the way they filter through the walls.