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Quote:

We are fools to tolerate poor-quality food

Daniel Drolet, Citizen Special

To some people, food may be just sustenance. But in my world, food is about a whole lot of other things as well.

Food is about family: The foods of our childhood are part of our identity, and family meals are special times.

Food is about culture: Often, we first come to know other cultures by their food. In that sense, food is about discovery.

Food is about friends and sociability: So many gatherings take place around a table.

Food is even, sometimes, about love.

Food, in short, is one of life's few renewable pleasures -- a garden of delights and tastes and discoveries, all seasoned with sociability.

For all these reasons, it pains me to see that so many of us accept mediocre food as our daily fare.

We are living in a time and place where all sorts of wonderful, tasty, exciting foods from all over the world are potentially available to us -- and yet, usually in the name of convenience and the dubious virtues of long shelf life, we blithely accept second-rate. Heck, sometimes we don't even realize it's second-rate as we wolf it down and demand more.

Are we crazy? Or have we simply forgotten that we can demand better?

I don't think I'm a food snob. I certainly don't expect that every meal be a gourmet experience: As much as I like fine food, I also enjoy a burger or a pizza every now and then.

But what I don't enjoy is food, sophisticated or simple, that has no taste -- or is dolled up with fake tastes. I want a tomato to taste like a tomato, not like cardboard. And I don't want it drowned in a salty cheese sauce in an attempt to coax a reaction from my tastebuds because the tomato itself has no taste.

We would get better-tasting food if we demanded it. It is, often, available. Sadly, we seem content with second-rate.

I was out recently with a group of friends for a restaurant meal. The setting was fine, the wines very good. But the food? At one point in the evening, I simply stopped eating.

Why?

Each dish was awash in melted cheese -- slathered on to hide the fact that there wasn't much else there in terms of taste. There was quantity, but the quality, as far as I was concerned, was not there.

If food tasted like it's supposed to taste, perhaps we wouldn't be tempted to cover it with salt and slather it with butter. Maybe we'd be content to savour it and not demand oversized portions.

Industrial production has succeeded in giving us lots of safe, cheap food -- but at a cost. I shudder now to see food items (for humans, not just pets) advertised as "made with real chicken!" Or "real" whatever. As if ersatz were the norm.

Our desire to have everything all the time is, I think, also to blame.

There was a time when many foods were seasonal. You got strawberries in spring, for example, and apples in the fall, and that was that.

But it seems we'd rather have strawberries all year round, even if they are often tasteless.

We have become so used to tasteless food that we accept it as the norm. Too many times I have been served tasteless tomatoes in August, the one time of the year when tomatoes are supposed to taste like tomatoes.

It needn't be so.

In the April issue of The Atlantic, food writer Corby Kummer, in an article about heirloom poultry, describes the shock felt by people who rediscover poultry with taste:

"The arrive of pasture-raised turkey at the teaching kitchens of the French Culinary Institute, in New York City, brought the dean of culinary studies, the chef Alain Sailhac, nearly to tears," Kummer wrote. "At last, he told the group that night, he had recaptured a flavour he'd thought was lost forever: the turkey of his childhood, a half a century ago, on a farm in southern France."

Tasty food is out there -- in artisan breads and cheeses, heirloom meats, organic fruits and vegetables.

I hope more of us are prepared to seek it out, and to demand it be available not only in select restaurants and grocery stores but in cafeterias and fast-food outlets too. And I hope more of us will protest at poor- quality food being sold to us in the interest of convenience.

yovargas wrote:

If I don't really care much, does that make me a lesser person?