The umami generation process accelerated by breaking cultural things into discrete marketable parts through which they become even more consumable and easier to mix into novel, delicious combinations, often across different sensory domains. These combinations could be unstable – as in actually plain dumb, dysfunctional, dangerous – because they... See more

I wonder if this blandness of our diet doesn’t explain why so many of us are overweight and even dangerously so. When things had flavor, we knew what we were eating all the while — and it satisfied us. A teaspoonful of my mother-in-law’s wild strawberry jam will not just provide a gastronome’s ecstasy: it will entirely satisfy your jam desire. But,... See more

That’s always been the way: the long-distance truck tomatoes sold in American supermarkets, for instance, are grainy, and oftentimes flavorless, but you won’t ever know how bad they are until you bite into an heirloom tomato and understand what you are missing. Similarly, the companies that own nearly all of our media have devoted billions of

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