why flavor matters
Our food landscapes are changing
Our world is coming together in ways that it never has before. The changing technologies around travel, transportation and communication are making it easier than ever to access and affect food being grown across the globe. This access carries with it financial influence that has created hardships for farmers across the world in the form of higher demand for less dollar. As a result, the stewards who grow our life sustaining fuel are being forced to grow in ways that unnaturally increase yields, incorporate soil depleting chemicals, and structure pricing according to sanctioned demands.
What does this mean for flavor? Flavor and micronutrients are sacrificed when the demand shifts to shelf stability and a food's ability to be shipped across the country without bruising. This shift is well represented by a grocery store tomato. The academic definition of a tomato has no requirements for flavor or nutrition . A tomato is a tomato, and if it looks good, it sells. We all know that grocery store tomato might look good but rarely does it taste good. We should be noticing that without flavor, the nutrition is potentially depleted.
By demanding flavor from living sources grown in rich soils, we can essentially require farming to return to its roots by caring for the soil and earth first.
OUR SENSE OF TASTE HAS PURPOSE
We seem to be living in a time when our sense of taste has been taken for granted as a superficial way of eating food. We see delicious flavorful food as something to be resisted, or guilt ridden or saved for special occasions. When we are choosing flavor, it's typically to redirect our taste buds to mask the forced nutrition in the latest dietary drink, trend, bar or powder. It's almost as if we are fighting our innate ability to experience pleasure in eating.
It's time to bring reverence back to this underdog sense! Our sense of taste, and our ability to detect salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami flavors are there to guide us to nutrition. It is there to help us detect, crave, enjoy and even turn our nose up at the levels of flavors present. Our sense of taste works in conjunction with our bodies to help us decide... do we eat more, or are we satisfied? Yes, flavor has this ablity, but it must be backed with nutritional benefits!
FLAVOR IS BEING MANIPULATED
As you can imagine, since food is now grown in nutritionally depleted soils that no longer produce flavorful food, we humans, who always DESIRE flavor are starting to lose our taste for "healthy foods." Take for instance that tomato that has travelled the country to your grocery store. It no longer has flavor, and your kids won't eat it.
Enter the flavor manufacturing business. This massive conglomerate of industries has taken off since the invention gas chromotography which essentially creates the abilty to manufacture any flavor that exisits in nature. The flavor humans desire is now being created in a laboratory, and you can rest assured that the nutrition behind a delicious red ripe strawberry far outreaches that natural flavoring in your kid's yogurt. The appeal we have as humans to flavor has created an open door to flavor manufacturing companies to mislead our tastebuds and send us into a spinning vortex down the path of food addictions.
no one knows what to eat anymore
If you've tried to eat healthy once, twice or 50 times over the last few decades, you know! Following the advice of health and wellness advocates this day and age is like spinning on an out of control carousel. Are you ready to let inertial take it's toll and get off this crazy ride?
A Living Flavor™ Revolution will allow just that. By paying attention to the flavors we experience: salty : minerals, sweet : energy, sour : digestive support, bitter : detoxifying, and umami: strenghtening, we can let go of the constrains around which foods we are "supposed to" eat and follow our own sense of taste, bodily cravings and real nutrition in order to determine what is right for us as individuals. Imagine the freedom you could feel if you didn't have to follow the masses into the next dietary trend in order to feel better!