Taste - not Everybody Has It

The title of this post doesn't refer to people who wear brown shoes with navy suits, or think stone-cladding is a good idea. It's about having the ability to actually taste things.

The thought has been prompted by my recent and continuing bout of man flu (if you could find one, it would have killed a lesser man, though I have naturally not made a fuss about it). Clearly serious though that particular emergency is, it's far less so than the situation of a friend going through post-operative cancer treatment. I read recently (in a piece plugging the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Cookbook) that one unpleasant side-effect of chemo is that much of the sense of taste goes, and that what's left tends to tell the brain everything tastes of metal. Nasty piled on nasty.

What is suggested to cleanse and please the palate with chemo patients, apparently, is pineapple, which flushes the taste buds and throat and speeds the recovery of the sense of taste. I found that with a mouth that was tasting of mucal grey-green (how unpleasant) fruits cut through that whereas vegetables failed with a whimper, and meat didn't even make that effort. I guess it's the acidity, though I prefer to think of it as nature's way of saying 'eat me, eat me'.

My step-grandmother lost her sense of taste after she banged her head in a fall. She loved her food, as her size evidenced, and the loss of any pleasure derived from meals was a cruel trick of fate. There are of course other aspects to the enjoyment of food. Travels in Japan showed me how that country's people value texture just as much as flavour, with some foods only explicable by their textures - I have a dim memory of some sweet bean cakes whose delightfully smooth centre in no way made up for their jam-gone-off taste. As Proust wrote (making a lot of fuss about tea and cake*), it is the taste that stays in our minds. What he didn't say is that taste is not only central to our memories, but for those of us whose basic needs are met, it is perhaps the core of the sensual part of our nature. An exceptionally cruel psychologist could carry out an experiment on a death row prisoner, offering the choice between a last hour spent with a girl- or boyfriend, or eating and drinking of the finest**.

Intensely selfish and focused on food as I am, I have started to worry about the gradual loss of taste as I age. Now in my very late 30s (my maths may be at fault here, given I was born in the late 1950s) I observe how my elederly father needs to cover his food with half an inch of salt to get any flavour from it. As he gave up smoking many decades back it is hard to blame tobacco for that.

As we are all, if newspaper reports are to be believed, destined to live to 135, loss of taste could be one of the many crosses we have to bear, as it is an embuggeratoin for those undergooing chemo. My sense of taste has started to recover from the man flu already. I intend making the most of it while I can.


(* Actually I loved reading Du Cote de Chez Swann at university, and of the five books I'm reading currently it's the only re-read)
(** May I combine the two?)