My biological psychology professor recently asked us, “What’s your favorite sense?” I’ve entertained a similar question before: if you had to give up one sense, which would it be? Though I don’t have a ready answer to that question either, the one I often choose to place last in line is vision. Maybe this is because I am so affected by color. In fact, I’m often baffled by other people’s apparent lack of fine color discrimination (apart from the naming itself which is another topic entirely). My reluctance to give up vision might make it the obvious choice for favorite, but I’m going to skip the obvious and go for a much more subtle and, at least to me, complex sense: smell.

My fascination with smell has to do with the ways in which it rehydrates long dormant and seemingly forgotten ordinary experiences. Among the senses, it appears that olfaction has the most unique relationship to memory. While I might have strong visual and episodic memories of where I was and who I talked with on September 11, I do not remember a single thing about what I smelled though I might have if I’d noticed something in particular that day. Alternatively, events that are entirely mundane, unmemorable to the most imaginable degree, are summoned back in vivid detail by a smell. I had a most transcendent experience of this phenomenon when I opened an ancient blue-tinted mason jar full of buttons that I’d collected from my grandmother’s sewing room after she died. In that jar was a embodied experience of place.

What I find so intriguing about the power of smell is its ability to rekindle deep experiential memories — the feeling of being there. If you asked me to remember my grandparent’s house, the resulting tableau would certainly include smells I experienced over many years there – percolated coffee, german sausage, oil paint and lake water – but I could not have resurrected the experience of being there brought so vividly to life by smelling all those things, mixed together for years and years, and captured in a jar of buttons.

steam beets until tender (stick a fork in ‘em)
put ‘em in cold water until cool enough to handle and slip off skins.
cut beets and place in bowl with diced avocado
add lemon juice,
olive oil
and lots of white pepper.

in a dry skillet, crisp up some dulse and crumble on top. dulse is a purple seaweed and adds salty crunch.

mmmmmmm

I came across this wonderful story from Charles MacInerney in his mindful eating meditation instructions.

I used to have Rhodesian Ridgeback named Chani. She was a big dog, and loved bananas for some reason. She used to eat bananas like she ate rib bones, crunching them into two pieces and then swallowing both halves, skin, stem and all. One week I decided to teach her the eating meditation using a raisin.* Normally she would swallow a raisin without noticing what she had eaten, so I held the raisin between my fingers so that she could only nibble the tiny exposed portion of the raisin. She took my whole hand in her mouth! After a while she let go of my hand and contented herself with licking and nibbling the exposed portion of the raisin as I slowly exposed more of it over the next minute. During this time she grew increasingly excited and wagged her tail and her whole rear end. This might have been the first time she had ever tasted a raisin, although she had swallowed more than her share.

After a couple of weeks of this ritual with the raisin, I was amazed when she took a whole banana from me, and instead of swallowing it, took it out onto the back porch and set it down almost delicately. She held the banana with one paw and peeled it with her teeth, and then ate slowly, wagging her tail, and pausing occasionally to look back at me. Finally when it was all gone, she returned to the banana peel and ate that as well.

* Please note that I have since found out that raisins can cause renal failure in dogs. Although it is doubtful that a single raisin would be sufficient to cause any symptoms, I would still advice using some thing other than raisins, if for no other reason than to reduce the likelihood that your dog will seek out raisins on it’s own and consume larger quantities which can be harmful to your pet.

Charles’ eating meditation instructions can be found on his website, www.yogateacher.com

No excuses are needed for me to find myself in the kitchen wingin’ it without a recipe but when a good friend hosted a party inspired by the movie, waitress, the cogs started turning double-time. If you haven’t seen the movie it helps to know that the title character is a serial pie inventor, each pie name a reflection of her current state of being: “I Hate My Husband Pie… You take bittersweet chocolate and don’t sweeten it. You make it into a pudding and drown it in caramel”. more…

One might think that with the prevalence of eating disorders in the west these days that we were a nation of gastronomes but our troubles may very well be caused by the exact opposite – that we have strayed away from actually tasting our food. The scientists who study our sense of taste have discovered that it’s development has much to do with guiding us towards what we actually need. If you are using old data and no longer really collecting new reliable data then you are bound to end up heading in the wrong direction when making food choices.

Soon this section will be expanded to include food meditations and other information on conscious eating that we hope will support you in honing your own food guidance system: your taste buds!