Smithsonian.com

A picky eater examines his plate (Courtesy of Flickr/all in green)

A couple of months ago I wrote about two major influences on individual food preferences: genetics and early exposure to flavors in the womb and through breast milk. I recently spoke to Marci Pelchat, a researcher with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, about another piece of the puzzle: the role sociology and culture play in determining how we eat throughout the life cycle.

The strongest predictor of how a person will eat is where he grows up, Pelchat says. A person raised in Mumbai is far likelier than one in Minneapolis to enjoy spicy foods—unless, of course, he or she grows up in a family of Minnesotan curry-eaters or Indian lutefisk-lovers. “Familiarity is a huge factor,” she explains.

For picky eaters it can take as many as 30 exposures to a new food for it to be accepted, although Pelchat cautions against parents forcing their children to eat something, a strategy that can easily backfire. Food-neophobic adults sometimes trace their reluctance to traumatic childhood food experiences. For instance, one friend of mine attributed her intense dislike of fish to the time her mother tricked her into eating a tuna salad sandwich by saying it was chicken salad.

A better way to handle a child that won’t eat something is to say, “good, more for me,” and then eat it yourself, Pelchat says. Obviously, this means you have to be willing to eat what you serve your children; parents who “model” adventurous eating are more likely to have food-fearless children. On a recent visit with my two-year-old nephew, I marveled as he gobbled up half the plate of fried calamari rings and tentacles we had ordered—not exactly the usual chicken fingers and pizza on most children’s menus.

Although people often become more open to novel flavors as they grow into adulthood, the most food-neophobic kids tend to stay picky in relation to their peers throughout their lives, Pelchat says. But social factors, such as peer acceptance, can also strongly influence how people eat. She recalled that when her son was a child she put a cut-up kiwi in his lunch box one day and one of his classmates said, “oh, you got a kiwi! You’re lucky.” After that, obviously, he was a lot more eager to eat kiwi than if his friends had expressed revulsion at the slimy green fruit in his lunch.

The growing appetite of Americans for once-exotic produce, however, puts a wrinkle in Pelchat’s studies on how people react to unfamiliar foods. “I’m very annoyed that mangoes have become popular,” she says. “We’re always on the lookout for something novel that also tastes good.”

As people become adults, living away from their families and widening their social experiences, their willingness to try new foods also tends to expand. “People go on dates, and they don’t want to look like a baby,” she says.

Adventurous eating doesn’t necessarily wane after middle-age, either, although changes in the senses can affect food preferences. Beginning as early as the 40s a person’s sense of smell, in particular, starts to decline. Sometimes this leads to a preference for sweeter foods, because the sensitivity to sweet tastes lingers longer than to others. Well-meaning dietitians for retirement homes often take the salt out of food, Pelchat says, even though only those with certain medical conditions need a low-salt diet. “When you take the salt out of food, you make it really bland,” she says. “Salt is also a better bitter-blocker than sugar.” This blandness, combined with already muted senses, can take a lot of the pleasure out of food for elderly people.

Perhaps, after tackling the school lunch, Jamie Oliver should take on the retirement homes?

A St. Viateur bagel, courtesy of flickr user sifu_renka

The bagel has to be the most successful Jewish food in history, at least in terms of general public acceptance—especially in comparison to, say, gefilte fish. In fact, bagels have become so commonplace in the last couple of decades that my husband didn’t even realize they were of Jewish origin. (See Amanda’s post from 2008 for the history of the donut-shaped bread.)

And, although they are now everywhere, the place most associated with good bagels is New York City. Some New Yorkers might even say it is the only place with truly good bagels, though that is less true than it was a couple of decades ago. (Those gummy, insubstantial rings of white bread masquerading as bagels at many supermarkets, however, are another story.)

So I was a little surprised the first time I visited Montreal that this francophone Canadian city, 350 miles north of the Lower East Side, is also famous for its bagels—which are known in French as, well, bagels.

Oh, but a Montreal bagel is a different animal from its American frère, as I also discovered on that trip: thinner, with a hole big enough that you could wear it as a bracelet, and slightly sweet even when sprinkled with savory toppings—or “all dressed,” as they call an everything bagel.

Photograph by Matt French.

Last weekend I visited Montreal again, and made a pilgrimage to one of the most famous Montreal bagel bakeries, Fairmount Bagel. According to the Fairmount Web site, the first bagel bakery in Montreal was opened in 1919 by Isadore Shlafman, the grandfather of the current owners. Here, the bagels are hand-rolled and baked in a wood-fired oven, giving them a nice crusty exterior that is similar to a well-toasted New York bagel. There is often a line at the open-24-hours bakery, which has no seating other than a bench on the sidewalk out front, but it’s fun to watch the bagels being made while you wait. One guy cuts off dough from a suitcase-size heap, then rolls it into rings, while another pulls planks of finished bagels out of the oven by the half-dozen.

So which is the better bagel—New York’s or Montreal’s? It’s hard to say that one is more authentic than the other, since both styles were brought by Eastern European immigrants to North America. As for my personal preference, I like that New York bagels are chewier and I don’t really care for the slight sweetness of the Montreal bagel. On the other hand, some New York bagels can be too big and doughy for me to finish; Montreal bagels have more manageable proportions. And you can’t beat that wood-fired crustiness. So my perfect bagel would probably use a New York-style dough recipe, with Montreal proportions and wood-fired oven.

As long as it isn’t one of those squishy bread-aisle abominations, I won’t complain.

I think it’s time we had a talk about the birds and the bees. Over coffee, naturally.

No, really. Did you know that the shady forests where coffee is traditionally grown in Latin America provide a critical habitat for many migratory birds? Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center has an informative slide show about this on the National Zoo’s website.

Shade-grown coffee bushes in the Honduran cloud forest, Courtesy of Flickr user Adel-Honduras

According to the SMBC, “of all agricultural systems in the tropics, shade coffee plantations have been found to have some of the highest numbers of individuals and species of migratory birds.” The hundreds of species attracted to such forests include everything from hawks to hummingbirds—and yes, even a stork or two.

However, in the past two or three decades, many coffee growers have latched onto new “technified” varieties which can thrive in direct sunlight, making planting and harvesting more efficient. Such “sun coffee” is often cheaper and more reliable to produce than “shade coffee“—and has been encouraged in the name of international development—but it comes at an environmental cost. Not only does sun coffee require more pesticides and fungicides, but it creates an incentive to clear land, raising the risk of erosion and reducing the habitat available to birds, bats and other wildlife. (And some experts say it doesn’t taste as good as shade-grown coffee.)

The SMBC cautions:

The diversity of migratory birds plummets when coffee is converted from shade to sun…Studies in Colombia and Mexico found 94-97% fewer bird species in sun-grown coffee than in shade-grown coffee.

Shade-coffee farms also support native bee populations and help maintain biodiversity, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It’s based on a 1,200-hectare landscape in the Soconusco region of Chiapas, Mexico, where coffee “is cultivated in the traditional style, under a canopy of overstory trees.”

By observing pollination patterns and analyzing the DNA of the resulting seeds in a particular type of tree called a saquiyac (Miconia affinis), the researchers found that the bees helped to spread a mix of genes between saquiyacs in different parts of the often-fragmented landscape—or in other words, prevented inbreeding, which is a bad idea for trees as well as humans. The bees traveled twice as far in shade-coffee habitat as they did in other nearby forest, with some flying more than a mile to deliver pollen.

Non-native honeybees would not be able to do that, because saquiyacs have a particular preference for “sonication.” That means that the trees’ reproductive organs won’t release pollen unless the bee grasps them and vibrates in just the right way. (I’m not making this up, honest!) It’s also called buzz pollination, and only occurs in certain bee species, which in the case of this study included natives like carpenter bees and stingless Trigona.

The authors conclude that the relationship between shade-grown coffee, native bees and trees is a mutually beneficial love triangle:

Traditional shade coffee farms can maintain native insect communities…Native bee communities within shade coffee farms…not only ensure against the loss of introduced honey bees and increase coffee yields, but maintain the reproduction and genetic diversity of native trees.

So the next time I shop for coffee, I’ll seek out shade-grown beans, like the ones featured in this directory. (Bonus points if the coffee is also Fair Trade, a certification which typically takes into account both labor and environmental practices.)

We’re taking a road trip this month for Inviting Writing, and Lisa drove the first leg (rather queasily) last week. Today, we’ll head to Paris with Anny Wohn, a D.C.-based pastry chef who previously contributed this lovely essay on Korean picnics.

If this inspires your inner Kerouac, there’s still time to send in your own story about road food. E-mail submissions to FoodandThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing: Road Trips” in the subject line by August 1st.

Our Moveable Feast
By Anny Wohn

On the first morning of our trip to Paris, I awoke to Andy pacing around our darkened hotel room, deliberately trying to get my attention. That rainy November day began with his words, “I can’t sleep knowing there’s a city full of pâté out there!”

Courtesy of Flickr user Cassidy Curtis (otherthings)

When you are a pastry chef married to another chef, all vacations, conversations and road trips converge on food. After three days in Paris of continuous eating punctuated by museum visits, we were about to embark on a 307-mile voyage through northern France, dipping under the English Channel for 20 minutes, before arriving in London via the countryside of Kent.

Because I have lived only in large cities throughout my life, and didn’t even sit behind the wheel of an automobile until the age of 29, the network of transit systems is my “open road” of possibilities wherever I journey in the world.

Preparations for the 2-hour-and-15-minute train ride from Gare du Nord to London’s St. Pancras Station on the high-speed Eurostar began early on the day of our departure. During our breakfast at the café near our hotel in the 5th arrondissement, we pocketed leftover tabs of Isigny butter wrapped in foil paper.

Then, traversing the Seine over the Louis Philippe Bridge, we arrived in the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, where we hunted for unpasteurized cheeses and pâtés, and gathered nutty financiers and boozy cannelés for dessert. I peeled away the woolen gloves from my frozen fingertips to linger over my last chocolat chaud of the trip.

Breaking a long crusty baguette in half (breaking this pastry chef’s heart to compromise the integrity of the beautiful loaf) in order to conceal it in my carry-on bag, we finally ducked into the metro and headed for the train station.

Weaving through the crowd, passing French police dogs whose discerning noses were unperturbed by pungent cheese, we stepped across political boundaries at the immigration desk and onto our train as the door clipped at our heels. As we were just placing our bags overhead, the more punctual couple in our four-person seating pod was already clearing their lunch of fast food purchased from a stall at the Gare du Nord. We sat facing them, yet avoiding eye contact, and strategically positioned our feet to avoid knocking knees.

Andy left to find the café car—where he exchanged the last of our euros for a Stella Artois and a bottle of mineral water—while I watched the scenic frames of northern France whizzing past at 186 m.p.h. When he returned, we set up our feast in an assembly line, stretching across our half of the table surface from window to aisle.

I spread the baguette with the golden butter made of grassy Norman cows’ milk, and passed it onto Andy, who topped it with any one of the full kilogram (2.2 pounds) of treats we’d purchased. There was country pork pâté, unctuous rabbit terrine, duck liver mousse and Pounti, a dense Auvergne-style meat loaf studded with sweet prunes.

After that, we unleashed our cheese course of Saint-Nectaire, followed by a sweet ending of pistachio-brown butter cake with sour cherries and cylinders of rum-soaked custard pastry (cannelés).

Upon detraining at St. Pancras and following the stampede through the labyrinthine Underground, we emerged from the Sloane Square Tube station, walked a few blocks to my sister’s flat, bearing small gifts of colorful macarons from Ladurée and a tin of crêpes dentelles from La Grande Epicerie.

We were just in time to join the expats for a Thanksgiving dinner in London.

The bowl was proudly passed around the living room like candy, obviously intended as a treat for the visiting Americans. My new South African relatives each picked up a bite-sized flake of something reddish-brown, savoring it on their tongue with a sigh.

Bowls of biltong, courtesy Flickr user jonanamary

Chocolate? Dried fruit? I ruled out those options as I got a closer look. No, more like bacon, or…

“Is this jerky?” I asked. Eyebrows shot up as if I’d said something a bit rude.

“No, no. Much better. It’s biltong. It’s a special kind of dried meat,” someone offered. “You must try it.”

Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to, I thought to myself. Sounds like jerky to me. (Biltong, I learned later, is made from strips of rump meat and literally translates from Dutch to English as to “butt tongue.” Kinda glad I didn’t know that.)

I hadn’t eaten anything resembling jerky since stumbling into a decade of vegetarianism in my late teen years, perhaps to atone for the disturbing number of Slim Jims I consumed in junior high. (Now, those chewy, cylindrical snacks strike me as eerily similar to certain treats in the pet-food aisle.)

But these dear people had invited us into their homes—and their lives—in Cape Town, because of my brother’s marriage. The least I could do is be grateful for whatever they fed us. And the braai they greeted us with had been delicious!

“It’s springbok,” they informed me as I chewed. I tried not to picture the elegant antelopes I’d seen featured in wildlife photos. Hey, at least it wasn’t a lion burger.

The texture was tough, but not as shoe-leather-like as I expected—I could tear it with my fingers. It tasted salty and rich with umami flavor. Maybe they were right; this wasn’t the stuff of American gas-station gastronomy and vending machines. More like charcuterie than jerky, in fact.

I wished I could say that to the family member who had brought the homemade biltong, but he is deaf and lip-reads only Afrikaans, which I don’t speak. So I simply gave a thumbs-up and reached for seconds. He grinned and rubbed his belly, nodding.

For more about different types of jerky—pardon me, dried meat—around the world, such as Chinese bakkwa, read this interesting piece by Oyster Food and Culture blogger LouAnn.