Gastropolitics give us food for thought

An Iranian friend of mine recently brought me some gaz from Isfahan. Commonly known as Persian nougat, gaz is perhaps the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. The only thing to avoid is learning how it is made. Pistachio nuts are mixed with ‘honeydew’ collected from the angebin plant of the Zagros mountains, a sticky white substance often believed to be the manna of the Bible. It sounds glorious. That is until my friend told me that honeydew is not the sap of the plant — but is exuded from the anus of an insect which feeds on it. So one of the tastiest things on the planet turns out to be louse crap.

What we know of something strangely affects how it tastes. In fact our enjoyment and appreciation of different foods is a strange mixture of fashion, scarcity bias, snobbery and mental associations: our taste buds play only a supporting role in deciding what we eat. In the early 19th century, white bread was a luxury: the kind of wholemeal loaf you now buy from a hipster for £4.80 was handed out to the poor in times of famine. In Scotland, servants demanded employment contracts which guaranteed they would not be fed salmon more than three times a week.

I have always been mystified by the popularity of miso soup. Imagine if you had never come across it before, and one day a local café served you a murky-looking broth with strange bits of leaf half-floating in it. You’d send it back, wouldn’t you? And yet many people — including me — are rather happy to drink miso soup once we know it’s Japanese.

Just as fashion can make weird-tasting soups popular, it can condemn obviously delicious things to disuse.