Meet Your Medium

Food is all too frequently mistaken as being only about taste. Likewise, the sense of taste is so much more than merely the stimulation of taste buds on the tongue. Food is rich with sensory stimuli—not only of taste but of smell, vision, touch, sound—and, in turn, memories and emotions and cultural connotations. A single aroma has the power to take you immediately back to childhood. (This differs for everyone, but walnuts do so for Andrew and raspberries for Karen.) And a single flavor has the power to suggest an entire region of the world! (When you think of soy sauce, try not to think of Asia.)