Embracing Your Senses: Taste

Every day, if we have the resources to do so, we eat three (or sometimes more!) meals. So many flavors passing through our senses – but are we paying any attention to their complexity, savoring their diversity, taking pleasure in our capacity to sense them? If not, now’s a perfect time to start! Our relationship with food can be multilayered and sometimes fraught with the cultural and social messages we’ve absorbed over the years. It’s important to slow down our inner monologue enough to re-experience the simple joy of eating attentively. This challenge offers a chance to reconnect with your senses of smell and taste, and rediscover the pleasures of nourishing yourself. This challenge offers a chance to practice staying in the moment and connecting with your senses in (hopefully) pleasurable ways!

Habit:
Try a new food or combination of foods

Daily:
Savor a flavor with attention

To Do:
Share something tasty with someone you like (take a friend out to eat, go to a potluck, make dinner for your family… whatever fits well in your life)

Create something about food or flavor (a recipe, photo, poem, essay, blog post…)

Fight food insecurity! (donate to your local food pantry, deliver a home-cooked meal to someone you know is struggling, support a local farm, visit a farmer’s market; if you’re into vegetable gardening, consider planting some seeds for autumn harvest (Northern Hemisphere) or ordering seeds to start when the weather warms (Southern Hemisphere)–there are so many possibilities!)

Reflection:
This challenge was a blast! I’m pretty inventive in the kitchen as it is, and it was wonderful to have extra motivation to pay attention to some of my fondest pleasures. For my ‘sharing food’ task, I concocted a feast of Southern specialties for my favorite ex-Virginian: BBQ pulled pork from the Instant Pot, coleslaw, and some cheesy garlic grits! My food invention is pictured below: Blueberry parfaits with lemon and freshly whipped cream and ginger cookies. I even picked the blueberries myself! And my fight against food insecurity has dragged into August, but it’s going to be epic: a big tag sale with half of the proceeds going to the Food Bank of Western MA. I can’t wait.