Tasting Mindfulness

Eating meditation trains you to become more conscious as you eat so you can be truly satisfied by food.

By Mary Taylor and Lynn Ginsburg

Here's a riddle: What makes a grape taste different from an olive? And what makes a grape grown in France's gentle southern coastal region of Provence taste different from a grape grown in the high altitude desert regions of New Mexico? Going further, what makes truth different from lies? What makes me different from you?

Indian philosophy offers a one-word answer to all of these questions, a quality that all things possess called rasa. Rasa is a concept with a multitude of meanings. On its most obvious level, rasa means "taste." More subtly, rasa is defined as the "juice" of any object, its "marrow" or "sap."

On an even more esoteric level, rasa is the essence of an object. With food, with all living beings, and even with philosophical concepts like truth and lies, rasa is the quality that defines and identifies something's ultimate nature. To foster your ability to perceive and understand rasa is to cultivate good taste. This means creating your own personal aesthetic, your likes and dislikes, based on an awakened ability to observe and discern.

But to come to know the more subtle levels of rasa, you must also learn to perceive the essential nature of all that you encounter in the world. Finding satisfaction and balance in your diet can be particularly frustrating as you try to juggle the slippery elements of what, when, and how much to eat.

You may find yourself on a wild goose chase that leads from fad diet to nutritional counselor, looking for the perfect combination of foods that will keep you healthy and happy and provide some lasting satisfaction. Learning how to awaken a deeper appreciation of the food you consume can completely transform the eating experience. You can start with understanding the rasa of food on the most outward level: taste. Both Westerners and Indians have systems that formally classify what it means to taste. Here in the West, taste is defined as a chemical process. Harold McGee, in his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (Collier Books, 1997), describes taste as a means of survival, a "way of discriminating between useful and harmful molecules."

McGee points out that even single-cell organisms discriminate this way, and humans have developed a sense that causes reflex actions to foods that irritate or burn. For example, we may choke, sneeze, or weep in the presence of black pepper, onions, or garlic.

At the most basic level, Indians characterize rasa as possessing six principal tastes: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent. Sometimes these classifications are further broken down into 63 different mixtures of the principal six flavors. Both of these Western and Indian efforts to define taste are attempts to codify the common experience of eating. The Western understanding of taste also includes the metaphorical language of the "sensual gourmet": Westerners "lust after" or "die for" a food, and swoon at the thought of aphrodisiacs. There's even the specialized term of "connoisseur" for one who develops a heightened sense of taste of a particular food or spirit.

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