White or wheat?
Nov. 25th, 2009 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerFunny thing. Since I've been in England, I've been eating whole-wheat bread - not out of any ideological or health reason, but because that's the kind of bread that the local bakery made in a loaf size that I could finish before it started to mold.
But recently when I went to buy more bread, the whole-wheat loafs were all sold out. So I got a white loaf.
...It's boring. It pretty cheap bread, which doesn't help, but...it doesn't have half the flavor of the whole-wheat. It doesn't have the little wheaty bits that make the texture interesting. It's puffy and fluffy and smooth and tasteless and boring.
I've read, in books about food, that healthy food tastes better than normal* food once you get used to it. I never believed it, because a) if that was true surely everyone would be eating healthy food, and b) the world is just not that kind. But maybe there's something to it.
In other food news, I had sweet potato and butternut squash soup for lunch. It was surprisingly delicious. Also, I'm curious: in America most soups have chunks of things (chicken, carrots, whatever) in them, but most of the soups I've had in Britain have been smooth, like the ingredients were pureed. Is this an actual cultural difference or have I simply not eaten enough soup to form a hypothesis?
Mmm. Soup. Yes, I definitely think I need more data...
*Normal food here means American food - because the food books I'm referring to were written by Americans - and American food here means deep-fried Twinkies, Wonderbread, and never any vegetables except maybe the limp lettuce and pinkish tomato on the Double Whopper. Like any generalization it's an oversimplification, but it is the national food culture that American food writers invoke when they want to explain the wonders of tomatoes that are actually red.
But recently when I went to buy more bread, the whole-wheat loafs were all sold out. So I got a white loaf.
...It's boring. It pretty cheap bread, which doesn't help, but...it doesn't have half the flavor of the whole-wheat. It doesn't have the little wheaty bits that make the texture interesting. It's puffy and fluffy and smooth and tasteless and boring.
I've read, in books about food, that healthy food tastes better than normal* food once you get used to it. I never believed it, because a) if that was true surely everyone would be eating healthy food, and b) the world is just not that kind. But maybe there's something to it.
In other food news, I had sweet potato and butternut squash soup for lunch. It was surprisingly delicious. Also, I'm curious: in America most soups have chunks of things (chicken, carrots, whatever) in them, but most of the soups I've had in Britain have been smooth, like the ingredients were pureed. Is this an actual cultural difference or have I simply not eaten enough soup to form a hypothesis?
Mmm. Soup. Yes, I definitely think I need more data...
*Normal food here means American food - because the food books I'm referring to were written by Americans - and American food here means deep-fried Twinkies, Wonderbread, and never any vegetables except maybe the limp lettuce and pinkish tomato on the Double Whopper. Like any generalization it's an oversimplification, but it is the national food culture that American food writers invoke when they want to explain the wonders of tomatoes that are actually red.
