JON FASMAN | ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE | December 5th 2007

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What is it that conditions us to appreciate freshness right up to the point of life, but not beyond? To answer the question—squeamish readers, stop right here—Jon Fasman considers living food, and very dead food indeed ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on," said Prospero, "and our little life is rounded with a sleep." I always loved the parenthetical implications of that verb. Whatever we do, or fail to do, it's all the briefest of gambols in-between two very long sleeps.

What we eat—our tastes—comprises a mere subset of all the things we might eat (and a particularly small subset, perhaps, for Anglo-Americans) in even that short space between the parentheses. Consider two adjectives that typically connote desirable qualities in food: "fresh" and "aged". (And before you object: I do know that we don't want "aged" yogurt or "aged" fruit—but that's in the nature of those things. Culinarily speaking, "aged" connotes refinement; it is a positive term).

How fresh is too fresh? We insist upon sushi so fresh the fish essentially lacks any smell or—I would say—taste. But we recoil (most of us would, anyway) at the notion of eating sannakji: live octopus dipped in sesame oil and chili sauce. As the name hints, sannakji is a Korean dish. A live baby octopus is plucked from the water, cut up and served, the tentacles still writhing on the plate. The dish can be quite dangerous to eat; the suction-cup-lined tentacles tend to grab onto anything they can, including the diner's throat. I consider myself a fairly adventurous eater, but the notion of putting anything writhing into my mouth makes me shudder.

On the other hand, I can eat raw oysters and clams by the dozen, and they are alive right up until the moment of consumption. I have steamed dozens of wriggling crabs and the occasional belligerent lobster, and found their vitality positively appetizing. A friend told me about eating live-fish sashimi in Tokyo—the ungutted fish was skinned, scored and nailed to a wooden plank while it breathed its last—and I don't think I would have any problem eating that.

I understand that every animal product I eat has come from a sentient creature, and I prefer eating meat that comes straight from the farm rather than from a pink Styrofoam package on a supermarket shelf. But something about that video clip makes me shut my eyes. Would I be less squeamish if they just moved a bit more slowly? And are my objections solely aesthetic: a dislike for how moving flesh feels, rather than a moral concern about eating something alive (answer: probably, yes). What conditions us to appreciate freshness right up to the point of life, but not beyond?

A similar squeamishness obtains on the other end of the temporal spectrum. Cheeses, cured meats, yogurt, sourdough bread, even beer: all of these should have a slight whiff of rot about them.

Prosciutto routinely hosts bluish mold on the outside as it ages. Though the mold is removed before eating, it actually is a positive development. The mold on the outside staves off more harmful bacteria from colonizing the inside of the meat.

A quality sourdough starter ferments for a good week at room temperature. It will make your kitchen smell like an old pair of socks, but it will produce the best bread you've ever tasted. Nuoc mam, nam pla, petis and other such southeast Asian sauces made from the liquid run-off from rotting, salted fish smells foul, but gives foods an unparalleled depth and savouriness.

And yet I suspect I would be unable to swallow a lump of hakarl—dried, fermented, putrefied shark so strong tasting (during fermentation, the acids in the shark's flesh convert to ammonia) that even aficionados eat only a tiny cube at a time. I was offered prahok—a Cambodian fermented fish-paste—only once, and could not bring myself to taste more than a chopstick tip. Yet I go through litres of the same product in a clear liquid form.

The lesson, alas, is that even for those of us who like to think of our parentheses as broadly spaced, irrationality, aesthetic preference and acculturation all play a role in what we can stomach. Reassuringly, though, we are not alone. Even Ferran Adria, the Michelin constellation who heads El Bulli, admits to an irrational but unshakably firm dislike of bell peppers.

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