March 18, 2015: My cat refuses to eat the food that I give him. There is no apparent reason for the refusal. It is good food. Then I start cleaning the house and lift his cup on the dining table. A moment later he comes to me looking happy, licking his lips with a smell of fish in his breath. His food had turned good when he “caught it himself”. I’m thinking of my cat when I see a man sitting on the ice for the whole day, staring at a small hole in the ice. He is ice fishing. I can imagine that whichever fish he catches must taste wonderful – however small or algae smelling it might be.
There are thousands of scientific studies about what kind of food is good for you. One claim is that all fried carbohydrates are “bad”, as the carbohydrates and amino acids react and may form acrylamide. Thus, acrylamide is formed also in bread baking. Human race has been baking bread since beginning of time, and now it is carcinogenic? The article continues with saying that even though whole meal bread develops these substances more than white bread, it is healthier, as it has other qualities that are good for you. There the wisdom lies, exactly.
What is good for me cannot be exhaustively defined by science. Lean cheese may be good for me, but why would I eat cheese that looks and tastes like a piece of plastic? I rather take a smaller piece of delicious fatty cheese that crumbles under my knife. I believe that tasty things are good for me when they make me happy. Happiness is important, and on some days good food may be the only source of happiness.
We are told that we should buy local food to promote local businesses, and also to know the origin of the food. Those are good goals. Agreeing with them, I bought locally produced organic buckthorn muesli. It consisted of dry oat flakes and small crumbles of buckthorn. Healthy, local and devoid of any imaginable poisons or acrylamides? Yes. Tasty? NO. The birds in our garden are now pecking expensive, healthy, locally produced organic oat flakes with some buckthorn hidden in crumbles. I, again, eat super luxury nut muesli bought from local Lidl. I don’t know where the nuts came from or what poisons they may have been treated with. It is tasty and I am happy (with a bit of bad conscience, of course, which seems to be part of almost any human bliss).
Me and my husband are DINKies. There are a lot of us in Finland. We have a double income with no children, summer cottage or boat. That means we can buy food at almost any price. We are not looking for cheap food. We are looking for good and new tastes. Organic, local, healthy, we don’t care as long as it tastes good.
A healthy piece of Finnish bread that has been sitting on the self for two days loses the battle 0–10 to imported German bread served hot from the oven. So, forget the healthy low fat cold cut chicken breast packages that fill the shelves in every grocery shop. Give us new, exotic culinary experiences. Give us a healthy, local, organic loaf of bread that tastes good. Ask whatever you want for it, we will buy, and so will the other dinkies in Finland. We will be happy and healthy and willing to promote a food industry that sees the trouble of serving us well.