One of the necessities of eating well is the need for appealing flavors. The American diet is heavily slanted toward basic ideas of what tastes good – sweet, salty, and fatty. Which is why a lot of people (myself included) half-jestingly consider bacon to be the Perfect Food – smoky, salty, fatty, with a bit of sweetness from the sugar in the cure.

However, what we crave is not necessarily nutritionally sound. We crave the salt, sugar, and fat because they are the basic nutritional needs that we require from food. We need salt to maintain heart rhythm, blood chemistry, and electrolyte balance. Sugar gives us instant energy for short-term demands. Fats are premium long-term energy storage – the densest calories we consume. We eat a lot of all of them. They taste good, and for very primal reasons. However, we overeat, especially fatty foods, because we need a certain sensory component to satisfy our appetite. If we take our satisfaction only from the basics, then we tend to require a larger amount of fats, salt and sugar to make us happy, because there are few other elements contributing to the gustatory experience.

Take the lowly potato. Pretty darned bland in and of itself, it’s got just a bit of starchy sweetness. Deep fry it, and sprinkle with salt, and it’s suddenly a tasty treat that’s loaded with sodium and fat – satisfying, but not healthy. Take that same potato, and cook it with other flavors – tomatoes, perhaps, and assertive seasonings – and it becomes a satisfying dish without destroying it nutritionally. As a culinary culture, we need to learn to substitute more intense flavors of spices for sugar, salt and fat’s lowest-common-denominator appeal.

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