Sour taste; the best taste that is desired by children in the East

I searched the Internet for sour taste and to my surprise I found out that we the Westerners do not know and would not like sour tastes. In a poll, I asked "what foods do you know that is sour? "Many people did not know the answer. One person answered and said: Vinegar, Candies, and Pickles.

We know that taste is one of the traditional five senses. In the West, we know of four taste sensations: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter; where salty, and sweet are considered "appetitive" and bitter and sour are "aversive". We and the food industry train our kids mostly to appetitive tastes. Aversive tastes do not exist in our culture and many times our brain is programmed to think they are potentially harmful substances. If we mix appetitive with aversive we tend to reject that food completely.

Majority of people in the East eat many sour foods. When I was growing up, my family ate many sour foods. The children loved sour fruit roll-ups with no sugar at all. The more sour the better we liked them. We loved sour plums. They always sold sour plums in season on the streets by our school and everyone lined up to buy them and we even put lots of salt on it, not sugar. We ate Cornelian Cherries; another sour fruit. We put fresh lemon juice and olive oil on our salad for dressing. We preferred sour cherries over regular cherries or Bing cherries. We ate the almond fruit before it was hardened and when it was sour. Besides loving sweet grapes we also loved them sour. We bought grapes before it was ripened and became sweet and we used them to make many great dishes. We ate sour soup at least once a month if not weekly to cleanse our body from inside. We had Tamarinds, Pomegranates, Rhubarbs, Sour oranges and Blackberries. The list of sour foods are plenty to choose from. We had many dishes that were sour and we loved them all.

Sour and bitter foods protect us against diseases. The natural nutrient and vitamin C in these sour foods will get rid of your acne, cracked lips, white tongues, obesity, constipation and cold and flu. They will bring up your immune system and metabolism. Lets you have a great complexions and they are great in prevention of cancer. Besides the sour foods that I mentioned above, you can bring up your taste buds for sour with Granny smith apples, Grapefruits, Dried cranberries with no sugar added, or just plain fresh lemon on your salad, fish, and water. I will talk about bitter food in another blog post.

We can train our taste buds and our children's taste buds to acquire and appreciate the goodness of sour food and tastes. The process of acquiring a taste involves consuming the food in order of learning to enjoy it. Many of the world's delicacies are considered to be acquired tastes.

If we can acquire tastes for some foods that send mixed signals like Coffee with creams or sugar; strong cheese; sweet and sour Chinese food we also can acquire to enjoy the sour taste alone without sugar.