Taste is cultured

When you are brought up in a family of a certain background, somehow your taste buds are accustomed to certain tastes by virtue of your parents were feeding you with the kinds of food they like to cook. While some other of your taste preferences are actually acquired according to your own choice as you eat along over the years. All this is a process and eventually you develop a complete preferred taste pattern of your very own. For this reason I said taste is actually cultured and not in-born

When I was a kid I did not like to eat any fruit or vegetable, I was more of a carnivorous animal than anything else. My grandma used to visit us bringing many oranges and apples which did not catch much of  my attention and I hardly set my eyes on them like the other village kids. My mom tried to convince me with all her teachings on nutritious values and the benefits of eating tomatoes, watercress and other kinds of vegetables, fruits etc. The raw, slightly bitter and green smell of such vegetables just did not go well with my taste buds and my throat. Anyhow, the swallowing of such vegetables was practically half coaxing and half forcing during my childhood days. Surprisingly such taste on vegetables was actually acquired and cultured over the years and now I love to eat most of these vegetables and also all kinds of fruits!

In my early village days, the common breakfast for  the village folks was actually all the fried and soap noodles as our staple dietary items. Subsequently when the breads were introduced to us, we started to eat breads with "Planta" margarine, and later part the more western style cheese and butter came along, and we acquired the taste and the liking for them as well. The "Roti Bengali" was my favorite and that my grandmother used to dip them into thick black coffee as afternoon tea time snack item. I also remember a kind of bread with its shape like a spring, and most of the time the Indian bread men on bicycles would hit on a bell "Ding, Ding, Ding"  in the evening time to sell all kinds of breads. "Gardenian" bread then was never heard of and its taste is no where near to those good old breads and until now it is never my choice!

I did not like to eat spicy food and deep fried things. My mom bought me the first ever Penang "Laksa" in Kampar and it tasted horrible for me, though I had get used to and developed the liking for eating "Laksa" nowadays. The spicy food such as curries always caused me stomach upset, while the deep fried stuff such as "Goreng Pisang" would somehow cause me to develop cankers in the mouth. I remember this word "canker" instead of ulcer taught by an American Chinese lady in a pharmacist store in Boston USA. When I requested medicine for relieving the pain of my ulcers developed during the trip, she told me I scared her with such term, it was not ULCER but canker! Anyway, Malaysians choose to use ulcers and cankers are also known as aphthous ulcers!

Because of my wife special liking for spicy food and gradually I develop the same liking for curries and spicy food too at later stage. For that reason, I could eat all kinds of Malay, Indian or Thai food in Trengganu, they are not so spicy compared to those of western peninsular states! My wife enjoys eating all kinds of biscuits, but my experience with biscuits started from my grandmother of my mother side. She bought tins of round "Marie biscuits" stocked them in the house and sometimes also packets of salty little biscuits for a change. We munched at them as snacks while we were hungry in between meals. And that was the only time I ate quite a fair bit of biscuits. I simply dislike eating most of the biscuits because they give the kind of dry and sticky feeling in the mouth. I did like to chew on Jacob biscuits though,  especially those presented in pretty gift boxes with nice corrugated wrapping paper, to pregnant moms who had recently given birth to babies. I believe this grade of packed gift biscuits are specially baked with extra ingredient and they must be expensive but very delicious! Another of my favorite is the Chinese New Year cookies biscuit which was made by frying rice and then ground into fine powder mixed with sugar. It was an annual family affair for my grandparents to gather all family members and make those biscuits together when I was a little kid. Now this making of new year cookies become a history and it still remains a vivid memory of the past for me to reminisce the good old childhood days spent with my grandparents in the village!

When I first came down to Kuala Lumpur from Perak as student, the food in our capital city was just totally strange and awkward to my taste buds especially when we were so budget-strapped. It took us years to eat around and find out the eateries that could suit our taste; partly because also our working income started to improve and could afford to taste around the various restaurants in town.

I went to Taiwan for 4 years and I had a hard time to adjust to the kind of food especially in the morning where they do not serve noodles for breakfast. They only have " Youtiao" or fried fritters and soya drinks most of the time! The beef noodles are spicy and strong in smell, my wife and I did not like them very much but then upon returning to Malaysia and we started to miss this Taiwanese beef noodles. The Taiwanese sweet potatoes porridge was also a specialty which we like very much.  I was in Japan for a technical training almost for a period of 3 months, it was not a pleasant experience for me to eat the iced noodles, canteen dishes and all their raw pickles in the cafeteria of Toyota Kyoho plant in Nagoya city. I remember one time I was so sick of the food that I decided to have just ice cream for my lunch! Having said that, the more expensive meals in high class Japanese restaurants were simply excellent. Over the years, my family started to acquire the taste of eating in Japanese restaurants, the raw salmon fish is our favorite. Going to a Japanese buffet just to savor on the sweet melting meat of the freshly cut raw salmon is really a meal which we always look forward to.

I suppose my taste buds are now saturated with all the previously acquired taste and no more accepting any more extra. Therefore in some other foreign cities that I lived at later part I just could not acquire the kind of taste to add into my collection!

In Mexico, they always like to put cinnamon in everything, in food, in coffee, and even the floor detergent also smells cinnamon. It was simply too much for me to bear and tolerate this cinnamon smell which surrounded me everywhere. Until now I could not develop the liking for cinnamon though I heard it has good medicinal value for health. 

While I was working in China northern provinces, the food is too oily and salty and I would prefer any of the road side stores food in Trengganu than eating those northern Chinese food.

I am so glad and relieved that I am now back home so that I could choose the food that I like to eat, be it Malay, Indian or Chinese!