testing taste fatigue

TESTING TASTE FATIGUE

I’ve been a dumbass so many times in my life that I can comfortably sit back all fat a sassy and have writing subjects based on those occasions for the rest of my existence.  Well, at least amusing tales to spice up the otherwise boring prepping tropes repeatedly flogged worse than a redheaded dead horse.  I’ve had exposure to taste fatigue before.  And it isn’t like you think.  You don’t stop eating.  Unfamiliar food, that which you do not recognize as food, sure.  You won’t eat that even when hungry.  But familiar food?  You’ll keep eating it.

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The trick is going to be to discover which foods you can eat the most of.  Don’t be like me and eat nothing but one food ( in abundant times ).  I don’t think anyone is going to be able to do that successfully.  I ate nothing but potatoes for a month once.  Then I didn’t touch another one for about five years after that.  Not even French fries.  And that is saying a lot because to me there are really few other near perfect foods like fries.  And yes, just like in Pulp Fiction, fries in mayonnaise ARE damn skippy good, even if it doesn’t sound like it.

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Thirty years ago I ate nothing but rice for a week, and to this day I can barely stand the crap.  I did the same with Top Ramen and only eat that a couple of times a year now.  And that was twenty years ago.  About the same time period I ate way too much peanut butter and I don’t think I’ve eaten it since.  Perhaps every few to five years I try it again and hate it.  I can’t even stand the smell of tuna anymore, and that was from eating it just once a week while living off grid ( I can’t eat chili, either, but that might be the heartburn ). 

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So, yes, taste fatigue is a real thing.  Mostly AFTER the fact.  While you are hungry you just keep shoving the slop down your gullet.  My one food I have found I can eat every single day, even two or three times a day is whole wheat ( I can’t stand white flour anymore.  I can eat flour tortillas and hot dog or hamburger buns, but sparingly.  As soon as I eat too much white bread, it upsets my system with bloating, discomfort and constipation ).  I can’t even do that with potatoes, and that is the dinner with meat carb I prefer the most.

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So, what can you eat every day?  Not bacon, that would be cheating.  Even if you canned your own bacon, you couldn’t afford that.  What carbohydrate can you eat every single day?  Have you actually experimented?  You might find that ONLY storing rice and beans is a mistake.  And a breakfast food probably doesn’t count, either.  It almost seems to be a universal trait that we eat the same thing every breakfast.  Dinner seems to be where we crave variety.

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Of course, everyone will be different.  Just ask yourself what meal or food group you seem to crave variety the most.  I eat oatmeal every morning now ( I can’t put butter on an empty stomach anymore, and dry toast, or toast with jelly, simply sucks ass-so I started with oatmeal.  Coat the stomach for coffee, and eat bread a few hours later ).  I can choke down leftovers for lunch.  But I have a hard time duplicating both meat and carbs from one dinner to the next.  So, take your variety meal and start eating your storage filler food every meal.

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You should very quickly find out if you can stomach that food repetitively.  As I said, if you are hungry, you’ll eat the same thing time after time.  I’m NOT saying that all those beans and rice you stocked will go to waste or fail to feed you.  They will.  What I am suggesting is that some foods are more palatable than others to you individually and will be less unenjoyable.  Whole wheat is mine.  I ate it for two meals a day-complete meals-for many years.  Taste fatigue won’t be an issue with me for the apocalypse.

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As long as the foods you stock are familiar foods ( no sheep entrails or eyeballs, no stir fried insects ), you’ll eat them rather than starve.  So, why am I saying on one hand that food fatigue won’t bother you under starvation conditions and on the other hand encourage you to test to your preference?  Because of your long term situation.  If I am correct, and I always am except for timing, we are headed into a centuries long Dark Age.  There will be no recovery in your lifetime.  Your food storage needs to be five to ten years long.  And you need to store what you eat.

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First, why you can’t bet on a recovery.  Systems decline because they cannot change.  Britain was seemingly wrong in relying on her colonies to feed her during both World Wars, as submarine warfare from a naval inferior almost starved her out.  Then she hooked her wagon to the US financially and food security wise.  She never changed her imported food reliance.  Rome and Greece both declined imperially after becoming vulnerable to imported food.  And now, the US does not decrease its exposure to foreign oil which feeds her.

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Despite history, and despite first-hand experience,  these systems refused to change even when faced with fundamental food issues.  Because they couldn’t.  Systems increase in complexity to deal with necessary growth ( you must grow or be defeated by a rival who will grow instead ), and you cannot change.  Because change both endangers your growth and is impossible because the system in place must be used to support the system already in place.  There is no resources available to support the present system and also introduce change.

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The example I always give is that only petroleum feeds the globes seven billion people.  Petroleum is needed to make all the machinery, and the feedstocks ( natural gas to artificial fertilizer ) and to pump the water and to process and move all that food globally.  And even though the rate of growth has slowed, we are still seeing population growth.  At the same time conventional oil supplies decrease ( you cannot use fracking oil for most agricultural inputs, and at the same time fracking takes conventional oil away from other tasks such as agriculture.  It is like using a third of our grain to create ten percent of our gas as ethanol ).

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We cannot even keep pace feeding the growing population ( former famine grain stockpiles have been drawn down during each year of harvest shortfalls ).  So we cannot stop using Industrial Agriculture to feed everyone.  And yet, only decentralized organic/permaculture can feed us when the oil runs out.  But to decentralize, we would need to go back to the old system of farms surrounding each small village.  You need to remove transportation from the equation to reduce energy requirements.  To do that, where do we put all the suburbs now resting atop former fields?

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There is zero energy available we need to invest in reproducing the agricultural infrastructure pre-petroleum that we destroyed.  So famine and massive die-offs are baked into the cake.  Ignore that at your peril there, Spanky.  Now, having established you need oodles and gobs of food, because Peak Oil famine, you cannot just stockpile a duplication of today’s present diet.  Not for that many years of food.  And you need a heck of a lot more food than you now have.  Most people look at grains as a filler to better tasting survival food in their stockpile.

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I’m saying, get used to the fact that grains are going to have to be your primary source of calories, with only a tiny amount of better tasting food to compliment it.  That is the only way the average Debt Peasant can stock a half decade of food ( or, ideally, even more ).  And since most folks don’t yet have that mix ( 95% grain, 5% luxury goodies ), you still have time to test your starch preference.  And you want to do THAT because I believe all folks are different in your body’s performance and composition.

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Tests have shown that a baby clearly shows preference for the foods it got as a fetus.  Of course, a fetus doesn’t get the actual foods but is nourished more like another organ.  So the taste preference is more of a chemical nutrient preference.  This is clearly a way of altering a body to exist on local foods.  This alone tells me we are programed to optimally run on different foods.  Add in cultural food bias and you might begin to see why it is stupid to think one size fits all nutritionally.  The USDA food pyramid, or the paleo diet, or any other diet, cannot be optimal for everyone.

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I don’t know if our genes actually mutate to run off different foods, or it is just an immediate alteration since we did evolve to be mobile wanderers.  But I do believe we at least have different body types that run differently and require different foods for best performance.  The obvious example is the “corn fed look” stocky guy that doesn’t eat extra but always carried extra weight.  But that doesn’t matter.  What does is that since everyone is different, recommending ALL preppers store rice and beans is stupid ( as is, granted, the old school Mormon based wheat diet ).

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Test for the starch your body rejects the least in preference.  When choice is available taste fatigue is much more obvious and utilized.  Try different foods.  It shouldn’t take long before you lose appetite for the overly repetitive food you are testing.  The one that lasts the longest wins.  Concentrate on that one, to give your body the fuel it best utilizes.

( .Y. )

( today's related Amazon link click here )

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note: here is an article/video countering the claim that Evil Socialist Venezuelans are fighting for scraps of garbage to eat.  Yes, it might be counter-propaganda, but an alternate view is still good click here .
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