This is a bonus chapter that's not in the book. You'll only find it on the website. New strategies will be added to this chapter as they are created. Stay tuned.

This chapter describes how to taste wine, chocolate, and coffee. The focus is on tasting these because singly, each can provide a lifetime of Joyful Eating, but together they are an embarrassment of riches. For each food I've tried to go into just the right level of detail so you'll learn something, you'll grow to appreciate the food, yet you won't get bored by endless facts.

The point of talking about how to taste these foods is to show you there's a lot of food out there for you to have fun with. There's a deeper level of experience in tasting food that you can learn about and apply in your daily life. It may sound corny, but this is really exciting stuff.

Each short how-to taste section is merely an introduction meant to wet your appetite to learn and experience more. An openness to a lifetime of taste exploration is a unique and vital part of Joyful Eating.

The section on tasting wine, for example, won't make you a wine expert. Not even close. Even if I could, it was never my intent to try and tell you everything there is to know about wine. What I hope to show you is that there is a lot of fun to be had in tasting wine. The vast majority of the fun is easily accessible with surprisingly little knowledge and practice. And the same can be said for each of the other foods as well.

The Value of Learning More About Tasting

It's hard to fully appreciate something when you don't have a vocabulary to talk about it. If you listen to people who really know and a love a subject, they talk about it differently than people who have only a passing interest. They are getting more out if it because they are observing and understanding at a deeper and richer level. What reinforces their richer experience is years and years of practice along with their own hard earned vocabulary for talking about what they experience through sight, tough, smell, taste, and thought.

One of my favorite examples of this is baseball. I am not a big baseball fan. I have nothing against baseball, it just has never done anything for me. But I have always been fascinated in the passion fans show for baseball. Listen to people talk about baseball and you have to wonder if baseball isn't more complicated than rocket science!

Baseball is a much different game for me than it is for people who have been watching and playing baseball their entire lives. When I see Barry Bonds hit a home run, the deepest though I'll probably have is: "wow, great hit." Pure genius :-)

A real baseball fan will be talking about the shift on in the out field, the pros and cons of pitching to Barry, the type of the pitch, the speed of the pitch, the location of the pitch,

about the pitches that went before, about the history of the pitcher against Barry, about the history of Barry against different pitches in different ball parks in different years, about the length of the hit, the history of walks in the league. Then they'll talk about who is the best home run hitter of all time. Then they'll talk about how Barry dogs it when running to first or how Barry has slipped as an out fielder. They'll compare Barry a dozen different ways to other players through history, all backed up with statistics and examples from games that happened years ago.

It's truly amazing. They are having a far richer experience from the game than I will ever have. I could, of course. But I don't have a passion for the game so my experience will stay superficial.

Baseball with its huge and specialized vocabulary has endless possibilities for rich and deep enjoyment. This is why a lot of people love baseball so much. Acquiring this level of expertise takes time, practice and most of all: passion. It takes thinking about baseball, dreaming about baseball, playing baseball, talking about baseball, and arguing about baseball. The process is self-reinforcing. As you learn more, the more you can learn and appreciate, which increases your enjoyment of the game even more.

As you learn, you see nuances in the game other people can't. An expert is literally seeing a different game than a non-expert because they can see and express the endless stream of details less knowledgeable people miss.

If I see a pitch I have no idea what kind of pitch it was. Was it a fast ball, slider, or curve ball? I have no idea. It was just a pitch to me. An expert is able to discriminate the type of pitch thrown. Just that one ability opens up entire aspects of the game I don't have access to. They will be able understand the skill of the pitcher in throwing the pitch. They might be able to grasp how a catcher is calling a game. They'll be able to see if the pitch was in the strike zone and understand where the strike zone is and how the umpire is calling a came. They'll be able to tell when the pitcher is getting tired because they be able to see when the pitcher is losing control. I'll miss all those details of the game and I am poorer for it.

Learning opens up whole new sets of experiences for us. Learning to taste food is exactly like learning any other skill.

Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand

Eating is so natural a process you don't give it much thought. You are hungry so you eat. You are thirsty so you drink. It is an automatic process you have performed since birth. As a child you cry, you get fed, you feel happy. You probably carried this pattern on in to adulthood.

When eating is so automatic you don't think about your food or how it tastes. What stands out are the strong spicy, sweet, and salty tastes. Just think about which snacks are the

most popular. Even I can appreciate a huge game winning Barry Bonds home run. But that's about the only level of performance I can appreciate. I am missing out on the rest of the game.

In the same way, for a lot of people, it will take a nice big donut or a potato chip dripping with fat and salt to make a pleasurable taste impression. More suble tastes simply don't register. Only big bold tastes count. Along the way you may have noticed these big bold tastes usually are the most fattening.

And just like in the baseball game, there's a lot more taste to appreciate that is being ignored. Once you learn how to appreciate the subtle nuances of food's infinite variety of flavors and textures, entire new continents of pleasure will open up for you to explore.

And that's the point of all this: pleasure and happiness. Eating is one of the few pleasures easily available to us, which is why we abuse it so often. The more you learn about taste and the more you practice, the more pleasure and satisfaction you can have in your life.

Building Up Your Taste Vocabulary

People who taste food for a living have these large and seemingly bizarre vocabularies they use to describe food. At first we all probably think it's nuts to say something like "this wine has a hint of tobacco, cherries, and a long pleasing finish." We may say to ourselves: What does that mean? How do they know? I don't notice any of that.

But taste experts really can tease out these tastes in food. And because they can they are getting more pleasure out of food than you and I.

Like in the baseball example, taste experts are able to explain their feelings, judgements, and impressions by using a very specific vocabulary. When tasting a food a non-expert may get stuck at the "it's good" stage of the tasting experience. The expert and the non-expert will largely agree on what's good or not so good, but there are far deeper levels to experience and appreciate.