What is an evolving palate?

As we get older, our eating habits tend to change. My first change was "swallowing my sweet tooth" years ago, and I have no taste for super sweet treats anymore. After I met my wife, my diet took another dramatic turn. You see, I grew up on a typical Mid-western meat-and-potatoes diet. No meal was complete without meat and some kind of starch. However, my wife grew up in Taiwan and is essentially a vegetarian.

Other changes have been forced on us as she slowly developed various food allergies over the years: she can't eat gluten or any wheat products, no dairy, no bananas, and nothing with sulfites. For a vegetarian, this list poses unique challenges for her to get enough nutrition and still enjoy eating.

Now I am a bona fide label reader, and while searching for allergens, I found chemicals -- lots of chemicals -- in our food. As I turned a more critical eye to the typical American diet, I became more and more enlightened with how unhealthy it really is. Call me paranoid, but it's hard not to think that American food has slowly poisoned my wife, and her body is rejecting all those chemicals that are neither natural nor necessary.

To cope, we focus on home-cooked meals, using fresh and dried organics whenever possible. We have also discovered that other cultures have cuisines better suited to our needs, and we have really developed a taste for the exotic. How I used to eat boring old meatloaf is really quite a mystery.

After all the years of exploring new foods and retrofiting old recipes, we have developed a large amount of knowledge and tasty, healthy dishes. In this blog, we would like to share what we have learned and what we continue to learn. For those who are looking for alternative diets, perhaps we can provide some new ideas.

So tune in and tune in often. Please post your comments and questions. We never stop changing; we welcome new ideas and new viewpoints. That is why this blog is called the Evolving Palate.

Thanks for visiting and we hope to hear from all of you who come and stay!