[Herbalist] bitter

[Gaylin Walli]

Suzanna mentioned:

>I also have the impression that bitterness, per se, was not considered a
>*bad thing* necessarily, just another taste.  Having used a bitter tonic
>at one time for a particular problem, I noticed that by the third or
>fourth day, it only seemed bitter, not awful and bitter.

Although I posed this on another list, I'm interested in knowing if
people here have considered it. My theory is that the influx of
sugar-sweetened items signaled the beginning of the demise of
bitter tastes in western Europe that we only now are starting to
recover from. I'm not talking about a demise over 10 years or
so, but a more extended one. We now see the bitter greens in
salads. My parents, while not old (I'm only 30 something), would
likely never have known anything resembling a bitter herb in
their diet had they not had them in California in their teenage
years. My mother, hippie child that she was, liked them well enough,
but doesn't go out her way to eat them even today because "They
just don't taste right." My father still abhors them (of course he
wouldn't know a green leaf lettuce if it walked up and bit him on the
behind). They were both born in the Netherlands.

Iasmin