英国卫报：人类的感官重要吗？该如何修复？(7)（在线收听）

　　In the UK we used to do something similar with a variety of apples called Cox’s Orange Pippin.

　　在英国，我们曾经用一种叫考克斯苹果（桔平）做过类似的事情。

　　You would shake the apple, and if it was ripe the seeds would make a gentle rattling sound.

　　你摇一摇苹果，如果它成熟了，它的种子就会发出轻微的嘎嘎声。

　　Now we have largely lost the sensory experience of handling food when we buy it.

　　现在，我们购买食物时，我们基本上已经失去了处理食物的感官体验。

　　All over the world, open-air markets are being supplanted by supermarket shopping.

　　在世界各地，露天市场正在被超市购物所取代。

　　The seductive promise of the supermarket is that it will do most of the job of hunting and gathering for you.

　　超市比较吸引人的承诺是，它将为你完成大部分搜集和采摘工作。

　　All of the produce for sale in these vast cathedrals of commerce has already been vetted and packaged and labelled and then assembled under one roof by someone else for your convenience, so that you can focus your time and energy on other things.

　　在这些巨大的商超里，所有待售的农产品都已经经过了审查、包装和标签，然后由别人组装，为您提供方便，这样您就可以将时间和精力集中在其他事情上。

　　I will never forget how ecstatic my mother was on her trips to the first big Sainsbury’s in our town in the early 1980s.

　　我永远不会忘记，20世纪80年代初，我母亲去我们镇上的第一家大型塞恩斯伯里超市时是多么欣喜若狂。

　　This anonymous and well-stocked marketplace spared her – a working parent – the bother of traipsing between separate markets and shops such as grocers and bakers as she had previously done.

　　这个没特色但库存充足的市场让她--一位有工作的母亲--省去了像以前那样在不同的市场和杂货店和面包店之间奔波的麻烦。

　　One of the tradeoffs of this convenience, however, was that food shopping became something less sensory than it had been before.

　　然而，这种便利的代价之一是，购买食品变得不像以前那样有感觉了。

　　When I try to remember how the Sainsbury’s of my childhood smelled, my mind is a blank, whereas I can still vividly recall the fresh grassy smell of the greengrocers where my mother used to go before,

　　当我试图回忆起童年时塞恩斯伯里超市的味道时，我的脑海中一片空白，而我仍然清楚地记得母亲以前常去的蔬菜水果店的新鲜青草气味，

　　and the stale blood odour of the butcher where we bought our joint for the Sunday roast, and the heavenly scent of the warm bags of freshly ground coffee from the tiny coffee shop in the covered market.

　　还有星期天烤肉时买肉的那家肉店散发出的不新鲜的血腥味，还有有顶市场的小咖啡店里刚磨好的热咖啡袋散发出的天堂般的香味。

　　In the early 2000s, two French sociologists studied how the sensory experience of food shopping started to change in Vietnam with the arrival of supermarkets.

　　本世纪初，两位法国社会学家研究了随着超市的到来，越南的人们购买食物时感官体验是如何开始发生变化的。

　　They found that in traditional markets, Vietnamese shoppers tended to pay great attention to the sensory qualities of different foods.

　　他们发现，在传统市场，越南购物者往往更关注不同食物的感官质量。

　　They looked carefully for tomatoes that were pinky-red in colour with intact stalks, suggesting that the tomatoes had not travelled far.

　　他们仔细寻找那些茎杆完整、呈粉红色的番茄，被采摘下来时间还不长。

　　When buying meat, they smelled it and touched it with a finger to check for freshness.

　　买肉时，他们闻一闻，用手指摸一摸，看看是否新鲜。

　　With the rapid expansion of supermarkets in Vietnam, this kind of close sensory observation became impossible.

　　随着越南超市的迅速扩张，这种近距离的感官观察变得不可能。

　　“In supermarkets, I buy without looking,” said one respondent.

　　“在超市里，我不看就买，”一位受访者说。

　　A similar process has taken place in Hong Kong, where researchers found that older shoppers had a much wider food-smell vocabulary than younger people.

　　类似的过程也发生在中国香港，研究人员发现，年龄较大的购物者对食物气味的词汇量要比年轻人多得多。

　　Older people had words for the particular odour of salted fish, of old tofu and of stale peanuts, whereas younger shoppers tended to speak only of food that was “fragrant” and food that was “stinky”.

　　年长的人对咸鱼、老豆腐和不新鲜的花生的特殊气味有专门的描述，而年轻的购物者往往只说“香”和“臭”的食物。

　　All of this is part of a bigger revolution in eating over the past 50 to 70 years.

　　所有这一切都是过去50到70年来饮食大变革的一部分。