Tamlin Magee writes for the Financial Times (archived) about his quest to understand a German descriptor:
Soon after my friend Andreas moved to Berlin, he sent me a picture of some pine nuts on a supermarket shelf. What made them photoworthy? The descriptor milde in big letters on the label.
People have eaten pine nuts since the Paleolithic Age, with evidence of their consumption found in ancient cave dwellings. And I really, really struggled with the thought that, from 10,000BC to any single time since, anyone anywhere would have flinched at their overbearing zest. Surely, if ever there was a naturally mild food, this was it.
As Andreas continued his new life in Germany, a steady drip of other “mild” foodstuffs arrived in my inbox. First, there were carrots, labelled as crunchy and mild. Then came mild orange juice, mild wine, mild olive oil. Mild chickpeas, mild tofu, mild maple syrup, mild yoghurt, mild bread. As a recent transplant, Andreas had no idea what this was all about. “I have BEGGED Germans to explain to me how carrots are not already a ‘mild’ flavour,” he wrote. But they couldn’t, and so began a shared mystery that would sustain our friendship for more than five years. […]
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