Philosophy
TheWife and I worked hard to keep the kids eating real food as long as we can before the larger cultural influences started exerting their unhealthy pressures. The less short of the short people had a class camping trip and on it, she tried soda. Come the school's closing ceremony, they had coolers and she asked if she could have a soda again. We gave in and since she was having one, we offered the opportunity to the shorter of the short people. He LOVES grapes, so jumped at the opportunity to try grape soda. You could see the anger and disappointment on his face when he took the first sip. "This doesn't taste like grapes."
After his baseball game the other night, everyone else got ice pops brought by one of the parents. Again, you have to pick your battles, so I said o.k. and he took a red one. On the way home, I asked him what flavor it was. He thought for a second and said, "I don't know. It doesn't taste like anything I've ever eaten." I asked if it was strawberry or cherry and he said that it didn't taste like either one.
Of course, it was one or the other. Our words for fruit are ambiguous, they refer to the actual fruit and to the artificially created chemical combinations that we label with fruit names. What is odd is that for many children the artificial flavor is the primary meaning of the term. We have so corporatized our food supply that the actual meaning of flavor words are no longer the flavor to which they initially referred.
Indeed, the alienation is so complete that we don't even need to connect them by color. Artificial blue gets labeled "raspberry." I grow raspberries. I have red. I have gold. I have black which is actually dark purple. There is no blue raspberry. There are blueberries, but even they aren't blue, they're purple. But the point is it makes no difference to children who don't eat raspberries. It is just a word. So, why don't we create new words that are completely distinct from natural vocabulary? If we are not even trying, why bother trying?
- Just Desserts
Why have liquid mainstays of the confectionery landscape like the malt, the phosphate, and the egg cream (and, to a lesser extent, the float) disappeared? Fast food has turned the soda and the milkshake from desserts to meal accompanying drinks and there...
- The Meanings Of Food
Doing the dishes last night, it struck me how differently different people see food. To TheWife, for example, food is medicine. The purpose of eating is to change the body's chemistry and cooking is an apothecary's art, preparing something to...
- In Praise Of Mulberries
Last night, after watering the garden, I laid down in the hammock for a few minutes and then wandered down to the mulberry trees for a little dessert. We're in peak mulberry season and we have four trees that produce copiously. One, in particular,...
- How Contextual Is Taste?
There is no doubt that taste is not directly accessed, but is influenced by all sorts of other factors. The question is how sensitive taste really is to that which has nothing to do with chemistry, physics, or biology. My kids, like all kids, insist that...
- Marco Polo And Pasta
"Did Marco Polo bring pasta from China?" by Cristen Conger TLC COOKING Long before paper, gunpowder and the compass, the Chinese had invented yet another staple of human civilization. A coil of dry noodles, preserved for 4,000 years, sat beneath an...
Philosophy
Artificial Flavors
TheWife and I worked hard to keep the kids eating real food as long as we can before the larger cultural influences started exerting their unhealthy pressures. The less short of the short people had a class camping trip and on it, she tried soda. Come the school's closing ceremony, they had coolers and she asked if she could have a soda again. We gave in and since she was having one, we offered the opportunity to the shorter of the short people. He LOVES grapes, so jumped at the opportunity to try grape soda. You could see the anger and disappointment on his face when he took the first sip. "This doesn't taste like grapes."
After his baseball game the other night, everyone else got ice pops brought by one of the parents. Again, you have to pick your battles, so I said o.k. and he took a red one. On the way home, I asked him what flavor it was. He thought for a second and said, "I don't know. It doesn't taste like anything I've ever eaten." I asked if it was strawberry or cherry and he said that it didn't taste like either one.
Of course, it was one or the other. Our words for fruit are ambiguous, they refer to the actual fruit and to the artificially created chemical combinations that we label with fruit names. What is odd is that for many children the artificial flavor is the primary meaning of the term. We have so corporatized our food supply that the actual meaning of flavor words are no longer the flavor to which they initially referred.
Indeed, the alienation is so complete that we don't even need to connect them by color. Artificial blue gets labeled "raspberry." I grow raspberries. I have red. I have gold. I have black which is actually dark purple. There is no blue raspberry. There are blueberries, but even they aren't blue, they're purple. But the point is it makes no difference to children who don't eat raspberries. It is just a word. So, why don't we create new words that are completely distinct from natural vocabulary? If we are not even trying, why bother trying?
- Just Desserts
Why have liquid mainstays of the confectionery landscape like the malt, the phosphate, and the egg cream (and, to a lesser extent, the float) disappeared? Fast food has turned the soda and the milkshake from desserts to meal accompanying drinks and there...
- The Meanings Of Food
Doing the dishes last night, it struck me how differently different people see food. To TheWife, for example, food is medicine. The purpose of eating is to change the body's chemistry and cooking is an apothecary's art, preparing something to...
- In Praise Of Mulberries
Last night, after watering the garden, I laid down in the hammock for a few minutes and then wandered down to the mulberry trees for a little dessert. We're in peak mulberry season and we have four trees that produce copiously. One, in particular,...
- How Contextual Is Taste?
There is no doubt that taste is not directly accessed, but is influenced by all sorts of other factors. The question is how sensitive taste really is to that which has nothing to do with chemistry, physics, or biology. My kids, like all kids, insist that...
- Marco Polo And Pasta
"Did Marco Polo bring pasta from China?" by Cristen Conger TLC COOKING Long before paper, gunpowder and the compass, the Chinese had invented yet another staple of human civilization. A coil of dry noodles, preserved for 4,000 years, sat beneath an...