BipolarLawyerCook

Not long ago, She She asked me if I’d read a piece in The New Yorker about Grant Achatz, the chef of Alinea in Chicago. Achatz devel­oped can­cer in his mouth and tongue, and under­went rad­i­cal radi­ol­ogy and chemother­apy in the hope that he could save his tongue, in the hope that at some point, the cells and sense and smell abil­i­ties killed in the treat­ment would grow back. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ter study, but it’s also a rumi­na­tion on (and excuse for, as so many New Yorker pieces are) the mean­ing of, the nature of the sense of taste. What comes out of the arti­cle is an explo­ration of how cere­bral the sense of taste and its insep­a­ra­ble atten­dant, smell can be– because it both evokes old mem­o­ries, good and bad, and can cre­ate new ones, by their abil­ity to overwhelm.

Think of it: when you have some­thing truly astound­ing tast­ing, what do you do? Shush your din­ing com­pan­ion? Close your eyes? Inhale, strongly, while hold­ing the food in your mouth? Who doesn’t remem­ber the first taste of ice cream (or cake, or choco­late, or lob­ster ther­mi­dor?) It’s the taste, the feel that comes first, but fol­low­ing after, like pap­parzzi to a star, are the mem­o­ries– maybe you ate that first frosty bowl while sit­ting at the kitchen table on a June after­noon, with the back door open. A breeze was blow­ing in, the cicadas were whin­ing inter­mit­tently, and some­one was run­ning a gar­den sprin­kler, tick-tick-tick-whirr. The breeze car­ried the green pong of fresh-cut grass and other grow­ing things, damp earth, heat. Some­one was start­ing char­coals for a bar­be­cue down the street with gaso­line starter. All from a bowl of frozen eggs, sugar, cream, maybe some fruit or nuts or (vanilla) seeds or (cof­fee or cocoa) beans to fla­vor. The taste and smell of the food burns all the other mem­o­ries into place– in the CD disk of your brain, that place and time and feel­ing is etched, entourage to the celebrity taste, unless some stronger expe­ri­ence comes along to scratch and mar the mem­ory, or write over it entirely.

For me, it’s the smell of ham­burger grease, the only meat we could fre­quently afford grow­ing up. I love a good cheese­burger, but only in cer­tain con­texts– at a restau­rant, in a back­yard, at a McDonald’s or Burger King. Cooked inside the four walls of home, with no “we are out and there­fore this is a treat” back­ground noise to help me inter­pret the taste, a burger smells greasy and poor. The mem­o­ries jan­gle with each other in dif­fer­ent con­texts, affect­ing my abil­ity to just taste the meat in my mouth.

But food is love, too. Food made with love, meant to evoke a mutually-cherished moment, or a story told by a stranger of times long past. Food can bring back the good things of the past, but it can also cre­ate and freeze the new moments– like the first (and only) time I made milk-braised pork on the Bet­ter Half’s birth­day. Sit­ting at our tiny kitchen table on a hot June day, in a hot back kitchen, with us melt­ing in the heat and the hot meat melt­ing in our mouths and him know­ing that I loved him? It was some­thing I’ve never felt before and haven’t, in quite the same way since, but it’s there, on a shelf in my mem­ory pantry, still fresh.

The arti­cle also evoked for me the feel­ings I’ve been let­ting mar­i­nate in the back of my brain about food and cook­ing. Any­one who’s read Michael Pollan’s arti­cles on the indus­trial food com­plex (take your pick– his NYT pieces, his books The Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food) can’t help but won­der what strange beings we are. We over­think our food, pro­cess­ing it to within an inch of its life, elim­i­nat­ing the nutri­ents and fla­vors they gained out­side in the sun and the rain, and then we add them back in, chem­i­cal­ized, to trick our­selves into think­ing we are eat­ing the real thing, the thing we destroyed in the name of sci­ence, or shelf-stability. Sta­bi­lized fats and flour enhancers to lend mouth­feel and sub­stance. Arti­fi­cial fla­vors and sea­son­ings to mimic the plants, the scents, the savor the real items lend and meld. It all rein­forced my feel­ing– sim­pler is bet­ter. Every once in a while, a com­plex, lay­ered sauce or dish is won­der­ful to expe­ri­ence– but a sim­ple steak, well-steamed broc­coli, a baked potato, some but­ter and fresh-ground pep­per? Those fla­vors never get old, never con­fuse us and leave us yearn­ing for some­thing less chal­leng­ing, less weird, less sense-confusing. Some things are meant to be savored, then and there. The attempt to stop time, to pre­serve it beyond the right moment, is a uniquely human endeavor. Some­times it works, some­times it doesn’t.

The other aspect of the arti­cle was the idea of taste. Can you taste some­thing even if, phys­i­cally, you can’t? The answer, to me, is a hedged yes. Achatz talked about hav­ing an idea in his head of what his cre­ations would taste like, long before they were brought to life, and dur­ing a time when he had to rely on his sous chefs to real­ize his ideas, when his senses were impaired by the ill­ness and the treat­ment. But the imag­i­na­tion is fueled by some­thing, and that some­thing is past expe­ri­ence. You can’t have taste with­out the infor­ma­tion of the basic sen­sory ele­ments. You can’t make new com­pounds with­out know­ing the atomic par­ti­cles from which they are formed, to make an anal­ogy. But I do think that some people’s imag­i­na­tions, ide­al­iza­tions of fla­vors, are stronger than oth­ers. I can read a recipe, and know what it will “taste” like. Not enough salt, or, it will need some acid to bal­ance, I can know. I can acid-test a book at the store, flip­ping through. If three dif­fer­ent recipes past my men­tal “mmm” test, it comes home with me. I knew this even before I was a more prac­ticed, and there­fore bet­ter, cook. The sense was there before my prac­tice refined my abil­ity to apply it– but the sense of things, the refine­ments of know­ing, improves the more new things I try, the more recipes I read, the more I share in oth­ers’ ideas of good food. It’s why I am a vora­cious reader of food mag­a­zines and cook­books and food lit­er­a­ture. Well-written travel prose about sights and smells, the jour­ney of the senses in a strange place, with a dif­fer­ent sun and a dif­fer­ent wind on your back work, too. Those pieces, plates, places, describe for me things I can imag­ine, seek out, try in my mind before I find the real thing and com­pare it to my imag­i­na­tion. In a well-written piece? It’s as close as you can get to the real thing, until the real thing comes along.