Tasty ;^)
All the presentations that had to do with taste this semester really shook up my understanding of how my much loved linguistic mouth muscle makes do diligently delivering sensations synaptically. I was surprised by how little my tongue tastes, but also by how influential that little snippet of information is.
Dogs, of course, don't have the same taste buds as humans. Yet sour is a universal dislike among humans and canines. If a creature has the same sense of taste as a human, does that mean it enjoys foods the same way? Wild canines and felines both have similar group meals as humans, hunting in packs and then splitting the reward. Even though they lack the spoken word, they still have these similar social dynamics, and they make meals matter. Meals may matter more to them than they do to humans -dogs are much more excited than people do for food, but they're also generally more excitable. Cats will wake you up just to feed them- and even though people may also do that, I judge cats less harshly. Cats don't have sweet receptors and deserve our pity. Especially if sweetness really is the flavor that brings us closest to God.
How important is eating together? Well, I for one spend three hours in Chase every day, the majority of that time with friends. So it's pretty important to me. I'll drive fifteen minutes from my home in Attleboro if someone hits me up for some late night. And I hate late night. How often do you hear people decrying how families don't eat anymore? Even though I would feed her around when I got home from school, my dog Zoey typically only ate a few bites, and would save the meal for when the rest of the family came home and was having dinner together. Animals often have similar ideals for human and nonhuman relations as we do. Across the board, sharing tastes is a feature of friendship, and strengthens relationships.
Perhaps that is what astounded me most- taste can have such an impact in how we interact with this world, and yet- it is nothing more than a combination of five different sorts of taste. Like the hexadecimal color codes representing every pixel on your screen by holding values for red, green, and blue, all tastes could theoretically be given a series of integers that accurately store the taste information in values of salt, sour, sweet, bitter and umami. It is the olfactory sensations that give food their other flavors- as was demonstrated when we held our noses and ate jelly beans in class. So the tongue is both a little overrated, while still being underappreciated, at least in western society. Maybe things would work themselves out if we started eating meals together again.
The miracle berries were neat! Mostly glad I can knock them off my "things the internet told me to try" list. But the experience was invaluable, and set up for what else I was to learn about my taster, that tongue. I remember the lemons basically tasted like one of those gummi candy lemons, even though I am usually akin to those dogs you see in gifs freaking out after being given a sour sample.
Dogs, of course, don't have the same taste buds as humans. Yet sour is a universal dislike among humans and canines. If a creature has the same sense of taste as a human, does that mean it enjoys foods the same way? Wild canines and felines both have similar group meals as humans, hunting in packs and then splitting the reward. Even though they lack the spoken word, they still have these similar social dynamics, and they make meals matter. Meals may matter more to them than they do to humans -dogs are much more excited than people do for food, but they're also generally more excitable. Cats will wake you up just to feed them- and even though people may also do that, I judge cats less harshly. Cats don't have sweet receptors and deserve our pity. Especially if sweetness really is the flavor that brings us closest to God.
How important is eating together? Well, I for one spend three hours in Chase every day, the majority of that time with friends. So it's pretty important to me. I'll drive fifteen minutes from my home in Attleboro if someone hits me up for some late night. And I hate late night. How often do you hear people decrying how families don't eat anymore? Even though I would feed her around when I got home from school, my dog Zoey typically only ate a few bites, and would save the meal for when the rest of the family came home and was having dinner together. Animals often have similar ideals for human and nonhuman relations as we do. Across the board, sharing tastes is a feature of friendship, and strengthens relationships.
Perhaps that is what astounded me most- taste can have such an impact in how we interact with this world, and yet- it is nothing more than a combination of five different sorts of taste. Like the hexadecimal color codes representing every pixel on your screen by holding values for red, green, and blue, all tastes could theoretically be given a series of integers that accurately store the taste information in values of salt, sour, sweet, bitter and umami. It is the olfactory sensations that give food their other flavors- as was demonstrated when we held our noses and ate jelly beans in class. So the tongue is both a little overrated, while still being underappreciated, at least in western society. Maybe things would work themselves out if we started eating meals together again.
Beautiful post!
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