Smells and Bells

The book, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition by Elizabeth Pérez is a very interesting Anthropological look at different Black Atlantic religions. The readings from this book lead me to thinking in an introspective way about what I eat and how I eat, as well as what I cook and how I cook.  I eat a lot of meat, I would say that I average somewhere between two and three meals a day with meat in it, but I have never killed an animal (besides the one bird I killed while driving), butchered an animal or cleaned an animal for meal preparation. Reading about how much effort goes into these steps, hunched backs of people plucking chickens, the spoons being separated to their pot with electrical tape and the significance that each part of the animal has to the Lucumí religion, makes me rethink how I prepare and eat food. It makes me think about how I treat cooking in my life, and all of the purpose that I lack within it.   ...

https://www.thespruceeats.com/jewish-bread-machine-challah-recipe-1135939 I had a really great experience doing the academic banquet this year. I thought that it was a really fun and great way to culminate all of the ideas we have learned this year. Other than the obvious sense of eating food, smelling the food, and seeing for people I found the community aspect of this banquet to be the most religious to me. In class we talked about how being in a community can be an aspect of religion. To me this banquet was a perfect example of this. At the banquet there was a group of people doing the same ritual and celebrating a larger idea (knowledge). To me that fits somewhat into the definition of what religion is. Part of this banquet making that I found to be very enlightening was learning how to make challah bread. to me making bread combines all five of the sense and maybe even the sixth, but I don't think so.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Kurutob_eating_with_hands.jpg The presentation from the touch group today made me think about an element of my study abroad that I really enjoyed. In both Tanzania and India, a lot of the food that we ate we ate without utensils, just using our fingers. In Tanzania it was rice, ugali, beans, cooked cabbage, and some other food. And in India it was many of the traditional, well-known Indian dishes like dal, curry and masala. We ate these by just grabbing the food we wanted with our fingers, mixing it around if desired, and picking it up and eating it. Many Indian dishes are served with a tortilla that can be used to pick up food. It was a practice that took some time to get used to, but once I did I found that I really enjoyed it. For one, it was a good way to tell if the food was too hot to eat. But it also meant that we really were connecting with our food on a bit of a deeper level than the disconnect of using a fork or spoon....

Sweets are known to be one of the most indulgent flavors humans long for. We make sure to save room in our stomachs during a meal so we can treat ourselves with having our last bite of food being dessert. An important mantra my grandmother used to share is, “Eat dessert first, life is short,” suggesting that we deserve sweets before the nutrition of our actual meal. We call it one of our comfort food and it seems to cure any wrongdoing, like how ice cream and chocolate can fix emotional turmoil. We eat sweets when we’re feeling distraught, lost, and empty and use them to fill ourselves. Sugar can be known to heal burns on your tongue after taking a sip of a hot beverage. And we especially know that sugar can mask bitter, unpleasant tastes, and so we use it to help “the medicine go down.” By this logic, sugar is good for us as it can help us get physically and mentally better.   We also use the word sweet to describe things that aren't food, like people and feelings. W...

Honeycomb s "Taste and see that the Lord is sweet"  Depending on the translation, God's sweetness flows from him like honey, an oozing sweetness that could mean bliss or joy, but could also be literally translated to sweetness. With the satiability of God's words and presence being connected to only sweetness, while things that may bring harm to us are considered bitter. What's interesting to me is the delectability of God despite his power and wrath. Where is the sweetness when he induces the flood? Would we every consider God any other flavors or tastes? To connect this back to what the author said about taste being a matter of perspective. Rachel Fulton also noted how sweetness can be seen as juvenile, with the connotations as follows could be perceiving the person tasting as immature.  Further elaborating on this idea that Bernard of Clarivaux introduced of our palate being tainted by the serpent's poison, providing a loss of tastes of goodne...

I have been craving cheesecake for the past week. Its been a constant in this crazy preparation for finals, always in the back of my mind, distracting me from my work. Its become a recognized thing, because its all I have been talking about. The general sentiment is something along the lines of  "Elise, you need to shut up about cheesecake", but its an important feeling at this time, so I will not just leave it alone. Anyways, yesterday, I drove some of my stuff home so the moving out process would be more manageable on Saturday. I requested a home cooked meal, but did not specify what food I wanted. The whole family is home, and we all sit down and enjoy a nice dinner and conversation before I head back to Wheaton. As the meal commences, my mother stands up and says she has made something for dessert. Out of nowhere, she whips out a homemade cheesecake, and I lose my mind. "Mom, you don't understand what you have just presented me with. I literally  have been talk...

Rachel Fulton’s article “Taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps. 33:9): The Flavor of God in the Monastic West” opens with a discussion about the ways that taste is used in language.   She explains that people describe others as “having taste” (positive) or having “bad taste” (negative), which are aesthetic judgments by another individuals.   This relates to her later explanation that we refuse to taste certain foods, because we have already structured what we do and do not like, therefore we fear those things which are mysterious to us.   The fear of these objects, I believe is what pushes us to judge others about what they taste as “more or less civilized or socially acceptable” (Fulton, 171).   I was interested in look deeper into the connection between culture and food and stumbled across an article, by anthropologists Yuson Yung and Nicolas Cisterna, which discusses food and sensory experience.    The authors ex...

Last night, Tuesday March 31st, I had the pleasure of attending sex week’s talk given by our very own professor, Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus. The presentation was called, “Doing it Orally: The Connections of Eating and Sex”. Eating is seen as something so intimate because one places something in their body, crossing a barrier, unlike other senses, and in that way is much like sex. The main theme of the talk, or at least what I took away was that how intimate eating and having sex are, and how many similarities there are between the two. Professor Brumberg-Kraus drove home the point that eating and sex really do connect to every sense, even the ones you would not think of. At one point stating that eating is hearing because we as humans have evolved the parts of our ears that now attached to our jaw, so we would be able to eat and talk at the same time. He also went on to cite the story of Adam and Eve where eating is seeing, Eve eats the fruit from the tree, therefore it causes her ...

Although they are fascinating, the details in Rassman's book that most interest me are not the descriptions of the recitations and their musical components. I am a visual/tactile learner with no rhythm, so while I can enjoy  music, I can't really wrap my head around it.  What does interest me, however, are her descriptions of how many of the conventions that govern the recitations are imported from the rest of the Muslim world, especially Egypt. This natural spread of culture among Muslim nations is fascinating and mirrors the dissemination of American culture around the world. In this globalized economy, the culture of most of the world's nations can be accessed from any other nation. This is how I can (and totally would) read Korean or Japanese comics (manhwa and manga, respectively), watch a Spanish movie (like Pan's Labyrinth), listening to British music (like the Who or the Beatles), and eating Mexican food all in the same day. However, whereas America has it...

For Spring Break some friends and I went to Montreal for the weekend. Their food of choice for their city is Poutine. This is the combination of french fries, gravy, and cheese. Of course you have the option to put many more things on it. It smelled great from outside all the restaurants and we kept saying how we had to try it (this also clearly affected our sense of smell).  On our last night we tried to go to one of the best places where it was served however, the line was out the door and we left Montreal without trying poutine. I have now personally decided the next time I go the first thing I will eat there is poutine. Aside from the fact that I didn't get to experience poutine, it was interesting to go to another country where their most known food is almost always available.

While on my Instagram this spring break, I saw this post from Martha Stewart and the caption immediately made me think of this class.  While it seems like food articles used to target taste buds, articles now about food are targeting a social media audience with an "it's pretty" approach.  People care so much about their social media feeds that Martha Stewart has had to develop synesthesia, connecting colors with tastes. She now focuses some of her recipes based on how they look. Are they pretty enough to post? This title says nothing about how the items taste, yet it's a post about food- with a recipe! Do we think that if it looks pretty it must taste good?  Just a quick observation on how the world around us (and our senses) might be changing due to this social media age. 

In the article Cultures and Cultures: Fermented Foods as Culinary 'Shibboleths' by Jonathan Brumber-Kraus and Betsy Dexter Dyer, the biology and religious cultural contexts for the presence of shibboleths in food is explored. The article defines shibboleths as a food that distinguishes one culture from another. These foods generally involve a fermentation component. For this reason the culture of the food has a particularly strong biological role in its development. Two of the three biological reasons for shibboleths explained in the article are: " 1. The original fermenting communities of microbes were (and many still are) no more than the indigenous microbes of a particular region and of its human population. Microbes from local soils and waters confer a characteristic ‘terroir’ by tumbling into open buckets of milk and vats of grape juice. The indigenous microbiota dwelling in and on humans produce not only familiar body odors and  flavors but also those same nua...

We've discussed (and experienced) the interesting ways in which smell is closely tied to memory. The experience of a scent is instantaneous; without conscious thought, we are taken back in time to when we smelled the specific aroma either for the first time or in a particularly important or memorable time. It is no question that each of us could come up with an example of this without giving it much thought. In talking about taste, we have also uncovered that most of our sense of taste is actually smell. Dr. Rachel Herz showed us this in action when she had us plug our nose and eat jellybeans. When we were unable to smell, we were unable to taste individual flavors; our experience of the jellybean was reduced to a sense of sweetness. So, then, wouldn't it mean that taste and memory are also closely related? Take for example the Disney movie Ratatouille in which the icy exterior of the harsh food critic is melted when he takes a bite of the title food and is instantly tran...

The idea of taste and food varies for every person. In fact every person has a special meal with is their favorite and everyone loves their meal prepared a certain way. A perfect example of this would be how someone would like their Chipotle burrito. They have all the options in front of you so the customer can choose what ingredients they would like to fulfill their needs when it comes to taste and flavorful pleasure. Another interesting idea is how one prepares themselves for a meal when it is related to a holiday. For example being Jewish, whenever, Hanukkah is near I am always ready for my grandmothers Latkes, or when it is passover it is expected that I am at the Seder or eating Matzah or a "Hillel Sandwich". Prior to eating these items before a holiday celebration you can already sense or make up in your mind exactly what the taste or smell will be. This is what makes celebration food so special.