… the 150 calorie bun, the worst smell in the world, and thoughts on disgust.
I.
When Ms. S. and I want real ‘burgers’ from whatever veggie burger is in the freezer, I make up actual hamburger buns using a tried and true 5:3 (by weight) flour to water ratio dough, kneaded normally, set to rise until double, and proofed until ready to bake for about 12 minutes in a 350F oven. You need a sprinkle of salt for flavor, and the amount of yeast you use will determine the speed of the rise.
We have one Gardein ‘Ultimate Beefless Burger’ left; it’s not really the “ultimate,” but that’s just the name, more a label and marketing speak than truth in advertising. Yesterday Ms. S. had one, bun-less, for dinner, and was far from impressed, whereas we’d had them on buns we found them satisfactory. They even have the sinewy stringiness of beef burgers, and you could mistake them for low quality beef supplemented by grain filler. In fact Ms. S. likened it to a school lunch burger. But I digress.
We have one such burger left, Ms. S. is not interested in it, and we both hate to see ‘good’ food go to waste. I figured it needed a bun, Ms. S. had already calculated her dinner without a bun (but with a Publix veggie burger to go with a serving a mustard), and so I to cut the recipe in half, more or less.
42g of flour, 25g of water, a dash of salt and solid dose of yeast, some in the flour, some in the water, about 100F. Let it bloom a few minutes before stirring into the flour and salt. Add a tsp. of sugar if you want to speed it up a bit more. Do not bother with ‘real’ stirring; this is where a hand mixer takes care of things. I used a 2 cup Pyrex mixing cup and my hand mixer’s bread hooks. And I just let it go to town for about 6-8 minutes. No hand-kneading today, and because the hooks do all the work, I let the dough stay a bit moist; I’d say it was about 30g of water at the end, so a bit more than a 3:2 than 5:3 ratio. Cover it in plastic wrap and set in a warm place …
… such as on top of an oven.
II.
Ms. S. has a bag of russet potatoes; I had a small bag of “Melissa’s Baby Dutch Yellow Potatoes.” And a baked potato is one hell of a comfort food item. Plus there’s the whole nutrition aspect, the potassium, etc. Thus such a beast was on Ms. S.’s dinner list; I went to the cupboard and got a whiff of soiled diaper.
That’s how I usually refer to it.
The smell of potatoes gone bad … going bad … starting to sit in a pool of brown.
My “luck” was that it was not one of the russets, but rather one or more of the yellow spuds, which were still in their mesh bag, which I dragged to the sink and rinsed. The bad spuds were tossed, the good saved, and I’ll be eating them soon.
III.
Disgust is visceral. More than with mere dislike, the ugly, the unsavory, etc., our response to the disgusting is something we feel not only in our mouths but in our stomachs, in our guts. Or perhaps, it’s that feeling in our stomach that allows us to label it disgust.
Either way.
We metaphorically label all sorts of behaviors as “disgusting,” and as with all sorts of virtues and vices we apply the language of aesthetics — beauty, ugliness, the grotesque, even the disgusting — to those things we approve or disapprove of for their moral character.
But let us ignore the metaphorical uses for a moment, or at least the extension of aesthetic qualifiers into the realm of actions and character. What seems to set ‘disgust’ apart from other taste descriptors — e.g. sweet, sour, bitter — on the one hand and other judgments of aesthetic worth — e.g. beautiful, ugly — on the other is that the former tend to be one-note and the latter in some sense matters of proportions met or not achieved, whereas disgust (as taste or aesthetic judgment) is a matter of sensory overload. It is too much.
Sweetness will not lead you to nausea, unless the ‘it’ being eaten is disgustingly sweet; only ‘disgusting _____’ makes you want to vomit, not just ‘_____’. The disgusting ‘turns your stomach.’ Disgust is an overpowering feeling; it’s not surprising that a sensory overload appears to be part of it, but that’s also misleading; it’s not just quantity (how much … how sweet, how sour, how out of proportion) but also quality.
And that’s where we have to realize that disgust is a matter of conceptual overload. It’s a matter of ‘overload’ in two senses, both the sense of ‘too much’ (to the point of failure?), but also in the sense used by programmers, in which by overloading one basically means ‘equivocation.’ It’s a kind of polymorphism in which you let context rather than explicit rules determine what is meant by an operation (‘verb’), such as multiplication … we know what it means to multiply two integers or two real numbers, but what about two letters? Two words?
Recent-ish ‘news’ is about the safety of aspartame. And so I found myself perusing a variety of websites about artificial sweeteners. Along the way I’m reading not about aspartame or stevia, but about saccharin, the granddaddy of all artificial sweeteners when it comes to 20th-century chemistry, one might say, and I was amused by how one anti-saccharin site using disgust as a logical fallacy yet rhetorical technique. Because of the ‘origin’ of saccharin, its discovery, in ‘coal tar,’ we are supposed to associate saccharin with coal tar, and our negative feelings about coal tar, especially insofar as it is treated here as a ‘food item,’ is supposed to produce in us a feeling of revulsion. But this is predicated on, on the one hand, and obvious logical fallacy about the nature of things in general, but on the other hand it’s a matter of crossing conceptual boundaries. Saccharin is sweet (though like many others I find its aftertaste off-putting), this we ‘know’ through experience, but this is overloaded with the idea of coal tar and everything that goes with both ‘coal’ and ‘tar,’ and by extension the sweetness is contaminated with the sense of something oozing, black, bitter, etc. in our mouths. Something sweet is conflated with something toxic. A food stuff is superimposed with industrial goods not meant for human consumption. And in a feeling of disgust all of these are present together, a kind of manifold, bursting at the seams.
Or perhaps bursting at the seems, as it is a matter of the senses and of perception.
Other thoughts I won’t pursue too much here because they distract and detract are:
- In the sense and analysis above, it appears that disgust is a triumph of the literal over the metaphorical. With metaphors we employ terms from an ‘improper’ conceptual domain and apply it to another object. If we say ‘love is a red, red rose’ we know that the feeling of love is not ‘literally’ a species of flower, something botanical; we are instead figuratively employing terms from the botanical domain to better explain something real yet slippery and abstract. And it matters that we picked a rose over a dandelion or poppy or sea weed. A rose is a sign of beauty, it is vibrant, precious, a bursting flower attached to a thorny stem. If love were a dandelion, would it not be fleeting and easily dispersed? If it were a poppy would not its seeds be distilled into an intoxicating and addictive drug? But in all these cases we understand that a metaphor is at work. But in disgust? It remains at the level of the literal; there is no cognitive or conceptual separation
- A traditional view of beauty is that the beautiful object is well proportioned, harmonious, has a proper interplay of parts and whole. A beautiful face does not have a nose that is too big. A beautiful figure does not have legs that are too short. Or splotchy skin. There is debate here, of course; we have relative cultural beauty standards, etc., but dynamic or static, some sense of harmonious interplay tends to come into discussion with the beautiful. The sublime, in contrast, seems to privilege the whole — its size, majesty, overpowering glamour, and so on — over the parts or details that make it up. But it another train of thought — explored more elsewhere — is that the disgusting, almost as an extreme form of the grotesque, is at the other extreme, privileging the parts over the whole. Imagine a face in which not just the nose, but the ears, bulging eyes, lips, cheeks, brows and chin are all too large, too ripe, too detailed, too saturated with color and smell and detail. And sweet and sweaty and sour at once, as if the face, not the mouth, were breathing …
- On the one hand disgust seems tied to sensory overloading; on the other hand it’s conceptual overloading and the crossing and blurring of boundaries at play. But it’s important to remember that while we occasionally speak of disgusting objects or actions, disgust is a feeling, and it’s also the kind of subjective experience prone to manipulation. I remember reading just the other day about priming subjects’ experiences with different smells or tastes by suggesting ahead of time positive or negative inputs. Give the subject one smell, but cue it either with ‘cheddar cheese’ or with ‘body odor’ to get positive or negative responses. And we can do similar things with wine, perfume, beer, and so on.
IV. Further Reading
Taste and Beverages:
- Why You Should be Drinking Cheap Wine
- What’s the Science Behind Expensive Wine?
- As usual the NY Times is behind the times when it comes to beer: “Whipping Up a Home Brew that is True to You“
- For Supertasters a Desire for Salt is in Their Genes
“Treats”?
- Applesauce (120g) + rolled oats (14g) + cinnamon (to taste) = yum
- Apple Pie: to finish off 5 apples past their prime
Artificial Sweeteners:
