My coffee of choice is the espresso from Natural Grocers. Every other morning I grind espresso beans. Every morning I make a large espresso for my coffee. I don’t know how much creamer to put in. When there’s too little creamer, the coffee is a mahogany brown, and the bitterness of the coffee still tastes good, but it’s not to my liking.
I will sometimes add a touch more, when it goes a shade darker. But now the bitterness is uncanny. It doesn’t taste like it’s supposed to taste. The bitterness has been only partly dissolved.
If I add too much creamer, the coffee turns into a light brown. The bitterness is not only gone, but the coffee has begun taking on the flavor of the sugars in the milk creamer. It appears this is to much, as it no longer tastes like coffee. It tastes like creamer.
The gold standard is somewhere between the darker mahogany and the too-light brown. I can see this shade form if I add just a touch of cream. The coffee then tastes right. The coffee flavor is there, but the bitterness is gone.
How are we supposed to describe these shades of flavor? Certainly there are scales out there and I don’t even want to look at them, because coffee “culture” is… not my thing, let’s say.
But on a more general level, we all have an idea of what coffee should taste like. How do we derive this “should?” Your “should” and mine are very different. Some believe it should taste nothing like coffee. Others believe it should taste only like coffee. There’s middle ground, but it’s not a uniform spectrum by any means. There are various potholes between the extremes where coffee becomes uncanny.
This isn’t a coffee post, I promise. This is a language post. This observation is merely to serve the general hypothesis that food and drink are grammarized by the Merge field and Parsed into their own linguistic systems. There are dialects of food and drink which all say something about the people who prepare and eat them.
The American language of food is hardly uniform. Those who write about the “standard American diet” are talking about 2 modes of eating, primarily 1) road food and 2) prepared foods. Road food is a product of the highway system mostly created by Eisenhower and strengthened by mass media, and prepared foods are a product of World War II, also strengthened by mass media. The introduction of canola oil, for example, would have been impossible if not for candle factories switching into food production. Most, if not all, of the problems of modern American food devolve into warfare and mass media.
There are other dialects of American food like southwestern/Tex-Mex, northwestern, southern BBQ, big game. Japanese food here tastes mostly like it does in Tokyo with some mild differences, Chinese food tastes like Beijing style food and nothing like Cantonese food, and Indian food is basically the same as it is in Mumbai, but with less spice. This is to say, don’t knock “Americans” for our food tastes. You should be specific about the state, even the county. Otherwise one betrays a level of cultural insensitivity on par with talking about Chinese people in general doing X or eating Y. In this era of mass media, we’re as foreign to our national neighbors as we are to internationals and so it’s worth looking at everyone, even your pesky typical Americans, as a diverse lot with lots of modalities to their lives.
Reason being, food language is built on the same mechanism which produces human grammatical language. The mediums for this language are through the nose and tongue, and to some extent the eyes. When a food seems right, we’re utilizing a language that is derived from the Merge field of unoptimized object-based combat, which humans alone are privvy to. Uncanny spaces between “unsalted” and “well-salted” or “acidic” and “bitter” are lexical items, equivalent to words. These words are tested in each new Merge scenario, which is always changing. Merge returns a novel Parsing scheme each time, since Merge always changes.
The overlap of food and war is a fascinating one. Napoleon created the Continental Breakfast. The taboo against war implements at the traditional Chinese and Japanese dinner tables, allowing only Primitive chopsticks, is worth pondering. My Art of Violence project would hypothesize that eating implements precede weapons of war. The food language then taboos the use of these items, unable to wrest them back. If a hand blender were suddenly chosen as the tool of a mass murderer, we might think twice about preparing food with one afterward.
And yet maybe food language gives rise to greater nuances that can’t be captured by the vocal language. Some tastes can’t be described, yet. Some shouldn’t be described, like the taste of Peeps or Candy Corn, because they reveal the inorganic processing behind the scenes.
It’d be interesting to look at whether the tongue’s tastes are modified by the employment of this Parsing. Were ancient taste buds worse? (And by ancient I mean 500,000 years ago.)
As I go deeper into the rabbit hole of this Unoptimized-Merge theory, I can’t help but see language bursting through the seams of everyday materials like stop signs and doorways. Zen Buddhism urges us to contemplate what’s behind these elements of reality, but does so through silence and stillness. Yahwism would say something very different, that the field which generates these concepts does so in a way that is beyond your control, and you cannot modify them the way you can tinker with Linux source code. I would assume modern Zen practitioners are averse to the idea that human violence produces the Merge field that these forms pop out of. You get some idea of the relationship of Zen and violence in history in Victoria’s Zen At War, but not among American liberals, who have disavowed this connection to their detriment. If you’re not contemplating violence and annihilation, then you’re only contemplating the Parse schemes of Merge and winding yourself deeper into the Matrix. This is why the uncomfortable combination of prayer and warfare (and near-genocide as in the cases of the Amalakites and Midianites) in the Torah is more worth pondering. Exegesis has done a bang-up job of also severing this connection, to the detriment of Christians. If recursive human violence underwrites language, as I claim in my hypothesis, then what better way to look at language? And what better reason to contemplate violence? And what better reason not to try and exit Merge into the raw field of human violence where annihilation is certain?
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