The Science of Taste

Week 9 Tasting Lab

A wonderful lunch was prepared by Sarah, Karen, and Brittany. Sarah prepared a quinoa tabbouleh, Karen brought in a peanut soup, and I wish I knew what Brittany used to make the soup that she prepared because it had a rich, cheesy texture I hadn’t had before in a soup. All of the dishes brought were outstanding. Given all of the political strife and jumbled emotion and energy being transposed and reverberated throughout the student body and through RAD services, professors, and other affiliates on campus this meal provided a safe haven to relax from academic studies and enjoy the presence of one another. Karen’s soup she prepared held the dense peanut flavor and the texture was thin which made me think why it was enjoyable because of distinct memories of peanut butter having a thick texture. The tabbouleh that Sarah brought inspired a quick study of the history of tabbouleh because last weekend a member of the community at Fertile Ground brought tabbouleh as a gift to Gail, Chris, and I while we were working on the compost bins. I found that it is a mezze, or a selection of small dishes that is often served before wine tasting (I can’t help but wonder about the neuroscience behind that), which went very well with the two soups that were provided. During the meal itself, I couldn’t help but smile when I struggled to eat the green leaf in my vegetarian salad which helped internalize the room for growth in my ability to prepare salads that are not exclusively leafy greens. Brittany’s soup was heartfelt and we had a powerful conversation about breath, physiological stress, and relaxation while we ate. She is wonderful.

Tea Tasting

This week’s tea tasting topped last week’s once again. Being a part of Kotomi’s growing process the past two quarters has been an unbelievable joy. This week we tasted Macha – a powerful tea that held warmth in my belly. The presence of the collective group this week was remarkable. In last week’s tea tasting experiment, Kotomi discussed the history of Chinese and Japanese tea practitioning styles and mentioned how a Chinese practitioner of tea tasting offered her to come in and show how she learned to practice tea. Right before the Kotomi tea tasting the previous week, I was in a position to present to the class as a requirement and I was not feeling confident in the presentation which held a bias for the perception of the cinnamon and music combination in the overall experience. Kotomi learned from my errors and the next week demonstrated the most powerful experience I have ever had with tea. I felt the singing bowls as large spheres of energy reverberating off of the rim of the cup towards me. I am unable to remember the entirety of what Kotomi said, but afterwards Kotomi discussed how thinking through emotion and the nervous system can inhibit being, which reminded me of a previous week’s seminar discussion about thought being interconnected with emotion. Given Sarah’s reaction from last week and this week’s tasting labs, Kotomi learned from observing my presentation and from her strength I learned the significance of sustaining the perception of emotions and nervous system care. The macha we tasted was silty green with a thick viscosity in appearance and had a musky, rich flavor with silty texture and rich, complex flavor. Kotomi discussed her amazed respect for the Senorouku tea master ceremony which uses charcoal to heat the tea kettle to the precise temperature, the use of a whisk, frankincense, and how she decided to add flowers to her final presentation to the class. Once again, it has been wonderful having Kotomi do the tea tastings for the program and seeing her growth over the last two quarters.

Tasting Lab Lunch: Week 8

Asparagus Stir-Fry

Students: Sean Dwyer, a brown bread made by Meghan, sourcing help from Alana Mousseau

Cut the bottoms of asparagus and trim to size

once bright green, throw in some ginger and chile

then add salad greens after and serve

I used pepper and salt.

Our ancestors understood this solemn truth, dug into the dirt, and built autonomous agrarian villages “for the beautiful ones not yet born.” (Davy et al. 2)

What’s a memorable experience of eating vegetables grown by someone you know? How does this change your experience of eating?

“The funny thing was everyone said I had a glow that evening and I kept saying that I didn’t feel good and the glow they saw was fever. They said I had the glow of health.” (Smart-Grosvenor 104)

Do you have a distinct memory of food and music together? Does the music, the food, or the environment stand out more in your memory? Can it?

Mead Tasting –

The mead tasting was a wonderful experience. The honey water tasted sweet but not overwhelming and the color wheel that was provided opened my eyes to several descriptive tasting words that were unknown to me. I was too interested in the presentation and all of the different types of flavor descriptions that were on the wheel to concentrate on how to describe it. Reflecting on the flavors, the honey water had a slightly fruity, caramel, and woody taste to it. The stronger mead that was mixed with the wine had a more pungent berry, woody, and a slightly caramel taste to it. Something that stood out to me is that in my studies of flavor and taste I read about the sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami flavors. On the wheel I noticed that umami was not mentioned and I couldn’t help but smile.

4) Why do you believe society doesn’t discuss complicated design issues to help solve either CCD or Individuation?

It’s a terrifying subject to discuss because it has such profound meaning to our existence and we don’t really know. A question that came up for me after the presentation was how do you raise bees outside of a box? I thought about it and the conclusion that makes sense to me is that bees shouldn’t be raised because they already thrive in a healthy ecosystem. Given the current state of the natural environment, it brings up a sense of fear in myself that can be hard to process while trying to promote Individuation and I imagine that I am not alone in that. Not until we can become confident in our individuality can complicated design issues be discussed with more ease.

5) Have you ever faced a painful part of your individuation process? If so what could society have done to have helped you?

I have faced a few painful parts of my individuation processes, but not with the same gusto that I give towards running from other painful parts of my individuation processes. The most painful aspects of that experience was when I felt unable to connect with people trying to help me because in the past I had run to others for help rather than facing the obstacles I built for myself first before getting support. Often times that happened because I couldn’t put a name to what was ailing me and I put myself in harms’ way to feel justified in my struggle. What this class has taught me is that when people know that you have love in your heart you are much more likely to believe they are there to help. Society as a whole could have encouraged me to ask questions from those who display confidence and make me feel good and promoted the importance of celebrating yourself. The beauty of it is that society did tell me those things but in a way that I didn’t understand until I experienced it, didn’t experience it, and then wanted to experience all of it.

6) When has the cultural norm helped and hurt you? What were the cultural norms/stereotypes that you are referring to?

The cultural norm of the alpha male has helped me be confident as a very sensitive person when my self-esteem was incredibly low and it gave me the opportunity to be more like myself. This norm has hurt me quite a bit because the opportunity to be more like myself was a trick of the rational mind, and in order to be who I really am I needed to develop emotional outlets to preserve that sensitivity and not grow into an alpha male, but the sensitive passionate person I am. Reflecting on how it has damaged me, I relied too much on social confirmation of my status as an alpha male and when people tried to connect with who I really am, sometimes I felt threatened in this pseudo-status and reflected who society wanted me to be. After realizing how overcompensation can obstruct perseverance in the individuation processes, I began to understand how fragile true confidence is if it is not reinforced with habitual integrity. I am beginning to see this cultural norm as a tremendous opportunity for personal growth, because it has allowed me to experience being an individual, not experience being an individual, and then want to experience it all the time.

7) I want to make honey, poems, music, farm, cook, cry, scream, and dance. And eat pizza.

Tea Tasting Lab

I have enjoyed Kotomi’s tea tasting labs so much over the past two quarters, but this tasting was definitely my favorite. I wanted to cry because I saw just how beautiful it all was. We tasted Jasmine black tea and silver needle white tea. I had a hard time describing the flavors of the tea until Natasha spoke about what the jasmine black tea tasted like to her. She said it smelled like the the woods by her grandma’s house in Woodstock, New York. When I was a kid I spent a lot of my time in the woods on my parents property in the neighboring town over – Saugerties, New York. As a kid I had really bad allergies and I would sneeze so much and pant with my tongue out so intensely that my parents tried pharmaceutical medication and it really didn’t work. I couldn’t smell. So when Natasha shared what the black jasmine tea smelled like, the next smell took me back to a place I hadn’t been in a long time – and the only way I could describe that smell was happy.

This week’s tasting lab was set up by Jessica with sourcing help from Kotomi and Kat who made a wildcrafted salad before class started. We had the privilege to enjoy posole served with red/green chiles and tortillas embellished with cilantro, cheese, and lime. The salad was comprised of spinach, kale, wood sorrel, chives, Oregon grape flowers, oregano, rosemary, olive oil and liquid aminos.

Jessica asked us about the importance in knowing the birthplace/history of our foods and how knowing this changes or doesn’t change our perception of them. I want to know the food comes from a good place when I don’t have time to intentionally seek out food with humble, humane origins. I also don’t want to know where the food comes from if I do not have time to intentionally seek out food and I need to eat. Reflecting on this has inspired me to invest more time in making sure I am not in a position where I need to seek out food, rather than eat a snack and prepare a meal. This also brings up the issue of needing to work, and have a roof over my head. This inspired the realization that if organization is essential to uphold the principles I want to sustain myself, then organization regarding my meals needs to be sustained by having snacks when planning meals.

Jessica also asked us what our favorite comfort food was and what a comfort food actually is. This question immediately brought up a favorable memory, which was interconnected with a visit to Eugene where an old romantic partner and I went to a mexican restaurant that she was notorious at during the late hours. We were treated with the same gusto we brought forth and it was a grand time, or at least remembered as such. I skipped over an older memory of a coming to age experience with my father and my uncle on Mount Elbert in Colorado where we had been hit with an unexpected storm when we had our stuff sprawled out after hiking a few thousand feet in elevation. I got to see my uncle and dad in action, running around having fun while they stapled down the tent, my dad inside holding it down cause otherwise the wind would have picked up the tent and tumbled down the mountain. As I ran around outside grabbing all of the gear without any protection to throw into the tent I got much colder than I anticipated. As I was inside the tent pretending to be as tough as the seasoned veterans, my dad noticed my inability to admit how cold I was and got spooned back to sense in a sleeping bag. After shaking off some hypothermia I had some burnt spanish rice and it was the best meal I’ve ever had. Reflecting back on that experience, I understand the importance of trusting the people you are with, and how significant it is that you surround yourself with people you trust. If you can’t be honest with yourself, how can people honestly help you? If I hadn’t run around picking up all of our items, we wouldn’t have made it. Just like if there was no cover to get warm under, we wouldn’t have made it.

This week Reid and Glenn overcame the obstacle of a power outage and continued leading seminar until the power came back on finished preparing the rest of the meal. This was a blessing in disguise because it gave us an excuse to lounge in the sun and enjoy the salad and bread as if it were all we had before enjoying the black tea and root veggie hash. Reid led us through a guided stretch where we embodied the recycled growth of a plant – beginning with tightening the muscles in a crouched position with arms wrapped around the knees, then extending upward and releasing the tension and stretching the arms. After releasing the extended arms from above the shoulders we created a circle in front of us to bear the fruit that we can share with others to let go, and return to a crouched position to start the cycle over again.

My last day in Port Townsend I wanted to create something for my family. My mother makes sourdough break and had some extra sourdough starter, so I thought I would try and make a pizza. After eating pizza before my bus ride to Port Townsend reading Tomatoland this quarter I thought it’d be great to create a pizza (that fit my brother’s allergy restrictions) and prove to myself pizza doesn’t need the sauce of slavery. I created a combination of the Codfish With Green Sauce recipe with the sauce from Cauliflower A L’Anita from Vibration Cooking. My sister has created pizzas and innovated new topping combinations at a few pizzerias she has worked at in the last few years and was a good resource to ask how to prepare the pizza base. After being advised to pre-cook the pizza base, I spread olive oil on the precooked sourdough base and applied the sauce I had made and added artichokes, two types of olives, feta cheese, red pepper corn, pepper, and salt. This pizza tasted better than any other pizza I have ever had before because it meant so much more to me than fermentation, chemistry, and rich ingredients.

Tasting Lab Makeup Week Four

In week four and five I was missing in action. My anxiety was rather volatile and acting up, and I was unable to be present for the entire class period for the first two weeks. If I had been sustaining my emotion through more interaction with others I feel like I could have been able to enjoy the remainder of Tuesday’s class, but I wasn’t, and I needed to leave and reflect. In posting a personal cooking lab I don’t mean to take away from the work that Alana and Annie did to prepare the pudding in week four and the work that went into the meal in week five by Spencer, Sjoukje, and others that helped. I have been struggling to experiment and create food recipes while having to coordinate borrowing fridge space from another person since I do not have one available to me in the dorms (vomit, greased stains, dead moths, and unmentionable stench deterred me from paying to borrow one from the school – no wonder RAD services weren’t inclined to clean them early in the quarter). Since then I traveled home to experiment with recipes with cold kept items and realized how simple cooking is when the recipes are pre-purchased and there is a reliably accessible space and resources. After being exposed to that, I hope to experiment when back at Evergreen with limited resources, and being able to make a meal that isn’t one dimensional with creativity as Vertemae Smart-Grosvenor has shown in her travels in Paris. Since then I have been incredibly excited to cook and have already found successful trade in ingredients and enjoyable shared experiences in the Sun Kitchen on campus. Upon visiting home to recharge and reconnect with my sense of self, I was able to use a real kitchen and created a Cinco De Mayo day meal with my brother. We started with a large bowl, parchment paper, a cutting board, a measuring cup, and an open stove top. We whisked enough hot water melted butter and corn masa together to dough up some homemade tortillas. We folded over the parchment paper and pressed out tortillas like a circus juggler (flipping tortillas on stove time) doing a cylinder and board act, except with an inflatable cylinder with a leak, until we were hunched over the cutting board with flattened circles ready to flop onto a burner. From there we ate some of gifted parsley from our neighbors with beans (unfortunately no sweet potatoes) and other store bought fixins to decorate our tacos with.

This meal was unlike any other meal prepared in class until this point. Meghan assisted Kat in making a delicious meal from foraged and local food. Kat’s “trust quiche” made from wild carrots, mushrooms, and local yard eggs was made even more delicious with the rhubarb and honey sauce. Egg crepes were also provided with wild-harvested greens. During the meal I talked with Spencer and Doug about John C. Lilly’s innovations and how he developed. After we ate, Kat took us for a walk in the woods and shared some of her knowledge regarding the wildcrafting opportunities on campus. As we walked along the trail we settled down on a native plant built garden and had a hypnosis session around a tobacco plant. As we walked from that spot back to the classroom we were to walk silently and reflect. As I tried to balance my breathing and be, I had convinced myself that I was actually being with nature, but I had just reached a place where I was able to be with myself and I happened to be in nature. Since that moment I have been thinking about how to be more connected with nature and be more in touch with my breath so I can be more easily and hopefully share that sense of being with non-human wildlife.

Linsey and Doug made this week’s meal which was dressed local greens and southern cornbread, not corn cake.

Linsey’s meal was heartfelt. She mentioned the origin of the recipe and her difficulty trying to learn from her mother who has just known what to throw together to make the cornbread for she had been making it for so long. Doug’s salad made me rethink how I went about making a salad. I had never thought about the tasteful mix of bitters and staple greens until the vinaigrette and pine nuts brought out the contrast. Doug asked the question that all of us don’t want to think about – Do you consider yourself a locavore? Several people in the room raised their hands and slowly one by one we had to wake up and smell the flowers. In that circle I knew everyone intentionally tried to eat with little impact. We are a food studies class! I had to smile when I thought about my love for avocado and rather than thinking how I could replace it in my diet I thought of where I could move to that would support my food cravings. During this process I reflected on how my lack of understanding of mixing a salad already provided an example for myself of how I should learn to enjoy the most from what my local environment provides before I endeavor to change my environment to adapt to my needs. Even though Oregon is the only thing between me eating local avocados, it was important for me to remember a greenhouse can always be built if my love for avocados survives my transition to being a true locavore.

Natasha and Meghan’s “three sisters soup”

Materials and Methods (ingredients and recipes): Market Spice Tea (black tea, orange, and cinnamon), 3 sisters soup (onions, garlic, bell peppers, and jalapeno sautéed in a large pot with coconut oil, salt, black pepper, paprika, cumin, cayenne, chili powder, then kidney beans, butternut squash, corn, vegetable broth and canned diced tomatoes added to the pot, brought to a boil, and then reduced to a simmer for an hour or two: no measurements – vibrational!)

Tasting Lab Questions in relation to weekly assigned texts: (Or in winter quarter’s language, “Inquiry for Critical Eating Studies, or The Mouth as Organ of Eating and Speaking”)

“Among some Native American tribes, the milpa system takes the name ‘three sisters,’ bringing together corn, beans, and squash.” (Shiva 2016: 52-53)

“As feminist historian Carolyn Merchant points out, this transformation of nature from a living, nurturing mother to inert, dead, and manipulable matter was eminently suited to the exploitation imperative of growing capitalism… as Merchant writes, ‘One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her entrails or mutilate her body.’” (Shiva 2016: 114)

1 Please consider as you eat the ‘three sisters’ chili: In the text, Shiva notes the importance of women in the growing and cultivating of food. In your experience, what roles do men and women play in cooking? In eating? What feminine vs. masculine paradigms exist in these activities? Does your experience of taste change as you eat food that you know is prepared by women, and grown organically (and partially locally)?

“In Hale’s Good Housekeeper bread has its own chapter… Bread is, indeed, singled out for praise in the preface: ‘The art of making good bread I consider the most important one in cookery, and shall therefore give it the first place.’” from Racial Indigestion by Kyla Tompkins (Tompkins 2012: 60)

“Alcott also retains and reworks Graham’s fetishization of the woman who bakes bread at home. In the chapter titled ‘Bread and Button-Holes’ Rose decides to learn the domestic arts. Says Dr. Alec,… ‘When you bring me a handsome, wholesome loaf, entirely made by yourself,… I’ll give you my heartiest kiss, and promise to eat every crumb of the loaf myself.’”

from Racial Indigestion by Kyla Tompkins (Tompkins 2012: 133)

2 Please consider as you eat the bread: How does the bread taste before you read the Tompkins quotes? Does your experience or taste change after eating it in the context of the fetishization of bread baking women?

Growing up with older parents and more traditional normatives my dad’s standard for his own cooking is low when he prepares them but often feels a sense of entitlement when it times to eat, for he is the breadwinner. That ’70s Show has an episode where Bob meets a woman, Joanne, in the grocery store after his wife left him and she makes him drop the handful of steaks and teaches him from a position of power. When Red and Kitty go to meet Bob’s new partner Red lets the stench of his grill entitlement seep into the shared space, and Joanne has no problem holding her ground and gains support by others who are tired of Red’s shit. My dad has never made a fuss about being the “grill master” but in his younger years the gender norms for cooking were imprinted in him and he is good with the grill, and ok with unseasoned beans and rice with smeared avocado and a tortilla. I have noticed in my limited experiences around chefs that the male chef has an increased likelihood of inputting charisma, swagger, and spunk into the meal even when it might not be appropriate. This, of course, is not true amongst all male chefs, the exception of whom that I have met are incredibly sweet and passionate people who are cooks, not male or female cooks.
I remember sharing the learning environment when these texts were discovered by Natasha. At the time I was learning to make bread, and it bothered me, and I can’t imagine how it must feel to be a woman who has enjoyed baking bread for some time. The texts from Racial Indigestion regarding misogyny in the kitchen makes my stomach turn. Reflecting on my trials of error baking bread and not kneading for long enough or giving enough time to let the dough rise, the taste of the bread changed and it seemed more like a doughy trial loaf I made rather than the bread Natasha made for that meal.