Cilantro and the sense of taste

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: May 2010

My mom has a large number of gardens, which includes some crop plants as well. Every so often, I ask for certain plants to be included for my own use.

One year, I asked for cilantro. Well, technically, the plant is called coriander, but I think of it as cilantro. This plant has the odd distinction of providing two spices, known as coriander and cilantro. Coriander (the spice) is the ground up seeds of the plant, while cilantro is the leaves of the plant. As for why the different names, it comes down to which culture learned about which use of the plant. Coriander is the proper English name, while cilantro is the proper Spanish name. And the Mexicans, who as you know speak Spanish, love cilantro. Their cooking is full of these tasty leaves. Coriander is used much more by other cultures, mainly the ones near where the plant originated, in the strip from southern Europe to southwestern Asia. It’s frequently used for pickling, for instance. India uses both parts in its cooking, but then, Indian cuisine’s full of spices so it’s not at all surprising they tried all the parts of the plant.

There’s also an interesting aspect to cilantro. A small portion of people who eat it think it tastes like soap. Others, like me, don’t find anything soapy about it and enjoy it thoroughly. I found a well-written article on the subject on the NY Times site. There’s a high likelihood that there’s a genetic component, but it may also be cultural. Genetic causes to differing taste buds are pretty common, actually. There’s something called Supertasters, people who have a genetic quirk that makes them taste a wider range of flavors than other, especially in the bitter ranges. They tend to hate foods like broccoli and Brussels sprouts because they can taste certain unappealing compounds the rest of us don’t notice. So if your kid really can’t stand certain vegetables, they may not just be picky, it may actually taste horrible to them.

Cilantro’s oddity isn’t tied to taste buds, though. And it’s not tied to supertasting. Instead, it seems to be a scent problem. Cilantro leaves do release a scent containing compounds that are also found in soap, aldahydes. And if that’s the primary part of the scent you notice, the whole thing will taste of soap, even though the leaves contain far more compounds than just aldahydes.

Human taste is highly dependent on scent, actually. If you’ve ever noticed how food tastes differently when you’ve got a stuffed nose, that’s the cause. Your taste buds aren’t affected by the illness, but your sense of smell is. Up to 80% of the taste of food comes from smell rather than taste buds.

Well, at least for normal people.

You see, I have very little sense of smell. I catch a scent every so often, but otherwise, nothing. Well, there are some scents I can quickly detect: the ones I’m allergic to. I’ve got scent-based allergies to cigarette smoke and one (or more) of the chemical compounds found in most cleaning products and perfumes. They give me headaches. I have to do scent tests for any cleaning product I buy, even if it’s billed as “Scent Free”, and a large percentage of them give me an instant headache right after the test (which involves, well, sniffing it closely). I tend to only stick to the Green and Natural types of products, since they tend to lack whatever chemical it is I have issues with. Just walking down the aisles in the stores that stock such things can give me a headache. In some stores, just walking by the aisle, not even going down it, is enough.

As far as I can tell, I’ve always had this lack of a sense. Most people have scent-based memories (such as the classic “Apple Pie baking, reminds me of Grandmother” you see in a lot of media), but I’ve got taste-based memories instead. Now, my sense of taste isn’t activated as often as the sense of smell is for other people, but still, I can remember visiting Fort McHenry when I was young partly because of the excellent tuna sandwiches we packed for lunch that day (and how often do you remember what you ate one day more than a decade later). Because I’m lacking a sense of smell, my sense of taste became much stronger in response. This is quite common, actually. Many blind people become very good at hearing, and deaf people at seeing. But this does mean that my perception of food is different than other people.

I suspect it’s a large part of why I learned to cook, and what I choose to cook. Cooking’s not something my family is really big on. I’m largely self-taught, and have been cooking my own meals since I was tall enough to reach the stove properly. But, because of my strong sense of taste, I’m not content with pre-packaged food like many other people are. I find them boring, really. They’re geared for people with a standard sense of taste, aka highly scent based, and the taste components are, well, lacking. Plus, I can taste some of the preservatives they use, and just like Brussels sprouts are for supertasters, I really don’t like them.

Speaking of Brussels sprouts, I actually find a lot of my favorite foods are ones that others don’t care for. I’m quite fond of Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and vegetables in general. I like liver and onions (though I don’t care for caramelized onions), tofu and fish, and avocados and cilantro. There’s also a whole bunch of commonly liked foods I just find so boring that I can’t stand them, such as burgers and cake. Burgers almost always taste like cardboard, unless they’re very well seasoned, and cake is just a mass of carbs with no nutritional value. That’s one of the other odd aspects of my taste buds: I can taste nutritional value. Well, it’s not so much the taste buds as the bloodstream. For whatever reason, I can tap into the information provided by my body as it processes the foods to get a idea of how well certain foods are satisfying my nutritional needs. (My dad can do this too.) So I actually eat a rather healthy diet, full of veggies and low in sweets (which rarely provide much nutrition). I try very hard to have at least one or two vegetables in every meal.

This actually makes certain standard American meals tough for me, namely picnics. There is very little I actually like eating on the standard picnic menu. Hotdogs and hamburgers are really boring. The salads tend to be boring as well (iceberg lettuce should not be used as 90% of a salad, really), relying entirely on the dressing for flavor. Potato salad is almost always made with mustard, which I hate, and there’s just too many sugars in fruit for me to want to make a meal of it. Oh, and chips and soda, well, you know they have little nutritional benefit. I’ve always eaten really lightly when I’ve been at a picnic (or an event serving picnic food), more out of social obligation than anything.

But that’s a bit off topic, let’s talk cilantro again! As I mentioned above, cilantro’s soapy taste seems to be scent based. I don’t do scents. This is why I really like cilantro. I don’t detect anything soapy about cilantro myself, actually. Instead, it’s a really pleasant spice that acts similar to parsley, but has a zestier flavor that goes really well with the other things I tend to like cooking. My personal cuisine has a very large Mexican influence, partly because a large number of my favorite veggies fall in that cuisine (avocados, tomatoes, jalapenos, and the like) and partly because I’m rather fond of spicy food. Spiciness is another flavor element that has very little to do with smell, so it comes through just fine for me.

I actually don’t mind not having a sense of smell. Some of it’s the “I don’t know what I’m missing” element, I’m sure, but so many of my favorite foods are ones that so many people don’t like partly from their senses of smell. So I’m more of the opinion that they’re the ones who don’t know what they’re missing.

And the taste of food doesn’t change one bit when my nose is clogged, which is awesome.

  

Lets base our architecture around false ideas of the past! Sounds like fun!

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Location Taken: Washington DC
Date Taken: October 2008

Did you know one of the DC Metro stations has its entrance under a building?

The Federal Triangle Metro Station comes out under the Ariel Rios building, home of the Environmental Protection Agency. That was a lot of capitalization. At least I didn’t got acronym crazy like I could have.

It’s a lovely building, so instead of leaving the pillared area housing the exit for the station via the normal route (straight out to the street), I instead walked through the building in the direction I was heading, which was south to the Smithsonian. You can see the National Museum of American History through the arch in this picture. It was undergoing renovation at the time, so there were fences and the standard sort of construction stuff all around it. I was heading to the building next to it, the National Museum of Natural History. I know, me, go to a museum focusing on science and all the other awesome history they lump into “Natural”? Never. Ok, more like, often.

Washington DC is a bit of an odd city. For one thing, there are no tall buildings. The tallest thing in the city is the Washington Monument, and that’s quite deliberate. The downtown areas are full of pillars and domes and white marble in a blatant imitation of the Romans. Mind you, the Romans actually painted their buildings and statues rather than leave them white. The paint just had all flaked off by the time people started idealizing the Romans, a trend which was in full swing in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s – right at the time Washington DC was being planned. I mean, when people are building houses that look like a broken Roman column or having parties where everyone dressed up in togas or as pillars or whatever they thought was properly “Roman”. (I learned that in my Art History classes. I had an awesome Art History teacher.) So Washington DC, as well as a lot of other cities built during that time, ended up full of white columns, imitating a false idea of Roman ideals. Here’s a comic that shows the concept far better than I can, even if they didn’t realize that it was older than the Victorians.

Makes me wonder what future people will think of us based on our architecture, and how much of what we’re making will last properly. Modern architecture is more likely to build something slated to last 100 years rather than 1000 years, after all. So who knows what the famous cities will look like in 500 years, when all our stuff is as old as the Renaissance is to us. The neo-Roman cities like DC probably will have weathered the time (though they may not have weathered us humans) since, even if they got certain facts wrong, they are at least based off of buildings that stuck around to one degree or another for millenia. Pretty good track record, if I say so myself.

  

Beautiful Border

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Location Taken: Thousand Islands, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010

I took this photo from the back seat of our car, while we were crossing the appropriately named Thousand Islands Bridge between the US and Canada. This is a series of bridges going between islands on the St. Lawrence River. This particular bridge isn’t the one with the border, but is the next one further north. Still, it solidly feels part of that nebulous “not quite in either country” zone you find near border crossings.

I first went to Canada as an adult, when I was, what, 23 or so? Before that, I had not left the country. For most people in the US, leaving the country just isn’t something you do. Aside from a few areas on the west coast and a small handful of cities such as Detroit, the borders between the US and its neighbors are pretty rural. And we’re such a large nation that leaving it usually requires a lengthy trip, and frequently an airplane. In general life, staying in the US is solidly easier than leaving. It’s no wonder so many Americans are rather iffy on their world geography. It just doesn’t affect their day-to-day life at all, so they have no reason to use the knowledge. It’s only oddballs like me who pay attention.

I’m more knowledgeable than the average American about geography. Most of that’s temperament, and the natural tendency to love and understand maps I have. I also love learning about other societies, other geology, other weather patterns, all the sorts of things that actually do lead you to looking outside the US. I’m also fond of a lot of foreign media, especially that from Japan. I’m quite fond of Japanese video games, music, and anime, after all. Still, even then, it can be a little challenging to remember that other parts of the world act differently than what I’m used to. Though in some cases, I’m more jealous than anything. For instance, I would love it if we actually had decent public transportation here. But, alas, we’re both a very large country and a very car-centered society, neither of which encourages the government to spend money on awesome stuff like trains.

The State system’s a bit of an odd one if you think about it. On some levels, each state acts separately, with its own laws, policies, taxes, etc. But even with all the differences you can find, each state still feels somewhat similar. Crossing the border between states is barely noticeable. Just a sign on the side of the road, and possibly a speed limit change. Oh, and perhaps a bump as you switch to a different schedule for road maintenance, with one side being much newer than the other. It’s nowhere near the event of an international crossing. There, you’re checked out, you present your passport, and so on. It’s really not that long, but it feels long.

And yet, both borders are figments of our collective imagination, lines drawn on a piece of paper that we all agree to pretend matters. There’s no line drawn along every border in real life. If you were walking in a non-inhabited region, you wouldn’t realize you crossed a border (unless you knew exactly where you were at every moment, of course). Such funny things we humans are, making imaginary lines matter in our lives.

  

Memories of a Past World

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I wasn’t really coming up with a good idea for this post, so lets go with one of my backup ideas: featuring one of my Minecraft worlds.

This one is one of my oldest and most developed worlds. I created it right after biomes were introduced to Minecraft, on Halloween 2010, less than a month after I started playing. Biomes are different types of regions such as deserts and forests and jungles. Before this update, Minecraft just had one biome, so every part of each Minecraft world looked about the same. There was some variation, but compared to what we have now, it pales in comparison. I’m probably not going to feature my very first world since it really didn’t have much going for it, plus I was learning and thus made some very odd structures.

I think of this world as “World 5″, since that was its original name. When it was made, you could only have 5 worlds, and if you wanted another, you deleted an older one. Now, you can have as many as you want, and can name them what you want.

My main house on this world is a lighthouse. It even has working lights, sort of. Sure, there is an actual mechanism that properly alternates revealing and blocking off the lights on each side, but, um, you can’t see it from the ground. For whatever reason, the very top of it doesn’t change properly. This whole world has issues with loading areas, probably because it is a rather old world and so much has changed.

For instance, this desert has snow on it because it’s now classified as taiga, and the snow covered trees below now bear the characteristic color of a dry desert. I think the ice there is in fact recently melted. The landscape hasn’t changed, but the biomes got rearranged, and the weather and leaf colors changed with them.

 

Which is a bit of a pity, since I had been planning on building a chateau under those trees, a place devoted to the joy of snow. It’s a lovely little island in the middle of an ice-covered lake, after all. But now, the colors are completely wrong, and that chateau will never get built.

Speaking of unfinished projects, this was one of my more ambitious projects: a giant tree. I built it all the way up to the height limit, and was using optical tricks to make it appear like it went even higher. Now, I wouldn’t need those tricks. The world height got doubled. If I built a tree to the top of the height cap now, it would solidly dwarf this one. A few other things: the branches are odd because I built it before you could use shears to pick up leaves and place them where you wanted, so all those leaves come from growing a tree on a dirt scaffold, then I connect the bottoms of all those trees together. It took a long time, too, since this was before bonemeal was introduced, which grows trees instantly. Oh, and the smaller trees in the foreground look odd because they came into being as “trees” rather than the “Oak”, “Pine”, “Birch”, and “Jungle Tree” varieties we now have, and these “trees” leaves grabbed from all the new types rather than choosing one and sticking to it. There are four different types of leaves on those trees, and they drop different saplings, even, so I can grow birch trees in this world despite never seeing one in the wild.

I still like this world, since I’ve spent so much time in it, and it has some rather lovely features. I’ve got a house in the caves behind this waterfall, for instance. But it bears the scars of its age, and many features are missing entirely. I stop back in for the occasional photo, but I’ve retired this world. I now work on other worlds, though no other has gotten quite as much attention as this one did.

Still, every so often, I build something new for this place. Like a farm, and a place to keep my livestock.  It just feels right to do so.  It helps me remember how things can change.

  

Illuminating Illuminations

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Time Painted: April 2012

It’s been an illuminating week. And if you groaned at that, congratulations, you know the other meaning of “Illumination”! If you check the dictionary definitions, they tend to just stick to all the “having light shed upon the subject” type definitions, with the occasional definition that includes the metaphor usage as well. (“I found the poem illuminating; it caused me to think about things I had not thought of before”) But, there’s also an art form known as illumination. It is the combination of text and decoration, with the decoration supporting the text rather than the other way around. It’s an ancient art, with some of the most famous examples, such as the Book of Kells being created over a thousand years ago. It was an expensive process, both in time required and materials required, so only important books, such as bibles, were illuminated.

A large part of the expense was that a very very large proportion of illuminated manuscripts involved gold leaf. In fact, the strictest definitions of this type of illumination require the use of gold. I suspect this is part of where the name came from, since metallic leaf and paint reflect light, and thus actually CAN illuminate something if circumstances allow.

Modern illumination is tied very closely to modern calligraphy. In fact, the book I’ve been learning illumination from covers both calligraphy and illumination, and focuses far more on the calligraphy. Which is perfectly logical, since the emphasis of an illuminated piece is on the text, while the decoration merely backs it up. Knowing how to make the text both decorative and readable is important.

I’ve produced two illuminated pieces, plus two related border plates, this week. The image above is the most recent. Tammy is my psychologist, who has been helping get my brain to the point that I stop being so hermitty and start trying to sell my art and the like. I felt like doing another illuminated piece Wednesday night, and was trying to decide on a word when the proto-piece combined with the fact I had an appointment the next day to say “Let’s make a present!” It was an interesting experiment, since I chose the decoration based on what I knew of her tastes, which lead to a very different feel than if I made it using my tastes.

Time Painted: April 2012

This piece (I know, bonus art!) was my first piece, where I was testing mechanics more than anything else. It says “Sharayah Mail” and has duct tape in the corners because it’s a more functional piece. I live with my parents, I’m not the one to get the mail, and Dad’s a wee bit bad about telling me I got mail. This has lead to one too many times of my being late on a bill purely because I didn’t find it in time. So I made a mailbox. It’s probably the fanciest cardboard mailbox this side of Topeka, if I say so myself. I didn’t want to just stick the box on the wall as it was, since that would not have been that appealing, so I made art for it. The black notch on top is where some cardboard’s missing, and I folded over the piece of the art paper that would have covered the missing spot to help secure the decorative panel better. I also made two almost identical side panels to cover the sides (the back is against the wall, the top is open, and the bottom is below eye level), seen below.

Time Painted: April 2012

I’ve already learned some nifty things about this art form, and I’ll probably continue making these pieces. I’d talk more about those concepts (like why erasing your guidelines BEFORE painting the piece is a good idea…) but that would be a whole other post worth of text and, well, I can make it into a full post easily.

At least these pieces all (sort of) follow the rule of having gold, since I broke out my metallic gold paint for this. It’s not gold leaf, but it is shiny. I am oddly proud of this.