The Pun Also Rises(as seen in the North Adams Transcript)
"The Smell Of Fear"So the other day I was in a car with a friend who put on a CD that had sitar music. And I found that after roughly 5 seconds of listening to it, I had an intense craving for Indian food. I think most times in the past that I've heard sitar music, I've been in an Indian restaurant. And I really love Indian food, probably even more than I love a big corned beef sandwich on rye. I guess you could say I prefer the New Delhi to the Old Deli. (And that quick punchline is what we call a punjab, even if it doesn't curry your favor.) Still, it struck me as odd that music would make me hungry. There are some reactions that one expects from music. For example, one can hear a song that one associates with childhood, and enjoy some wistful nostalgic reflection. Or one can hear a song that one associates with an ex-lover, and then suffer in agony as memories wrack your body, causing you to fly into a murderous rage and start screaming and throwing all of your furniture around until finally you collapse into a pile of tears on the floor. Or maybe you can enjoy some wistful nostalgic reflection, although I guess it depends who you dated. Anyway, my point is that sound is not normally one of the five senses you associate with food. Taste, obviously, would be the big one (except for people who eat tofu), followed by smell, and then sight, and then I guess touch if you include texture. Sure, food makes a sound when you drop it, but sound is so unnecessary to food that I'd rank it behind the sixth sense: ESP. ESP is a commonly used abbreviation for Eclair Sensory Perception. Some lucky people are blessed with this gift, which allows them to know when eclairs or similar desserts have entered a room. They don't have to see them, or smell them, they just know. It doesn't always work though, which is why occasionally I'll be caught accosting random people and saying, "Hello, have any eclairs? No? Sorry." Given the dubious accuracy of ESP, most people stick to the other senses when attempting to track food. And this is why if I walk into a bakery, I will buy something. My sense of sight is overloaded with cases of confectionery at places such as Molly's Bakery, and the smell of fresh-baked baked goods pushes me over the edge as I end up having a nutritious breakfast of two apple fritters and four miniature pecan pies. Again. Worse yet, supermarkets have caught on to the fact that the smell of baking makes us buy things. Many supermarkets now have systems designed to produce the smell of fresh-baked bread, even when no baking is going on, just to give us a craving for their bakery products. And while this may be evil, at least it makes sense, because they want us to eat bread. What doesn't make sense, at least to me, is the trend of making absolutely delicious-smelling shampoos and soaps. There are only two possible explanations for this. The first is simply that companies have decided soap itself should smell and taste good, presumably targeting the demographic of kids who are going to swear so much that their parents continually wash their mouths with soap, so they need to have some soap around that tastes like papaya and peppermint. I think that's a pretty small demographic, so my fear is that the second explanation must be true, which is this: Soap and shampoo companies are trying to make people smell like food to promote cannibalism. Honestly, what other reaction could they possibly hope to be eliciting? Sometimes I'll be sitting on a couch with a female friend of mine, and think I smell food before I realize it's just their hair. Eventually, I'll just snap and go, "Mango and coconut? That smells delicious, maybe I'll EAT YOUR HEAD!!!" For your own safety, I recommend you follow the example of the aforementioned Indian food purveyors, and wrap your head to prevent the smells from escaping. I have a head-wrap now as well, so I have to admit that as trends go, it's disturbin'. ________________
All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |