Random ruminations on food

Sometimes, it is the simplest things, executed beyond perfection, to heights that you never even imagined existed, that grab your attention. I refer here to a bread pudding that I had at TRU last night. Part of a dessert collection, as they refer to it, my first dessert course, after the palate cleanser, of course, included a frozen lemon pudding thing, and a little teacup of bread pudding. These seemed to be fairly unremarkable items, and I must say that the lemon custard was, while not unimpressive, certainly not impressive.

The bread pudding was another story. This was a confection with little of the bombastic taste that so many desserts rely on to wow the diner. Instead, it was light, to the point of almost seeming without taste. Now, I do not say that it was tasteless. Rather, the taste required you to look for it on your tongue. It tasted like any other bread pudding that I have ever tasted, but better. What came to mind as an analogy was the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny. Every other version of bread pudding I had ever tasted were shadows of this. There is a single true bread pudding, and while it is impossible to claim that this was the one, it was certainly a deeper shadow of the central bread pudding than any other I have had previously.

For some reason, it has just occurred to me how Platonic the Amber Chronicles are. I wonder why the obvious never struck me before.

On another food-related note, I recently had a thought about foie gras. There are two classic methods of preparing this food for consumption. The first is the chilled mousse, the second is a seared block. It occurs to me that these represent two extremes of a philosophy of food. A chilled foie gras mousse gives the person who eats it a certain purity of experience, in both texture and flavour. The mousse, being a mousse, should be consistently smooth and uninterrupted in the mouth. The sensation is similar to spreading butter over your tongue. The taste sensation is also quite singular and uncomplicated. There is a buttery smoothness to the taste that is oddly pure and smooth, for all its complexity. Overall, the experience is one of unity, smoothness, consistency.

Seared foie gras is quite completely different. The aforementioned texture and taste still exist, of course. To this is added a contrast. The seared surface is slightly crusty, resulting both in it being rather difficult to cut in an elegant manner, and in it sort of exploding in your mouth. The crust gives way to the butter of the inside bursting into your realm of sensation. The saltiness of the crust too cuts a sharp contrast to the almost sweet flavour of foie gras. Seared foie gras is, for me, a study in contrasts, and it is these contrasts that make it such a shocking pleasure to eat. Seared foie gras elicits eyes widened in pleasure and exclamations of joy. A good foie gras mousse, on the other hand, closes one's eyes in appreciation.

Crapshoot

The idea of one's afterlife being determined by what one does in life bothers me. It seems quite unreasonable to judge a person by what he has done in life, particularly since there is no clear set of rules. Oh, there are rules, but these are set by other people. There does not seem to be a compelling reason for me to believe that what everybody else in society is telling me accurately reflects the standards by which I will be judged in the hereafter.

We are told from youth that there are a great number of rules that we must follow, if we desire to attain rewards and avoid punishment. I'm not going to bother now with the rules that govern social behaviour exclusively. I doubt that table manners will be a major factor in the judgement of my immortal soul. There are many rules regarding social behaviour that may be considered to involve morality as well. Going about slaughtering human beings on sight will get you arrested and thrown in prison. This particular consequence is an attempt by society to regulate its members and ensure that nobody runs around killing its productive citizens. Murder also may be considered to have moral consequences. It seems clear that we are taught that to kill another human is an immoral act. The more religious would call it a sin, or something to that effect. The question is, who decided that it is a sin to kill human beings?

Certainly it is clearly prohibited in the Bible, and many other religious texts, but these are suspect as representations of the word of God, or whichever deity is relevant. The authenticity of a historical text may be verified to some extent, but the authenticity of a religious text cannot. At least in our modern understanding of religion. Deities are transcendental beings, beyond the human experience. So most humans will never have a direct interaction with a deity. As such, any religious text must be taken on faith. Faith is tremendously problematic, and I'll get to it in a little bit.

I think it's fairly clear that innate moral objections to acts such murder are definitely not innate. Mass murderers and serial killers are human, despite what popular culture and overwrought family members of victims may claim, and they have no compunction over murder. Soldiers in war kill, and are able to justify their actions by pointing to a flag. Move back just a little bit in human history, and we find many paragons of virtue who would not blink at the wholesale slaughter of their enemies. The killing of another human being is not something that runs counter to innate human sentiment. Moral objections to such acts are cultural and social. We are told that certain acts are bad, and after a while, we start to believe it. Guilt is not something that we are born with.

So there is nothing encoded in us that tells us, in detail what to do. That would appear to be the best method for a deity to give people a set of rules, short of personally appearing and giving a briefing every now and then. If we know what we should, without any input from society, then chances we would go and do it. And if we choose not to, then we willingly decide to go against divine will. As things stand, we do not know. I personally have no idea if theft or adultery or murder is going to count against me in the afterlife, assuming that one exists. So the only reason I do not do these things is because of the social conditioning that I have been subject to my entire life. This is a good thing, don't get me wrong. I believe that restricting the behaviour of the masses is crucial to maintaining the kind of society I like. This does not aid me in deciding whether I will go to Heaven or Hell. If I believe that the Bible is accurate, then they will. But I cannot say with any real conviction that the Bible is definitely, without a doubt, completely accurate. What if the whole gig has been a scam by the Devil? Heretical, I know, but not impossible. After all, the documents upon which the Bible was based were not written by Christ himself. Humans wrote them. And we don't exactly have a great track record with resisting the machinations of demons. So perhaps the entire premise of much of Christian regulation of human behaviour has been wrong. Maybe we were encoded with the right thing to do all along, and we are supposed to be raping and stealing and fighting and all that. Maybe we have been manipulated into thinking that resisting the natural impulses to do what is divinely encoded into our souls is the way to ascend to Heaven, when in fact it is the exact opposite.

Now, I don't actually believe that the Bible was written as a joke. I don't. So don't send me emails highlighting your failure to read what I typed.

Without a known code to govern my behaviour, it seems unfair and unreasonable to either reward or punish me for actions that I did not know were approved of or not. While ignorance of the law is not an excuse, at least the information is freely available to anyone who cares to find out. In the matter of judging my life, I have no means of learning what the true code of conduct is. I can guess at which one of the offerings is right, if any at all. So what we have is a system where you are hauled into court for wrongdoings under a legal code that is only known to the judge. Sounds a bit arbitrary to me. Similarly, it seems unfair to receive a reward for accidentally stumbling into the right thing to do.

An identical problem arises with choosing a religion. Assuming that there is some deity or deities, and we are answerable to them, how do we know which one is real? Let's say that believing in the right god will get you into heaven, and believing in the wrong one will land you in hell. Hypothetically speaking, if the true god is some pagan god that has been eliminated by Christianity, then we're all going to hell. In a more contemporary consideration, if the true god is among the ones in current worship, then how does a person discover this? If a person does end up choosing a religion, then this chosen religion will most likely either be the one that his parents or friends believe in, or the one with the most persuasive recruiters.

In the former case, I would be condemned to eternal agony because I happened to be born in a family with the wrong religion. Seems to me that the problem there lies in the god, for placing me there, and not in myself, who has no choice in the matter.

In the latter case, the problem is that it is impossible to choose a belief. You cannot sit down and decide to believe something else, since you would then not truly believe it. So if you are persuaded and charmed by an emissary of a false god, and the recruiters for the true god are simply not capable, then you are condemned because of the competence, or incompetence of others. This is eminently unfair.

Of course, the reverse also applies for rewards.

So we find that our eternal afterlife is a complete crapshoot. Great.

This is pretty remarkable.

I started reading Anna Karenina online this afternoon at about two. It's quite amazing what you can find online for free these days. Anyway, so I got into it, but thought that I would stop to head to class at about 3. I had somehow persuaded an unemployed friend of mine to read it at the same time as me, so we were chatting and discussing the book as we went. After a bit, I got a little hungry, so I got out of my chair to go grab something to eat, and realised that it was dark outside. Apparently, I had been reading until about 11 pm.

Bloody ridiculous.

Arbitrary, Moody, Unreasonable

What are the ways I can parse these?

Alphabetical.

Rhythm of the ending consonant.

Separating common meanings to different ends.

Descending pitch to roll off the tongue pleasingly.

Least syllables in the middle.

Beginning vowels at the ends.

People don't understand. The above are the considerations I ran through in the two or three seconds of the breath I drew in as I composed the description. Layer as I might, people don't catch it. I find it intolerable at times. It seems that what I think of as perfectly logical completely fails to register as the same with others. Why do I detest people so much? Largely because so little thought goes into their interaction with me, in particular. I have never found someone who builds and reads conversation on a similar wavelength to me. Each conversation I do have with people is always a mere tiny portion of what strains at my tongue. Nothing I say has its intended effect, or is heard and understood as I mean it, so I so frequently cannot bring myself to bother. And when I grind things down to what is understandable, so little is left of the original intent that it might as well be someone else speaking. As it is. I push against the insides of me, but all that accomplishes is jabbing others. So I reach instead to push at the insides of my skull. At least in that realm, I avoid letting my shadows invade others. Safe. Schizophrenic? I suppose I'll learn that eventually. Maybe I am simply being arrogant. Hubris is a known flaw of humanity, after all. Perhaps it is not that others do not hear everything that is going on when I speak, but that nobody cares to hear it. That is a distinct possibility. After all, what am I but a person who feels no obligation to be nice to others. I am a nice guy, I think. I just don't find that a compulsion exists to be nice to people whom I do not want to be nice to. I do not care what others think of me, beyond that it is not strong enough to incite violence against my physical person, and so I see no reason for anyone to care what I think of them, beyond a reassurance that I will not in the foreseeable future pick up a sledgehammer and pound their skulls in. I lost all faith in the reliability of friendship a long time ago, yet still manage to lose a little more with each passing day. Independence is so underrated. When everything slides off your person with all the ease of barbed wire on bare skin, the only thing you lose is blood.

And that is what I wanted to say, but ground down to an observation of behaviour.