Failed Psychogastronomy

It's easy for me to forget that food can have dire effects on us. More than something that is tasty, or something to eat because you are hungry, it heats you up, cools you down, energizes you, makes you sleepy, gives you a headache, burns your cheeks, as well as plenty else. There are also all the long-term health effects diet may have, but I am talking about effects at an immediate level of sensation, emotion, and bodily helplessness. Taking a cue from bringing to light the abject aspect of digestion, I want to conceptually explode the body and the subject further. Rather than thinking of food as having effects upon the self or the body, but I would like to think of food's entry itself as a beginning of these identities. Let us take the adage "you are what you eat" to an extreme.

Can language do this? Can subject, object, and verb be arranged to bring about their undoing?

I bring this up because of a fairly mundane drink of yogurt, water, and honey. It was just what I needed at the time I drank it; it was soothing and cooling (both in the sense of temperature and otherwise). For a while it transformed what I could and could not sense. It would be nice to place cognition aside from this externalizing gustatory scene, but I'm afraid it too bends and is bent by eating. I began to write the recipe for this drink, which led somehow into reading lassi recipes online. My half-cognition of what happened recognized itself through a descriptor in one of these recipes: "soothing." This validated my feeling that the drink had brought about a change. Which brings me to trying to write this and having difficulty remembering anything beyond the words I read in that recipe somewhere (and I can’t find the recipe either). This doesn’t make the case for what I was saying about cognition at all. Damn.

Honey Lassi

1/2 cup yogurt
1 cup water
2 teaspoons honey

In a glass drip honey over yogurt. Use honey-covered spoon to mix together yogurt and honey as thoroughly as possible. Without removing spoon, add water. Stir until most of the honey is dissolved from the spoon.

This is a tea commercial and the slogan is "taste the secret."

Generally I poo-poo herbal tea.  When I do drink herbal teas, it is ginger or chamomile.  I think this is because I don't have for it one of those yet-unnamed "way in which food compels," which I'm tempted at the moment to call exoticization.  But I'll let the terminology simmer for now.  Instead I'll illustrate the appreciation I don't have for herbal tea with a scenario.

You're in Starbucks.  There are too many things there, but to simplify the situation you could get coffee or you could get tea.  Coffee seems the safe option, as they are in the business of coffee, after all.  If you get tea it will probably come in a bag and be brought stewing in lukewarm water.  But you're not after fine or well-brewed tea.  You're not here to be picky and get what you expect.  You get some herbal infusion full of arcane-sounding fruits, herbs, and spices and named after some far-flung locale.  It's not that you care particularly what's in it or what it's called--these are all just allusions to what you want.  You put your nose to the steam swirling from the cup and feel like you're privvy to a secret.  The aroma taps you into the ephemera of some other life lost to nearly everyone else.  They're all drinking coffee.

That whole scenario is a lie.  It's the addressed who leads "some other life lost to nearly everyone else," which, through an imagined appreciation of tea, I wish to access in the same manner.

Ginger Tea

This is very much not the ginger tea at Koshy's, which is steeped.  Maybe it would have been more appropriate to call this "ginger chai," but then some might have gotten the impression that it's like a Starbucks Chai Latte, but with more ginger.  A more accurate name such as "boiled ginger tea" just sounds nasty to me despite the fact that I boil my tea to death just about every morning these days.

2 small slices fresh ginger

2 teaspoons Assam CTC

1 cup water

1/2 cup milk

3 teaspoons sugar or 2 1/2 teaspoons honey

Combine water, milk, and fresh ginger in a small saucepan and bring to a boil on high heat.  When milky water boils it will foam.  At this point quickly add tea and remove from heat to prevent it from boiling over.  After 40 seconds put saucepan back on heat and boil once more.  Immediately strain into a mug.  Remove ginger from strainer, rinse off, and plop into mug.  Stir in sugar.  Drink immediately.

a nasty concoction

I used to
sneak into their kitchen
at night to concoct
an ineffectual remedy
for an intangible ailment
warm milk
chamomile
nutmeg
vanilla
I used two
spoons of honey

Cold, Hard Proof that it's Summer (well, not so hard)

Even if it's not summer.

one bottle lemonade (make it yourself, for all I care)

five strawberries

2 tablespoons rose water

[eight cloves]

Drink a small glass of lemonade. Slice five strawberries into quarters (yes, after removing the leafy top) and put them in the bottle of lemonade. Add two tablespoons (cap-fulls) rose water. [Bring 1/2 cup water to boil. Add eight cloves to water. Continue boiling until water is reduced to two tablespoons. Pour this into the bottle of lemonade.] Serve in a glass with ice.