My Comrades, the Taste Buds

The other day in chemistry, we talked about seawater, which is just 1% salt, yet still enough to kill you due to its relatively high concentration of isoelectrons.  A sense of betrayal twitched in my esophagus -- salt, my reliable friend, has always had the potential to make me into a shriveled-up cadaver.  Lovely.

Nevertheless, I really like salt.  Saltiness is probably the most glorious taste, followed closely by the refreshing chill of watermelon cubes and the bursting sweetness of plump Korean clementines.  Without salt, Hot Cheetos would be all pain and no pleasure.  Kimchi would just be peppery, fermented cabbages and radishes.  Mapo tofu and other soft tofu dishes would become spicy mush.  Eggs would be tasteless flabs of potential chickens.  And Gloria would be sad.

So there's salt, and eggs, and I'm pretty sure I could live a considerable amount of time simply relying on a skillet and those two ingredients.  But I assure you that I do have a wide range of taste.  I like sticking anchovies into tangerines.  I used to have an obsession with raw brussel sprouts from my neighbor's garden.  My friend recently asked the social media world for "the most delicious meal in the world," and I came up with an eclectic blend of raw oysters, watermelon...and three different egg dishes.

Aside from salty entrees, I have my particulars for sweets. I love oranges and grapes, but I hate orange- and grape-flavored candy. Tylenol and cough syrup are vomit-inducingly sweet, but I delight in devouring fruity cough drops throughout the year, sick or not. And then there’s limes. Even before my infatuation with lime green began, I had a strong bias for all things lemon/lime-flavored -- Sprite, yellow and green Skittles, yellow and green Sour Patch Kids, yellow and green M&M’s, etc (the last one was a lie; my taste buds aren’t acute enough to detect the differences in candy dyes). I don’t often eat actual limes, but no bowl of pho is complete without a subliminal squirt of citrus.

I was recently disillusioned at one of those amazing soda machines of wonder (see: Noodles, Meatheads). The brilliant artificial coloring of their Lime Fanta cajoled me to fill my cup to the brim, but I was speedily broken out of my citrus reverie by the actual taste. Please, if you ever have a strong desire to judge the quality of limes, do not base it upon this sorry excuse for a soda, unless it is heavily diluted by the more appetizing flavors of Strawberry and Raspberry Fanta.

Moral of the story: Even the holiest of foods can disappoint.  But at the core of it all, salt and limes rule the earth.