Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail

Chapter 9: The Garlic Sang

That passage celebrates taste, I think, though Rat and Mole are savoring the food through their other senses, too— something we all do, particularly with smell, whether we are aware of it or not. For it's not easy to separate taste from smell, as you realize when you have a cold. Food is flat and tasteless when your nose is stuffy. Or perhaps you've noticed that when your'e very thirsty and glug something down rapidly, a glass of lemonade, you dont' really taste the drink (after its first contact with your tongue) until the final swallow and air floods back into your nose and throat. Till then the lemonade might just as well be water. If you really want to savor a drink you take small sips, as with an after-dinner liqueur or brandy, and this allows your nose, with its experience, to enrich your tongue. For the tongue alone distinguishes only four broad tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, and salt; but coupled with smell our tongues have infinite discrimination.

You might have fun, as I did in a biology class, finding out where on your tongue these different tastes are, for though each taste bud picks up its own particular responsibility, the buds are not distributed randonly, but like-buds cluster together. In class we put something bitter on the end of a toothpick and touched all over out tongues till we'd found the total area that responded to "bitter" and then we marked it on a tongue map. We did the same for the other three tastes. I've found this knowledge a great help in taking nasty medicine. And talking about tongues: I don't suppose I need ro recommend that you examine yours in a mirror. It's a fascinating study, especially the less noticed underside which reminds me of the innards of a clam, only more colorful.

Both in writing and actual living I feel the sense of taste is a poor cousin to the "more important" senses of sight and sound. You might argue that this is natural, since we don't use our tasting equipment nearly as much as our eyes and ears, unless our profession is tea-taster, wine-taster, or cheese-taster and if one had to give up one of those three senses, there'd be no question which would lose out. Also, our eyes have to rest on something, unless they are closed or it is absolutely dark, and similarly our ears are rarely if ever in a situation of total silence. So we are constantly exposed to sight and sound, whereas our tongues for the most part rest quietly agianst the roofs of our mouths, and I've never noticed that my roof has any exotic or interesting taste. (What does spit taste like, anyway? Does it seem tasteless merely because we're so used to it?) Oh, yes, we talk. But then our tongues are bathed in equally tasteless air.

Even though we don't use our taste sense as much as the others, I think its neglect goes deeper than this. Maybe it has to do with an old— and false— religious split between the mind, or spirit, and the body. It was better to be "of the spirit" than "of the flesh," and so the senses that smacked more of the body— touching, tasting, smelling— were considered more base than seeing and hearing, where there is at least a cushion of air between the ear and what's making the noise, or the eye and what it sees. But with noses we're getting uncomfortably close, and when we come to touch, our skin is actually in contact. But consider taste: if we live we have to eat, and when you think about it, what a gross activity!

Here you pick up something, actually take your environment, and put it in that pink cavity, and crack it and mash it all around with that odd looking flap of muscle, and swallow it down your gullet, and then various peculiar things happen to it. Megan the other day came back from school and asked, "Why do you have to have that whole big liver just to do that?" and she found it so distasteful— notice the word— that she didn't want to explain about the liver making bile which pours into the intestine at some point or other, and finishes the digestive process.

By the time we get down to the guts we're pretty basic. We know things are getting used up, and we've known since our own toilet training that we're not supposed to talk aobut these things, unless in a detached manner, using the acceptable words. All this is the end product of taking in, engorging (like an amoeba), tasting. And because of our distaste with waste products we've ignored then or flushed then away, and the world is now approaching a gigantic cesspool. We're discovering that we've got to talk about waste products, and at dinner, too. But that's another whole chapter— or book.

But back to the other end of the alimentary canal. If we enjoy our food, how marvelous! We should. And what a great gift from the universe or Whoever was our maker. Not only can we taste, but that there is such a tremendous variety of tastes for us to enjoy. Yet how many of us feel embarassed, as if we're too earthy, too aware of our senses, if we eat with great gusto? We can't burp, we can't slurp, we fence the whole process around with all sorts of manners. We musn't eat like pigs.

I always loved to go along to feed the pigs. It was such a pleasure to watch them come racing, ears flapping, squealing and crowding up to the fence, scrambling on top of each other in their eagerness, their stomachs the most important thing in the world, their only care. Billy Beadle would push through the mob and empty a can of milk slops into the trough, maybe right on the heads of a few, and the bedlam would be deafening as every pig tried to cram his snout in. And then all the gulps and schlurps as the food was drained. I suppose I enjoyed it vicariously— I knew I couldn't eat that way myself, or show my pleasure so heartily.

E.B. White rivals Kenneth Grahame on his huge enjoyment of food. He tells about it from several points of view, or should I say, tips-of-tongue? Here he describes Wilbur the pig's dinner, in Charlotte's Web:

Here are Charlotte's spidery tastes:

And how about that disgusting rat, Templeton, whose tastes run to the rotten egg under Wilbur's trough and the residue from old, discarded lunch boxes at the fair?

Kenneth Grahame's animals, on the other hand, are more nearly ourselves in fur. Toads, moles, water rats alike have a human palate:

How can we improve our "taste quotient" for richer living, spicier writing? The answer is obvious: go on tasting and don't be satisfied with your own narrow taste vocabulary.

It's essential to be willing to try new things. At friends' houses, if they're in a different cooking rut from your house, you'll have a chance to sample different sorts of cookery. When we were little we once hiked across the field to another farm and the kids treated us to mustard and sugar sandwiches. Now there's a taste thrill. At restaurants you might order unusual dishes, or at least sample the eel and avocado salad your father ordered, even though it looks like a mess of angleworms on a bed of goad cud. You understand, too, that you have to be willing to try restaurants beyond Freddie's Hamburger Heaven.

Demi, Megan, and Jill are all together in a French class at school, and on the last day of class they prepared and ate a typical French meal. In a previous school Demi ate Russian style in her Russian class, and in her world lit class, the group prepared a dish native to each country whose literature they studied.

Try collecting unusual tastes. Same all the various spices— alone and in food: ginger, curry, cumin. Try spruce gum. In my book The Taste of Spruce Gum, Libby first encounters that novel sensation:

I first encountered spruce gum in Vermont the summer after we were married. Bob had gone to a camp in New Hampshire when he was twelve and chewed it there, and now he was looking forward to making a collection of this delicacy when a bunch of us climbed Camel's Hump. He circled every spruce on the trail and examined it for the delectable lumps, but after the first few finds there weren't any more. "That's funny," we kept hearing him say, a little behind us. "Somebody must have been along her recently and gathered it all." Then we stifled our giggles, the Walsh kids and myself, for once we'd found out what to look for, we were scampering along ahead of him and getting it all first. At the bottom of the mountain we presented him with a bagful that lasted him for years. The taste? You love it or you hate it— but like Libby, you can develop a liking. You can find spruce gum not only on a spruce tree, but in various New England stores— try the Shelburne Country Store, Shelburne, Vermont— or by writing to C. A. McMahan Co., Five Islands, Maine. It's about fifteen cents a box; and I buy it by the carton. Tamarack gum off a tamarack tree is even better, but I don't recommend pine gum. It won't hurt you but you'll never get it off your teeth. I've not tried Hemlock gum, after what happened to Socrates. And for an entirely different taste and texture, chew a handful or raw wheat grains, until you get down to the wheat gum.

I recommend also that you seek out ordinary staff-of-life food, but the first-rate instead of the third-rate stuff that we're all so accustomed to that we don't know any better. I wonder if certain first-rate foods even exist any more. It's been a long time since I ate a really eggy egg. Our tastes get dulled by the poor, the standardized. Bread! One weeps to think what's happened to most bread:

The cotton batting you can roll into a bread-pill the size of a marble! Seek out new bread, hot, homemade, fresh baked new bread, with high quality butter. And thick, oozing hamburgers rather than the cardboard slabs you get at Freddie's. Try fresh picked peas and strawberries. I went into a Howard Johnson's once, which had mammoth posters up all over the restaurant, extolling June and Feature-of-the-Month, STRAWBERRIES! in all forms from shortcake to ice cream. I inquired from the watiress if the berries were fresh picked, and she said no. It turned out they were making shortcake and sundaes from the same frozen strawberries they used all the other eleven months of the year!

Of course, all interesting tastes aren't eating tastes, or even good tastes, but to be a writer you have to be willing to sacrifice something for your Art. There's worm medicine. There's alum. As a small girl I put a penny in my mouth once, in church, and just about vomited— there's another taste— from the foul copper. I didn't have the courage to push past all those knees and bowed heads, and go wash out my mouth, either.

Our daughters are woods-nibblers. They inherit this from grandparents, parents, and a book that's one of our bibles, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, by Euell Gibbons, which describes the pleasure of gathering and eating foods growing in the wild. The girls early discovered wintergreen leaves, which grow close to the ground with little glossy leaves and are used to flavor gum and toothpaste. They keep the dried leaves in their rooms at home in the winter. They taste everything— with the exception of unfamiliar mushrooms and berries. As they walk they pluck leaves, twigs, grasses, and crush, sniff, and sample. Sometimes the taste is interesting and worth swallowing, often it is not.

My sister Pat used ot prepare "taste thrills" for me. I soon became wise enough not to respond when she chanted, "Open your mouth and shut our eyes, I'll give you something to make you wise," or was it, "and you will get a big surprise"? Same difference. I myself made up tasty concoctions for my goat, mixtures of various cow feeds and pig formulas, but Sugarpuss always preferred straight oats and elm leaves, which she ate with much waggling of the tail. She also liked cigarettes and my brother's used clarinet reeds, but not tin cans. That's a goat myth. She only liked the labels off of them.

Next advice: couple your tasting with your writing. It's challenging to describe tastes, as I found out when I tried to describe spruce gum. Thomas Jefferson, a man of many talents and fine-honed tastes, didn't merely write the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. He also wrote, "On a hot day in Virginia I know of nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of that aromatic jar below stairs in Aunt Sally's cellar."

Kenneth Grahame describes taste in terms of the other senses: the garlic sang, cheese lay down and cried. That shows you it wasn't any old pasteurized processed cheese product from the supermarket, it was the real McCoy. Other books that have fun with food are Green Eggs and Ham, Bread and Jam for Francis— that's all she'll eat— and An Anteater Named Arthur, who gets tired of the same old guess-what's-for-breakfast every morning. And don't forget the chapter in Caddie Woodlawn where she and her brothers become so tired of turkey sandwiches that they trade for the half-breed children's bucket of parched corn.

Then besides describing tastes, those you like and those you don't, write down your own stories that deal with taste. Probably our best and funniest, the most vivid and interesting writing, will be the negative ones dealing with food.

Food's so absolutely basic. A psychologist states mater-of-factly, "Since giving food is giving love..." As parents we withhold food as a punishment (Where the Wild Things Are); give it as a reward; stuff ourselves when we feel unloved; we sometimes get huffy when children reject our meals, i.e., our love. With food so often used for manipulation, no wonder children's, and everbody's tastebuds get confused. Our simple Rat-and-Mole pleasure in the good things of life become complicated. Dr. Spock was forced to eat squash once as a child; it was forty years before he tried it again, and discovered that he liked it.

My husband was force-fed as a child, and grew up hating meal times. As a result we've bent over the other way and never make our girls eat, although I occasionally get mad or put the screws on them. I was only forced to eat once, and rememeber clearly sitting for what seemed hours in front of that bowl of creamed cauliflower, until Mittens our cat came by and I fed it to her.

A friend of ours poured her orange juice through a knothole in the floor every morning, down to the dirt floor of the cellar, where it sank in, until one morning she was careless and poured it on top of her mother, who was down there doing the wash.

Another friend ate at a huge, round oak table which weighed a ton, and when her mother fiinally moved it to spring-houseclean, down cascaded a year's worth of bread crusts which Meg had been secretly tucking on an inside ledge.

A final story: a couple of years ago I came across a box of chocolate-covered insects at a gourmet store. I thought it'd be a good joke to give them to the kids, they'd have fun taking them to school and showing their friends. So I bought the box and wrapped it and put it under the Christmas tree. I'll let Megan proceed, for she read this bit and informed me scathingly I had it all wrong. Actually, she should start sooner: I'd written, "You could see the bees in the candies, and the ants," and she wrote in the margin, "You couldn't! They were wrapped in tinfoil and even when you opened it you could only see the ants." Well, as she continues:
"We opened the box together and we all selected one. Jill, baby bee, me, caterpillar, Demi, ants. Jill and I unwrapped ours and ate them in one bite. They were good, crunchy like malted milk.
"Demi said, 'They're real.'
"We laughed. "They're malted milk,' we said, and we argued a bit but Demi showed us hers— indeeed, ants, that hadn't been covered— floating mangled on hard chocolate. We were stricken but it was done, and after all, they were good. (It was too late for the sink, both of us had swallowed.)"

That last sentence was because in my account I had Jill running to wash her mouth out when she discovered her mistake. It just goes to show that if the event happens to you, your memory is apt to be more accurate than other people's, even your mother's. In defense I hasten to add that I didn't expect the girls to think the chocolate-covered insects were fake, and eat them, although there are, of course, cultures such as the Australian aborigines that relish insects. And St. John there in the wilderness lived on locusts and wild honey; it always used to turn my stomach, back in Sunday School, to think of him munching down those creatures like potato chips.

What are your stories? As a guest, did you ever choke down something you didn't like? Or have to eat another meal right after you'd eaten? Arrive somewhere expecting dinner and not gotten it, and in your mind gone over every shelf of the refrigerator at home, as your hunger increased? One fourth-grader wrote that he swallowed a lump in his orange juice, and his mother told him it was a goldfish. "Would my own mother deceive me?" he queried. It turned out that she'd emptied the liquid remaining in a can of peaches into the orange juice, and a bit of peach had gone along. Now there's a mother I can relate to!

You also might try broadening your "taste empathy" by putting yourself in the place of an animal, as E.B. White did with Charlotte, Wilbur, and Templeton. Write about their lives from their point of view, including their diet. And by all means, whether you are writing about animals, yourself, or imaginary creatures from a distant galaxy, describe food and other tastes through all the senses. See if you can make your cheese lie down and cry. Your garlic sing.

Linscott Charter School 220 Elm Street Watsonville, California 95076 (831) 728-6301