Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

Scientists have announced that our tongues can detect another taste: starchiness. For millennia there were only four tastes: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. Then umami was added in 1985 although technically it had been accidentally discovered decades earlier by the Japanese who were doing research on giant fire breathing reptiles. If you’re keeping count that’s six now, although if you’re keeping count it’s because you’re a primary school teacher frustrated at having to update your lesson plan and the colorful cartoon tongue hanging in your classroom again. And this discovery raises serious questions about what scientists will discover next. It’s bad enough that in middle school science class we learned that there are three
states of matter-solid, liquid, and gas-and then halfway through the year had to add plasma, which was very strange because the year before we’d learned that plasma is part of our blood but now we had to remember that there’s a different kind of plasma which is a state created by high energy atomic nuclei, and it’s important to keep one separate from the other and remember which one is in the human heart and which one is in the heart of the sun. And then it turned out nature might have at least fourteen other states of matter, not including my Aunt Lena’s Jell-o salad which everyone, including scientists, agrees is unnatural and should not exist. And we have absolutely no idea what other categories of matter, taste, or even color will be uncovered by scientists. We already know that while the human eye can detect three color wavelengths the mantis shrimp eye can detect twelve which must make mantis shrimp primary school classrooms very interesting. When I was a kid all primary school classrooms had a series of colorful pictures around the wall with all the colors of the rainbow from red to purple, but in mantis shrimp classrooms they must go all the way to, I don’t know, hyper puce maybe.
The discovery of new layers to our senses reminds me of synesthesia, a neurological condition that allows the senses of some people to intersect, allowing them to “see” sounds or “taste” colors even without the assistance of that bearded guy who passed out the sugar cubes while Pink Floyd played “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”. Synesthesia enjoyed a brief surge of popularity in literary circles, or at least in creative writing classes when I was in college where we were encouraged to mix up the senses in our descriptions, coming up with images like “the mahogany smell of coffee”. After years of being told not to mix our metaphors it was as hard as wrapping our tongues around the idea of more than four states of matter, especially with my roommate who always went off and left the coffee pot on so that my best description of the smell of coffee was “wet ferret plasma”.
The important thing is it was an intersection of art and science, two things too often assumed to be separate, even though by the time synesthesia trickled down to creative writing classes it was a cliché, an important lesson for science too: most discoveries eventually get superseded by something else.

What does it take to make an experience valuable?

I was a college freshman and alone for reasons I don’t remember. It was unusual for me to be alone since there always seemed to be someone around, even when I didn’t want others around,but on this particular night I was bored out of my skull and had left a series of messages on my neighbor’s answering machine describing in excruciating detail just how bored I was. When I guessed the tape was nearly full I left a final one that ended with, “Being able to share my feelings in this way has given me an entirely new and happier outlook on life. I think I’m gonna go fly a kite.” All of which was, of course, completely untrue. I didn’t even have a kite. But I did get up and leave. I’d been hit with a sudden craving for Chinese food and like a lean and hungry hyena, or at least like a pudgy guy in a trenchcoat, I set forth in search of numbers five, nine, thirteen, and a handful of fortune cookies. The problem was the closest Chinese food place I knew of was three miles away. I had heard of Chinese places that delivered, but New York is a long way from Indiana and I doubted any of them were willing to make the trip. Besides I barely had enough to cover a cup of hot and sour soup, let alone the extremely generous tip they were bound to demand. So I called in my order. I wasn’t going to sit there in the restaurant and eat by myself because that would be weird. And set off on foot. Having measured my walking pace I’m guessing it took me about an hour to get there and even though there was a chill in the air I didn’t worry about my food getting cold on the trip back because it was already cold when I picked it up. And I returned my dorm and had a small feast that I wouldn’t say was fit for a king or even the general whose chicken I was allegedly eating, but at least it broke the boredom. And the next morning I felt like it had broken something else. I had an intense pain in my right foot. I couldn’t stand on it but could hobble along by leaning on walls or on friends. The student health center provided me with a pair of Civil War-era crutches and my parents considered fetching me home to Nashville where my father knew a podiatrist named Doctor Payne. And I kind of wish they had, not because things would have been any better but because when your doctor as a homonynomous moniker like that the jokes just write themselves. I even spun out elaborate imaginary introductions. “Hello. I’m Doctor Payne. I’ll be assisted today by my interns Doctors Hertz, Bledes, and Nurse Stab.”

Instead an aunt and uncle nearby took me to the hospital where I was doted on by the same doctor I’d seen about a month earlier when campus security took me to the emergency room at three a.m. with severe stomach pains that turned out to be the result of mixing caffeine pills with Coke. I’m pretty sure that same doctor was there twenty-four hours a day which, in a small town, probably isn’t unusual, but that’s another story.

It turned out I had a stretched tendon. At least that’s what I think he said since it was kind of hard to pay attention over the sound of the guy a few chairs away who was trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a baseball. I was told I needed to stay off my right foot for the next six weeks which was annoying because walking was my primary way of getting from point A to point B since geometry wasn’t covered in any of my math classes. And I was stuck with the campus crutches which I knew dated from the Civil War because they’d clearly been made for Abraham Lincoln, and even once I got the hang of using them I didn’t move from place to place so much as take flying leaps that luckily didn’t stretch any tendons in my left foot. And when I got bored in class I could amuse myself by picking termites out of them.

It was an interesting experience but I leave this question to you: was anything learned or was it in any other way valuable? Would it help if you could try the egg rolls?