Apr 14 - Living A (Tasty) Lie
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
Give me a book and I’ll analyse everything about it, before I even start to read it; take me to an art gallery and you bet I’ll be the guy that gets told off for touching a Miró* or watch me take out my phone to record sunlight float across any old object whilst some interesting sounds happen in the background. I’m all about the stimuli.
I’m a very fidgety person, I touch everything and you bet the second thing I do after touching something – if I enjoy it – is put my face in it. There is nothing I enjoy more than smelling and tasting things; I have an extremely good memory for these two senses in particular and it’s just become a big game for me. I really enjoy feeling things to the fullest, so I’m here to tell you about the lie we’re all living.
Some of my earliest memories are linked to smells and tastes, something I found extremely confusing growing up. It wasn’t until I was well into my teens that I realised these things probably featured so prominently in my memories due to a little neurological condition – of the good kind, like ASMR - called Synaesthesia. Everything started to make sense, all the connections, and since then I’ve been extremely fascinated with asking non-synaesthetes about how they perceive things. I felt like I was living a lie.
But the real deal came when I realised that a bunch of things I was attributing to this weird and wonderful phenomenon were just downright lies for everybody. I remember asking people about flavours of food and what they made them think about; it was weird. But the weirdest thing came with time as I started exploring flavours for what they are, consciously overriding the desire to link them to other things, and I realised how many things we know to be of one flavour when actually they are not at all.
Let me give you a couple of examples:
I’m sure you’ve all had strawberry ice cream, and strawberries, the fruit. And had a pine tree air freshener that smelt nothing like our rooted buddies. Or Opal Fruits… I could go on forever. How can an air freshener smell like “Greek Seaside” or “Linen and Sky”? I haven’t even made those up. So how did all this start? How did we start to associate these artificial smells and flavours to real things? And it goes even further: We just know a sweet in yellow packaging is “lemon” flavour and a green one is “lime”, it’s obvious, duh. I even had a coffee whilst I was finishing some work in the office a while ago that was “coffee”, because it didn’t taste anything like real coffee does.
Oh and then you get the older generations saying things like “tomatoes don’t taste as good as they used to”. Yes, I’ve tried tomatoes I’ve grown myself in a plant pot and they are a lot better than the stuff you can get at the supermarket. And it makes me think: why are we being lied to so much? It’s not even about organic or GMO, natural flavourings and colourings against artificial stuff, because quite frankly ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat, my problem is about feeling cheated and lied to. I’m not even mad, I’ll eat anything, I’ll eat a horse, I’ll eat your dog! But just thinking of the people out there, who aren’t as adventurous as I am with food, who think that strawberries really taste like the red Opal Fruit makes me feel some type of way.
*This happened at the Tate Modern in 2012.
Check out some of Stefano’s projects at:
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