Hot Sauce

I wanted to do something a little light today. It's election day, and in a few hours the votes will start being counted. Polls show Clinton in the lead, but polls and votes are not the same thing. We shall see.

(Also, tomorrow's post might be kind of a bummer, so today we'll meander and learn some cool things.)

It started with Hillary Clinton's appearance on a morning show, The Breakfast Club, hosted by Charlamagne Tha God, DJ Envy, and Angela Yee. (No, I had not heard of it before, but I think I had heard of Charlamagne before.) They asked her to tell them something she always carries in her purse, which is a very common interview question. She answered "hot sauce".

http://time.com/4297996/hillary-clinton-hot-sauce/

This set off a whole thing, with accusations about Clinton pandering to Black voters, along with many defenders proving vigorously that Clinton has a long history of loving hot sauce, including having a collection of 100 bottle of hot sauce during her time as First Lady, and remembering that it was used in the 90s to make her look low class.

That is all somewhat interesting, but not necessarily the part that I find most interesting.

First of all, the accusations of pandering tended to focus on the line in the Beyoncé song "Formation":

"I got hot sauce in my bag, swag."

The morning crew seems to focus on this, saying "Are you getting in formation" and "swag". Clinton looks completely blank. So when they say people will say she's pandering and she answers, "Okay. Is it working?" that strikes me as her completely missing the reference, but she does get accused of pandering a lot, so she tries to handle it in that manner, but keeping it light.

And that's fine. Beyoncé is pretty big, and the video and Super Bowl performance got a fair amount of publicity, but Clinton is also a 69-year old woman running for president. It is completely possible to know there was a song without knowing the lyrics. (I'm sure someone has explained it by now.)

My mind went - and it would have been the main destination if I had not read the "Formation" lyrics - to the 2002 Eddie Griffin film Undercover Brother, where he had a hot sauce dispensing watch to help him tolerate mayonnaise.

I remember thinking that as someone who had to travel a lot, where sometimes the food might not be that good, or it might be high quality but geared toward a completely different palate, then the hot sauce could come in handy. Then it got more interesting.

The defenses for Hillary's love of heat (which pre-dates Undercover Brother too) included her responses to earlier questions. There are multiple incidents, including even her Breakfast Club segment, where she says that she believes hot sauce and peppers keep her immune system strong. It keeps her going.

That really interested to me. I remember hearing back as far as high school that cayenne is good for your immune system, and various types of spicy foods are frequently mentioned as boosting your metabolism. A strong metabolism and immune system is a definite benefit for someone always on the go, but I know a lot of people who would never take advantage of it because they hate hot foods.

That's why I was also interested in this recent question and answer in Ask Marilyn:

http://parade.com/470706/marilynvossavant/what-causes-different-senses-of-taste/

The cilantro example resonated for me. A lot of Lao food uses cilantro. I never thought about it one way or another, but there was another sister who hated it, and she got so tired of eating it in everything. This explains it; it made everything taste soapy to her. (And then once some people took her to Marie Callenders, and she ordered a dish with cilantro in it without realizing until it came!)

I never use mayonnaise, but I never use hot sauce either. My family thinks of me as liking spicy foods, because some foods I really like are spicy, but it's not the heat that I like. They are savory and I like that enough that I can deal with the heat. (Yes, I like umami, and yes, MSG gets used in a lot of Lao food also.)

But I have friends who love spicy, like one who tried to grow her own ghost peppers and one I gave a bottle of Sriracha to one Christmas, because that was his great love.

So all of that, all of those reactions can relate to how many taste buds we have, and which variants of them, and which receptors are working, and yet there are still more factors that go in to whether or not we enjoy them.

I have talked about complexity in some of my political writing, because it is a thing that exists in the world and has some perils, but complexity can be found all over the place.

I think of the taste issue in conjunction with The Psychopath Inside on brain function. It wasn't just nurture and nature, but also different parts of nature, because there are the genes that build the brain, but also the ingredients that work in the brain function. Is the serotonin there? Are the receptors set up to grab it? Is there anything that could be blocking it?

Complexity gives us a lot of things that can go wrong, but it also gives us mystery, and fascination, and makes things more interesting.

One of my misfortunes is that it seems like the healthiest foods - fish, walnuts, and cruciferous vegetables - are the ones I hate most. There are lots of other foods out there, and certainly other vegetables. Maybe if we all like some, no one has to like all of them. People who think roasted Brussels sprouts taste like candy, I don't understand get that at all, but rock on anyway. You do you.