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".
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:
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.
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