Things are not what they seem

Adventures in subterranean meaning

“Gas”, my father said, “I smell gas”. My momentary feeling of alarm subsided immediately as I realized that he was referring to the truffle oil that my partner and I have been liberally sprinkling over our morning breakfast of scrambled eggs, ever since our Italian holiday last year. “Nah”, I said confidently, "that’s truffle oil.”

But, also, I trust my father’s nose. As an old-style chemical engineer, but also a naturally endowed suspector and cynic, my father’s hold on me is absolute to the extent that to his face I pooh and paah, while in private I hem and haw. So off I went to the all-knowing internet and asked, “Truffle oil. Ingredients.”

The very first headline put all my nerves at unease, as can be expected from any answer beget from the Internet. “The truffle industry is a big scam,” it read.

It turns out, that what is commonly sold as truffle oil is a flavor seeking to mimic one of the ingredients found in some varietals of the much prized, dog-sniffed, rare truffle, namely 2,4-dithiapentane, an organosulfur compound that is naturally found in truffles. 2,4-Dithiapentane is the dimethyl dithioacetal of formaldehyde extracted from petroleum. Wikipedia then went on to inform me that “It is prepared by the acid-catalyzed condensation of methyl mercaptan, the main aromatic compound in both halitosis and foot odor, and a secondary component in flatulence.

In other words, all kinds of gas. Thus crumbled my fantasy of self as a discerning gourmand.

But then, I began to think instead of chemicals and how much they inundate our atmosphere.

The smell of petroleum does make me nauseous, but I grew up around other strong smelling chemical compounds in my literal backyard which was an industrial township and remember with strong nostalgia the smell of dimethyl terephthalate. In our tiny school laboratory, the smell of formaldehyde and the exotic animal specimens it preserved made me simultaneously beholden but also repelled by a science that destroys in order to preserve. (Not that this is the domain of science alone. Lest you think, art has loftier ends, look at this scathing critique of Damien Hirst’s penchant for death and killing animals.) My nephew when ten years old, was in thrall, of all things to household cleaners, and specifically, Lizol/ Lysol where the active ingredient is hydrogen peroxide. And in continuing free association, remember the term “peroxide blonde”?

Surgeons’ Hall Museum; Edinburgh

A burgeoning branch of anthropology, chemo-ethnography, recognizes, in the words of anthropologist Nicholas Shapiro:

“...that we can’t understand what it means to be human in the 21st century without thinking about modern chemistry...Chemistry suffuses so many different aspects of our social fabric, from what flavours and smells are deemed valuable and alluring, to the levels of persistent chemicals in our bodies."

Shapiro has conducted research in other scenarios to look at the role of how the smell of formaldehyde signifies newness and freshness, “a new car smell”.

I will have to devote another post to the role of the olfactory in daily life, but for now, truffle oil has led me down the complex mix of memory, words, and chemicals that characterizes modern life. To conclude, one person’s gas is another person’s snake oil.

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What am I reading? Or rather, what have I finished reading?

Haruki Murakami’s “Novelist as a Vocation”

Verdict: It’s alright. But it does give you insights into why you may have read Murakami when you did, and why you are reading his work in the present moment. I find that I was bewitched by Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore when I liked my life defined by grids and lines that were always in danger of being torn asunder by happenstance and romance. These days, scenarios of straightness I find to be useful fictions.

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What am I eating?

Strawberry and lemon curd tarts, made from scratch. I mean, it’s not that great a thing to crow about. Dear and loving women friends of mine are whizzes at this. From scratch, mind you. But, it was just lovely to do this over a week. To put together the dough, to freeze it overnight, to bake it in two rounds, to carefully slice strawberries, to whisk lemon curd. All of it. So slow. Such delayed satisfaction.

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