The Perfect Pizza

by Lauren Drayer

Whether you are a supertaster (someone with high tongue papillae density) or a subtaster (someone with a subpar tongue), you have experienced the Perfect Pizza. It was the ideal combination of hand-tossed ingredients, baked at the ideal temperature for the optimal amount of time, and placed on your plate (or napkin…or bare hand…) exactly so many seconds after coming out of the oven (or microwave, if you’re that kind of person). If you ask around, you probably won’t find two exact descriptions of what makes the Perfect Pizza. For some people it might actually be perfect after it defrosts for fifteen minutes in the back of the car on the ride home from the grocery store. I have to remind myself that: 1) not everyone likes warm pizza, and 2) maybe eating pizza close to its frozen state preserves its vitamins.¹ In any case, it is realistically improbable that anyone will be able to create a universal Perfect Pizza, on account of the fact that everyone has unique tastes.

But, what if a chemical trick could reconcile all taste buds and we could indeed make the One Pizza everyone uniformly loved? After all, tongues are only tongues, and they can surely be tricked into believing they are tasting the best pizza ever. Something similar already exists. It is called miraculin, extracted from the miracle fruit, which grows in West Africa. Miraculin makes sourness turn into sweetness for a while, until it lets go of your papillae. But that’s not enough for our thought experiment. Miraculin might make lemons taste sweet, but the change isn’t uniform: some people will perceive the same lemon as more or less sweet, depending on their personal preferences. What we need is a chemical that will trick tongues into tasting exactly the same thing: our Perfect Pizza.

Sadly, there are many roadblocks.

For one, taste is not only about papillae. There is an element of smell as well, which would not be controlled by our synthetic taste-altering chemical. What to do? Personally I would trick the brain directly. By targeting the parietal lobe, where taste is processed, and the frontal lobe, where smell is processed, I would have total control over how people feel about my Perfect Pizza. But designing a drug with such capabilities might have even better applications. We could make Brussels sprouts taste like pizza. We could make durian smell like pizza. We could make downtown San Francisco smell like pizza. Why? Why not! I would definitely pop a pill in the morning if it helped me navigate the city without gagging until I reached the safety of my classroom. This would be a true boon to people everywhere subjected to terrible food and terrible cooking. If they could make their food taste great, the quality of their lives would improve. Think of our friends, the vegans! Think of our friends who are allergic to nuts! How awesome would it be to eat sunflower seed butter (it’s alright…) while it tasted like peanut butter (yeah!).

In many ways developing this drug would be both horribly difficult and horribly shortsighted, but I think we should focus on the good. The benefits outweigh most of the problems I was able to identify,² so we should give it a shot! Miraculin is bound to break into the market in the near future, so scientists should definitely explore the synthesis of more molecules like it. Issues of taste affect everyone, every day of their lives. I am sure it’s a project that can be monetized, which is a good reason to start any endeavor, and it would truly improve lives. On the other hand, if you could have a Perfect Pizza every night, when would it stop being perfect? After a week? A year? Then what?

Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.

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1 Cooking some foods does reduce their nutritional value, according to www.theproducemom.com, but I don’t know if I trust that website.^↩
2  Such as encouraging people to keep eating terrible food, since they can make it taste good^↩

At Least I Am Not Writing a Thesis

by Lauren Drayer

There are many things to complain about when it comes to your academic life. Your professor has questionable logic, he assigns one hundred pages of reading every week, and his class is based on the premise that you will fail; your lab partner spells the most surprising words incorrectly, she never remembers what time she was supposed to meet with you, and she keeps changing her mind about the font she uses in her emails. The smallest little things—and academia is nothing if not an aggregate of small things elegantly orchestrated into a master concept called a major—can get in the way of the big picture. They cloud your perspective: it is hard to project yourself a semester into the future when you are currently worried about whether you professor intends to fail you this semester because you deserve it or because he feels like it. The little things also prevent you from sleeping well: they nag and nag at you until all you can see when you close your eyes are all the little failures of the day. Most importantly, they prevent you from enjoying that burger you’ve been craving—who enjoys a burger when they have to rewrite their paper outline for the fifth time? That being said, at least you’re not writing a thesis.

The truth is that I did write a senior thesis. A very long one. On the biochemical characterization of antibodies. But that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about writing a thesis in a department purposefully geared toward emotional pain: the Humanities. Humanity means the human race, or human beings collectively. It also means humaneness and benevolence. Academically, the humanities are the study of literature, philosophy, art … all things that are at the core of human beauty and creativity. It should be intuitive, it should feel good, it should reflect our energy, our capacity for good. It should feel human—good-human. But there is nothing good-human about the humanities. At their core they are vague, violent, mean.

There is this thing in law that dismisses regulations entirely if they are too vague to be reliably obeyed and enforced. The actual term is “void for vagueness”. We should be able to dismiss the humanities as a whole on that premise, because there is no structure within this area of study that would allow any practitioner to reliably produce a good analysis of literature, art, and especially philosophy. Why especially philosophy? Because philosophy is not even properly rooted in words; it exists in our minds as an abstraction of ideas that few have intelligibly translated into documents such as the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Just kidding; that book is unintelligible. Which further proves my point that philosophy rarely yields a structured response from anyone. Not even the Great Thinkers. Thinkers should keep their thoughts there, in their heads, in the space directly surrounding their bodies—not on paper, for it is there that it infuriates me the most.

So, above I have addressed why the “vague” portion of humanities is a problem. My conclusion, more or less verbatim, is that “it infuriates me the most.” My next point has to do with violence. We all have preconceptions of violence. Homicide comes to mind, police violence, battery. But obviously this is not the sort of violence that we notice in the humanities. It is far more subtle, because the humanities have mastered the art of quiet warfare. It comes in the form of an essay you thought was about Monet, when it really is about income inequality of Latino lesbians with lupus. You always, always get tricked into a carefully convoluted web of knowledge that is neither here nor there, all disguised as an essay inconspicuously titled “The Straightforward Explanation of Monet’s Paintings”. See? It is violence of the most sophisticated kind: directed at the reader wholly and personally.

Lastly, I need to address why I think the humanities are mean. There isn’t a very well thought out opinion there, so I won’t discuss it in any detail whatsoever.

In conclusion, when developing a humanities thesis, the student has to surmount the vast vagueness of his topic, realize that his writing will cause physical pain to his readers, and he has to understand that as a result of his work people will view him as mean, and probably avoid him in the future, both in the short and long-term. We all have many complaints about our academic experience, but if we are lucky, we are not humanities students, and at least we aren’t writing a thesis.

Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.