Sensual Cooking: Sound

Each post in the Sensual Cooking series will focus on one of the senses through which we experience our world.

With regard to food, sound is somewhat of a novelty. I'll never forget my first experience eating Rice Krispies. I was floored when I found that the cereal really went "Snap, Crackle, Pop" as the onomatopoeia in the commercials suggested. While I briefly experienced a moment of wonder, my excitement for talking food was soon forgotten once I realized how much better Rice Krispies tasted when combined with marshmallows and margarine.

The truth is, sound can actually have a significant impact on your dining experience. A 2010 study revealed that background noise interferes with your ability to taste food. The findings were used to explain complaints of bland food on airplanes (though the study had no explanation for lousy food found in quiet hospitals.)

Restaurant kitchens are noisy places. Banging pots. Slamming doors. Splashing of water. Boiling water. Sizzling food. Chopping. Shouting. Stirring. Mixing. A cacophony of sounds in the effort to produce a symphony of flavors. One listening might attempt to connect the clamor heard in preparing a complex meal to its quality, but it isn't so. We so often, I so often, want to be heard. Not all of me, just the good parts.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 

1 Corinthians 13:1

Talk is cheap. Our lip-service to a way of life doesn't make it reality. We often try to give an impression of morality and self-righteousness. Resounding and clanging on the outside; selfish and scared on the inside. Some may be fooled for a time, but after people taste our lives, we will be exposed.

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

Matthew 6:2

The noise we make needs to be honest, like the food we offer.