|
ARCHIVES
|
Make Things Better Posting Date: Apr 20 2009 2:51PM Luncheon meat is one. A car is two. A doughnut is three. A Coca-Cola is number four.
Each of these things can be better than it is for reasons that make absolutely no sense.
Take, for example, a tasty slice of Genoa salami, a shaved piece of Black Forest ham, some roast beef, some luncheon turkey. Take that piece of meat and lay it flat on a piece of bread, garnish as you see fit and squirt a little mayo or mustard on there. You have but a humble sandwich.
Now do the same thing except this time, don’t lay that meat flat like a sleeping bag. Instead, put a little wave in, fold it, twist it, kink it up. Do whatever you have to to make sure it’s not flatter than a piece of newsprint. Make your cold cuts three dimensional and what do you have now?
Magic, I say. Pure, unadulterated, deli magic.
The configuration of the cold cuts does nothing to enhance flavour. It doesn’t alter your taste buds or recontextualize your dining experience. It doesn’t make you richer or better looking or more charming. It doesn’t alter your biochemistry, make you any hungrier or make your bread any fresher, but I’ll tell you this much, it improves your damn sandwich by about 10,000 percent. It turns your sandwich from Sanjaya to Susan Boyle (search YouTube if you don’t know who I’m talking about).
The same thing happens with a clean car. Your car may rattle, shimmy, creek, moan, wobble or push, but right after a good wash, when the chrome is all chromey and the tires are all rubbery and the windows are actually see-through, your ’86 Civic handles, if only for the next fourteen minutes, like a showroom Lexus. Unless your car was so dirty that the sheer weight of the grime was affecting performance, there is no reason for cleanliness to influence performance, but it does.
Doughnuts are another. Ever notice that a single doughnut doesn’t taste nearly as good as one that comes out of a bunch? Try it. Go to Tim Hortons and order a lunch combo that brings you a single doughnut. Tomorrow, come back and order a dozen doughnuts, then select one of the bunch and eat it. Ambrosia! Pure doughnut delight.
Coca-Cola is yet another example. Take two cans of Coke and put them in the fridge. Chill them to perfection which, to me, means cold as cold can be. Then take them out and drink them, one from the can, one from a glass. Tell me the one from the glass doesn’t taste about nine bjillion times better.
The only scientific reasons I can identify would be that the Coke still in the can is perhaps more carbonated than the decanted Coke. Perhaps a Coke with less carbon dioxide tastes better, but that seems counterintuitive since a flat Coke taste like acid dinosaur pee. The only other explanation is that in the drinking from a can, the can imparts some sort of aluminum residue on your tongue, destroying the taste of the beverage. But if that were the case, wouldn’t we be slathered in aluminum residue pretty much all the time? Wouldn’t it be dripping off us every time we touched a wheelchair, car engine or rust-free fence? Sure it would. Aluminum doesn’t decompose like Wonder Bread. You can pour a little cola over an aluminum can without having the can disintegrate like a Bovril cube.
So, despite all the extensive scientific evidence I just presented, the decanted Coca-Cola defies science and simply tastes better.
What do we learn from all this beyond identifying that the best way to enjoy lunch is to wash your car, drink a Coke from a glass, eat a doughnut from a box and a sandwich with a wad – not a stack – of meat?
We learn that little things matter, that sometimes folding the salami makes all the difference in the world. Isn’t it comforting to know, in these turbulent economic times, that the folded slice of luncheon meat is a tasty privilege available to rich and poor alike? Who knew that a crumpled slice of prosciutto would unite our divided society? |
