Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Where angels fear to tread

This is on its way to being the official Lang Religious Studies food. Go on, try one. What does it taste like to you? I picked these up at the Little India market in Curry Hill, expecting them to taste, well, not any taste in particular, but some taste, surely a tasty taste. But phool makhana (popped water lily seeds, it seems) sort of doesn't taste at all. Yet oddly, while it it is almost disturbingly tasteless when you first pop one into your mouth, it's hard to stop popping, and then there's a sort of doppler effect of taste - the memory or aftereffect of taste without the experience of the taste itself. Different interpreters at today's religious studies information session found its tasty tastelenessness like cardboard, or stale air, but the best account was that it has the taste of impermanence.