Personal Auras Strong as Coffee, Complex as Cajun

I think we forget how strong is the aura of a person.  That is all, thanks.  I’ll be philosophizing here all week.

Seriously, what I mean is that we spend our whole lives practicing how we present ourselves to others. We want to attract relationships of some kinds and not others. We forget that this practice creates a strong “giving off” of “vibes” whenever we are around someone. Some of us are sensitive to others’ treatment of us, especially those close to us.

If someone doesn’t want to be around us, sometimes it hurts, even if only a little. But we should remember just how powerful of an experience it is to be around another person. Especially intimately—you might be able to abstract some of the people on the bus or train into faceless heads or meaningless figures, or perhaps stick your nose in a book or your phone (though I’d wager we are all less capable of that than we think we are).

Imagine being in the same room with a single other person, perhaps someone you know. As soon as you perceive him or her or them, your mind recalls various sorts of associations, personalities (e.g., this person is like this around me, that around our family, the other at parties), all consolidated into the facade that is their face, countenance, and how they’ve dressed themselves today. Someone might not want to be around you just because they’re tired or not prepared for the dynamism of perceiving you.

It’s a very sensational experience to be around another person. In the story that follows, I’ll suggest that we should attend a little more to the power of the sensation of perceiving another person, or that we should be more sensitive to the sensations our social presentations of ourselves produce. The story will include some general advice on how to cook well, which will raise questions about social perception and self-presentation.

I had the somewhat unintuitive idea for this essay one morning during a weeks-long troubleshooting of my new pourover coffee apparatus. It’s a glass pitcher designed to make and briefly store pourover coffee. I had been using and usually use, simply, a reusable metal filter placed over a coffee cup, and with great results.

A minor mistake with the new piece led me to think of some basic advice to Americans (particularly Americans, which I’ll explain in a moment) who were just beginning their cooking, cheffing, or other culinary journey. Four hundreds of years, American emigres have had an unusual relationship with food compared to the rest of the world but that is a story for another time; for now, it should suffice to briefly outline my hypothesis: scarcity of food, a humid climate susceptible to food spoilage, and a later overwhelming mass production, generally focused preferences on food security and economies of scale rather than taste and artistry. This latter part seems rooted in our British ancestry: when it comes to a meal, we prefer speed, ease, and dependability over variety and exploration (in their everyday gastronomy, the British are known by other Europeans for eating mostly the same rotation of meals and frying as often as possible to ensure flavor rather than other dependable flavoring methods, a rather cynical approach if you ask me).

Not that I am an expert chef; my qualification is that I have spent a lot of time traveling in the U.S. and abroad, living with families in other countries in which I was not in control of what I was eating—both because what I sought was not available and because I was obligated, quite rightly, to eat what the families and others were cooking—and I cook a lot of my own food, often resulting in compliments to the chef when I cook for others, including a variety of ethnicities and my large extended family. It is what it is. Back to the matter at hand.

I had accidentally spilled some coffee grounds into my cup when I was removing the filter from the pour-over so I could throw the filter into the trashcan. I recalled not just that I had read on a blog somewhere that you don’t want old grounds in your cup nor even a ground or two newly ground bits because your tongue, whether you explicitly realize it or not, will detect the unfresh or irrelevant flavors. One of the keys to a good cup is to ensure that your filtering method really filters out all of the grounds, because they, somewhat unintuitively, have a different flavor than the liquid produced by brewing (I’ve noticed that some people erroneously believe that the grounds make the coffee taste more coffee-y. This is like thinking that you should eat an entire lemon instead of making lemonade or down a gulp of tea with the leaves left in the gulp; you just wouldn’t do it—even for mate, a bombilla filters out the leaves). Not just that, but in an introductory psychology textbook, I have also seen that, in double blind studies, the average person can detect all the way down to one gram¹ of sugar mixed in two gallons of milk—that’s how sensitive the tongue is.

The basic advice, then, is to use as few and as fresh ingredients as possible. That is particularly important for Americans to hear because, for some reason (my suspicion is that, as good salesmen (which by the way, I think is a virtue), American restaurants, food distributors, etc., have convinced us of this in order to tell tall tales about the scarcity of their product or the experience it produces) we tend to believe that the key to good cooking is to find just the right mix of some secret recipe of ingredients, most often ground or powdered (i.e., not fresh) spices. While people whose occupation it is (perhaps professionals and some stay-at-home family cooks like parents or children/caregivers in the aging modern era), might have time to experiment with complicated cooking methods, mixes of spices, chemistry, etc., one of the first, if not the first steps, to good cooking is to realize that fresh and few ingredients make a good plate. This is due in-part to the sensitivity of your tongue, especially if you haven’t ruined its tolerance with daily added sugars and store-bought boxed snacks (e.g., baked snack crackers or cheesy totopos). Don’t believe me? If you ever have the privilege of visiting award winning restaurateur José Andrés’s Restaurants, like Oyamel or Jaleo (especially the latter), you will notice that award winning plates include things like “gambas al ajillo,” “tacos al pastor,” or fried this and thats. The ingredients tend to be the target of the spice (shrimp/gambas; beef; calamari), garlic, salt, and lemon or lime. That’s 4 things total. Plus, I suppose, the oil they’re cooked in. If you’re thinking “if it were that easy, why doesn’t everyone do it?” You will quickly have a second question along the lines of “how do I even find and maintain fresh ingredients?” The second answers the first—except that, in many cultures, at least the 3 foreign countries I’ve lived in, families do put in the work to stock fresh ingredients in their homes and don’t eat out much, just not in the good ol US of A. (In fact, the going hypothesis in science is that we like fried or crunchy food because the noise it makes signals to our old brains, which evolved while we were mostly foragers, that the food is fresh and therefore would be more nutritious and not make us sick, since the crunchiness tends to indicate freshness in vegetables, nuts, and fruit (to be clear, food tends to lose nutrients as it oxidates, oxidation being the main process whereby food spoils with passage of time, though bacterial infection also ruins food.)

This less is more approach can further off-put the intuitions of the American who knows, as well as anybody, that more salt or sugar produces a saltier or sweeter flavor. To be more precise, then, we should say less in kind is more, not less in amount of each kind. Though I’d still urge to err on the side of less seasoning.

Well so back to the impetus for the post. I had a experienced a synesthesia after making the coffee and thinking of the advice, a synesthesia whereof my mind thought of our perceptions of people as sensational in the way that food is.

We are sensitive to even minuscule gestures, the grams of sugar in a two gallons of milks of the self-presentation world. Unlike for food, social presentation is irrevocably intuitive and incalculably complex even to the most awkward among us. We at least ought to consider just how powerful are the auras we put off, and those we receive, and perhaps take the time in the day to take a few breaths and meditate on them—we certainly shouldn’t worry if someone doesn’t want to spend time or talk with us at the moment. That can often even be an indicator of your aura’s power.

Epilogue:

For what it’s worth, my cup of coffee was indeed not as good as it had been the few days prior.  My experience is that the excess grounds, which I can see at the bottom of the cup ended up being more than a few, have a distinct flavor and an interesting one, but not the smooth, fruity, ever-so-slightly acidic flavor with an earthy aftertaste of the coffee I have brewed in the few days prior (with the Organic French Roast from Rise Up Coffee Roasters—it has just been leagues above the Starbucks’s Verona I usually use.)  The grounds’ flavor is short, bitter, toasty and smoky.

While I am at it, my first impression of this bean from Rise Up was fantastic.  My first sip of the coffee from freshly-ground bean instantly and involuntarily took me back to the mountains of Guatemala, each volcanic to varying degrees, where my friends and I circa 2014 happened upon a coffee plantation while hiking around bird hunting with a prodigious pooch.  The vagabond pooch is a story for another time.  But we stumbled upon a coffee plantation some 50-75% of the way up the mountain, a relatively flat but very wide one among a sierra. The inclination seemed 10-12% at most.  The shrubbery was verdant, the trees thick with flora and vines, and the dirt an inky dark brown, almost black or dark purple against the nearly neon leaves of t he jungle.  As we wandered around, through a light mist we saw an inclined field of coffee plants showing red berries, a few fields of furrows, with a small wooden shack that must have served as a production or coordination nucleus of sorts just beyond.  The smell that pervaded the mountain was of ancient volcanic earth and young plant.  That is where the first sip took me.

Notes

1. I suspect that one gram of sugar is actually a lot and the industry is cramming sugar down our throats in order to sell us cheap weight. I realize that that is cynical; again from my experiences in other countries, I’ve realized that most products that include added sugar in the U.S. do not in other countries, like breads, meats, yogurt, nut butters, soy milk, oat milk, etc. I need to do the research, admittedly, on when exactly we add sugar and what the claims are as to why. In the meantime, I measured out a gram of sugar with a scale and, frankly, it looks like a lot, especially when you consider that common “healthy” breads in America include 2-4 grams of sugar per slice. By volume, it equaled about 4 nickels (to be clear, four five-cent coins). If the claim is that sugar’s a preservative, perhaps we should be making bread without sugar and simply storing it in the fridge.