Before they recycle

Salt and Sugar and Modernism:

Probably the most incontrovertible thing that can be said about salt is that it causes people to retain water, and thus weight. That’s a small price to pay for salt’s ability to balance the sweetness of a dish, to heighten the green of a vegetable, to mediate between acid and oil, to act, in the words of Malcolm de Chazal, as “the policeman of taste.” 

Salt, said Chazal, “keeps the various flavors of a dish in order and restrains the stronger from tyrannizing over the weaker.” 

Although salt is probably the only natural resource not threatened by depletion, obtaining it “has forced man to explore, to think, to work, to travel,” writes Margaret Visser, a food historian. Because of its importance as a preservative, salt has influenced the course of history. Venice’s trade suprema. cy was built on it, as were a dozen countries’ before and since. 50 important was salt in the Middle Ages that distance from the salt cellar at the dinner table indicated a guest’s importance, hence the expression “above the salt.” 

But even as it bestowed power, salt retained an earthbound simplicity Plato exhorted decadent diners to return to “salt, olives, cheese onions and yegetahles.” Jesus referred to his followers as “the salt of the earth ” Salt’s intrinsic purity denoted wisdom -an old salt (sailor) was assumed to he wise. 

Salt is vital in maintaining the body’s balance of fluids, but the human appetite for it far exceeds the need. 

and:

The season of 'gluttony is upon us. Beginning with Halloween, when the juvenile lust for candy moves children to commit at least four of the deadly sins, through Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Americans will consume more and richer desserts than at any other time of year. Americans seem to regard dessert as an inalienable right. “A lot of people feel they haven’t had a complete meal unless they’ve had sweets at the end,” said Prof. Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New University.  Yet the American exaltation of dessert or what nutritionists call “low nutrient-density foods” is practically singular. In France and Italy, the custom at home is to finish a meal with fruit or cheese. Fancy restaurants and ceremonial occasions have their grandiloquent desserts. but the daily sugar fix is obtained at a café or patisserie. . . '. : “I don’t know of any other place in the world where dessert is a reward.” said Karen Hess, a culinary historian. “I find it weird."

 There are reasons America is a shining city on a hill for dessert lovers. Wood and sugar are two. In the Middle Ages, people in Europe had very little wood and access was controlled by nobility.  “They therefore didn't have ovens. If you wanted bread or cake you bought it from a baker, and sugar was incredibly expensive. “When people came to this country, wood was-no longer a problem. Everybody could have an oven, and the sugar islands sent in molasses. It became a nation of cake bakers and sweet eaters.” Americans, it seems, got what all humanity craves, for scientists agree that the desire for sweets is innate. Breast milk is quite full of lactose, and babies seek out this sweetness.

and

Christopher Lehman-H on Sherry Turkle: “Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we 'are to find out the secrets of our nature,” wrote Emerson. “They are our test objects.” After citing Emerson’s remark in her new book, “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,” Sherry Turkle adds a third test object, the computer. “Like dreams and beasts, the computer stands on the margins,” she writes. “It is a mind that is not yet a mind. It is inanimate yet interactive. It does not think, yet neither is it external to thought. It is an object, ultimately a mechanism, but it behaves, interacts and seems in a certain sense to know.”

Or more exactly, ~Ms. Turkle adds two computers to the list of test objects: two contrasting machines, the IBM. PC and the Macintosh. The former, she explains, was for users who wanted to see into “ ‘the guts’ of the machine.” It was transparent and invited analvsis. ' 

“In contrast,” she writes, “the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh’s iconic style presented the public with simulations (the icons of file folders, a trash can, a desktop) that did nothing to suggest how their underlying structure could be known.” It was opaque, and invited a belief in what William Gibson, in his novel “Neuromancer” (1984), termed “cyberspace.” 

In this switch from transparency to opaqueness, Ms. Turkle sees a larger cultural shift, one from “modernism” to “postmodernism,” as she puts it. In her somewhat odd set of definitions, “the modernist view of reality‘ is characterized by such terms as‘linear,’ ‘logical,’ ‘hierarchical,’ and by having ‘depths’ that can be plumbed and understood,” while postmodernism is “characterized by such terms as ‘decentered,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘nonlinear’ and ‘opaque.’ ” 

One might object that Ms. Turkle is skewing these categories. since modernism, in art at least, is usually associated with the shift in our sense of reality effected by Einstein’s'discovery of relativity, and involves the sense of instability she associates with postmodernism. But no matter; her point is clear enough. As she sees it, the change in perspective she describes has deep implication§ for such matters as artificial intelligence, artificial life and, perhaps most important of all, f‘a fundamental reconsideration of human identity.” And these are the subjects that “Life on the Screen” explores so fascinatingly;