On Flavor and Consciousness

I often ask the question to myself, why do we eat what we eat?

But fundamentally, I'm really asking myself, who is the one who is experiencing the eating? Where does the experience of taste and flavor come from?

I've long wrestled with this question since I was a high school teenager. I can't remember exactly what pulled my attention to this fundamental aspect of consciousness, but I do recall having an intense anxiety about death. It's amazing what an overactive mind can produce, as I tried to simulate the experience and sensation of what it would be like to have no experience of consciousness, no experience of experiencing. The sense of void and emptiness in all direction, for all eternity.

And from that existential angst spurred a two-pronged journey for myself. I had already began a love affair with chemistry, building my own chemistry laboratory and delving deep into strategies of organic synthesis. But that was ultimately because I was extremely fascinated in entheogens, in psychedelics, after falling into a rabbit hole of the drug encyclopedia that is Erowid. I remember reading the accounts of so-called psychonauts and their explorations into the psychedelic space, of the chemical exploits of Alexander Shulgin and his journeys into different psychological and spiritual spaces using synthetic substances.

Using bits and pieces of information from the internet, the first substance that I synthesized was the sedative chloral hydrate from household materials. But such illicit studies gave me the passion to really put my mind to the subject.

From a separate direction, I began exploring the Eastern traditions of meditation and esoteric teachings. There was this point in time, probably around 14 or 15 years old, where I sat in meditation for a good 30 seconds before quickly losing interest. Little did I know that one day I would be able to sit for hours, but at the time the best I could do was read a few Buddhist sutras and some lines of Zen koans, those metaphysical riddles meant to stop the mind in its tracks. The pieces of the puzzle would absorb me at times, and I couldn't help but speculate to what degree these altered states of consciousness could be entered at will through practice and training.

And so these two interests would intertwine, sometimes meeting in the middle and sometimes living at opposite poles throughout my life. I could not easily wrestle the philosophical perspectives of the Buddhist concepts regarding enlightenment and emptiness that lives at the subjective interior of a human being with the hard lines constructed out of the scientific materialism that serves as the foundation of our modern objective world. By the time I was in college, I was making great academic headway as a chemistry student, but no matter how much I learned, I could not shake this feeling that I was just learning facts and information.

Some of those were quite powerful and could produce interesting products, useful products. Technology is a wonderful thing, and capable of producing what someone centuries ago would consider miracles. And it allows us to delve deep into certain mysteries of our reality. There was even the ability to explain the fundamental processes that occur in the brain, in the neurons, in the biological tissue. But at this stage, and at the time I was working through these problems in my own mind, the question of who is experiencing the world and the sensory inputs, remained unanswered.

Neurotransmitters and compounds may interact with the neurocircuitry, but there still remains the one who actually experiences the sensation. I can bite an apple, and know that the sugars and flavor compounds touch my tongue, interact with my taste buds and olfactory system, which then send signals to the brain that integrates it into some subjective experience. But again, who is feeling this sensation? Who is the ghost who lives in the shell?

Parallel to building up my understanding of the physical and biological sciences, I was also deepending my spiritual and meditation practices. Fundamentally I was going off faith, with the hope that if I could practice longer and more often, that something would be answered for me. I found that quieting the mind, I could start to see certain psychosomatic features that are well characterized in the spiritual and religious literature, but it was still so hazy, so dense and unclear. I remember feeling this sense of claustrophobia, this sense of trapness of being in a human body with its limitations and boundaries. Despite the exterior accolades and successes, and this primordial practice of meditation, I could not see the way forward. The feeling was like I was living within some sort of cloud, constructed out of cultural narratives, experiences, and networks of relationships.

I experienced an inner knowing that I needed to separate myself from the spaces that I was occupying, a sort of spiritual pilgrimage to place myself in a different context and reality.

A series of experiences helped precipitate the circumstances that gave me the opening for such a pilgrimage.

I had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time and decided to attend Burning Man in 2009, which was often spoken about by my middle school science teacher, Katrina Minck. Somehow that inspiration clicked in that moment and swept a number of responsibilities off my plate to make space for going. There's a lot that could be said about that first time I attended, but the main point is that I ended up at the Temple, where people will leave their remembrances for lost loved ones and relationships. And somehow as I walked into the space, there was a series of mental flashes and what I could only call a voice that said to me,

"Your father will die in a year."

And I felt as though all the blood had drained out of my body. What I could see was a sort of visionary premonition, of my father in a casket, that something horrific had fallen over him. And I remember falling onto my knees in the sand, shaking, and tears sputtering down my cheeks. Within that experience, I also had this feeling of being embraced in a warmth as though held, an experience of intense compassion flowing back into my mind and body. And through that sudden upliftedness, I came to realize that what I needed to do was make all the amends I could on my end, for my own behavior and challenges I had experienced with my father.

I took that moment seriously. I spent that year doing all I could to resolve any lingering issues that lived between me and my father, as much as I could knowing that there was only so much that could be done. My father had been a physician during the Vietnam War and suffered as most Vietnamese who lived through that time and fled to the United States.

My father ended up passing away from a second stroke on August 18th, 2010.

And that was when the opening for the pilgrimage became available. I had spent so much of my energy and time engrossed in academic study and achieving success, that I had neglected the part of me that was reminded of the potential of death waiting at every corner. That just like my father, my own life could end and vanish without a trace. In the following months, I began formulating a plan to walk across the United States as a pilgrimage and in honor my father, who had spent much of my life disabled on his right side.

But this pilgrimage was also an experiment of sorts. I wanted to know if there was more to reality than what I had read and studied, whether from the point of view of the scientist or from the point of view of the mystics and monastics. I remember requesting of the Universe,

"Please show me what you need to show me, and I place my life within your hands."

Strangely, all of the coordinating elements needed to make the walk work, happened somewhat spontaneously and without much effort. I remember needing a place to stay, and suddenly a friend was going to be out of town for several months and needed someone to house sit in Sunnyvale, which gave me the opportunity to train a bit beforehand. Pieces of the puzzle came together swiftly, and eventually I set off. Part of the experiment eventually came to be the thought that if I was destined to continue at any point, that I do so without any money and only on the support of others. I set off from Irvine, California with a push cart that my friends and I put together.

And at every turn, people would spontaneously stop their cars and give me a sandwich, or a bottle of water, or even money. People would help me, provide me a place to take a shower or sleep. And none of these were requested, I never asked anyone. It just kept happening over and over again. I even had moments where individuals would offer hotel stays. Sometimes, randomly, I would find money on the ground, $20 bills.

So there is a part in this trip, where I was walking late into the night through what I recall as either Arizona or New Mexico, and I run into a truck parked on the side of the road. And the trucker called out and asked me if I happen to have a cell phone on me. I had a flip phone, which I used to call my mom once a week to let her know I was still alive. I gave the man the flip phone which he used to call his wife, and we began chatting about his life as a trucker and a bit about my reasons for my walk. When I took my leave, he gifted me a watermelon and small statue of the Buddha.

The next morning, I decided to eat the watermelon under an overpass because it was too heavy to carry with me on my cart. There happened to be a dead animal that had passed away under the overpass, as that was fairly common since many animals were hit alongside the highway. I had gotten used to the smell of decaying animals, but I remember this one was particularly intense.

But I went ahead and started eating the watermelon.

In that moment, the smell of death combined with the taste of the watermelon, and I had an intense series of visions where I was watching the inception of the watermelon, starting from a seed growing into a vine and producing the watermelon, unfolding into its decay and death. And then I was seeing a person picking the watermelon, and that person living out their life, watching the birth of their children, and growing into old age, and also eventually passing away. And I saw the children grow through different stages of life, different expressions of life, moments of celebration, graduation, weddings, the birth of their children, watching each moment of life rise and fade away.

And I saw animals grow and pass away in this succession, to be eaten by predators, to be eaten by humans. And this chain of events went on and on, into an ever expanding web and network, to see that each being came into being, eating other beings, and then they too being consumed either by another creature, by microorganisms, or by the Earth itself. And I experienced this intense inner light shining through each aspect of the vision, like crystalline fractals dancing in the sun, a composite web bejeweled by the complexity of each relationship.

This was life. This was death. One could not be without the other.

I was completely moved and stunned as hot tears flowed down, knowing I too would be consumed, that all those that I knew would be consumed through this fundamental reality of existence.

And it was somehow that inception point of taste and flavor. I was experiencing something far more than I'd ever known, and the entry point was through the senses. That moment spoke to me about something fundamental about food, about flavor.

And so I bookmarked this experience that has led me to a career as a food scientist, as someone seeking to further understand what is flavor, and who is the one experiencing it.