Editing Blog/2026-01-27/Life Is Intense (section)

== The Tasting ==

But the striking thing for me was ''how tasty the thin slice'' of the grape was. If this small slice provided so much of the taste, what was I doing when I was eating the whole grape. I cannot say that it was 1/fraction_of_grape the amount of taste sensation I got from fraction_of_grape! We all know intuitively of sensory adaptation but that the mere fraction delivers such a large amount of the final output is unbelievable to me.

It was just the other day when [[Astra Meridian|Astra]] was eating that I marveled at the variety of foods that she got to try. While I had no shortage of savory cuisine to try and also no shortage of tropical fruits, both were from India.

Astra gets to try all this Chinese food, Indian food, and all the various cuisines common in the US. She has had such a varied range of flavours and textures without being even a single year old yet. But also the intensity of these flavours has to be certainly a lot more than what we used to have.

The grapes are outrageously sweet and seedless, the oranges are all universally orangey, and we have [[wikipedia:Envy (apple)|Envy apples]] now which are an outrageous creation of [http://wikipedia:HortResearch Mankind's best biochemists].

I won't pretend that we didn't have things beyond the ken of most Americans. There is no such thing like a [[wikipedia:Banganapalle (mango)|Banganapalle mango]] here. It isn't even easy to get a good one here because they have to ripen off the tree. But those were seasonal. You might wait an entire year before you get your next batch. And how many could you possibly get?

That hasn't changed for that mango but the grapes and blueberries and other fruit common here in the West are available year-round, either through improved horticultural techniques or, more likely, better preservation methods that allow a crop to be frozen and thawed so that it is available for purchase throughout the year.