Blog/2026-01-27/Life Is Intense

Not the best knife work or care but good enough for the point

I recently took a few of our knives to Bernal Cutlery to get them sharpened.

The Knives

When Julie and I combined our household supplies we each had a nice Japanese carbon steel knife and then someone gifted us one for our wedding. For the first few years that I owned my knife I took pretty good care of it, but I wasn't entirely professional with it and if you know high-carbon-steel knives they eventually get all these marks and this and that, and they're also harder on upkeep.

Anyway, I took the knives to Bernal Cutlery who have a massive backlog but are familiar with the Japanese edge-bias and with the double-bevel of the Sabatier. It took them a month to get to them, which is perfectly fine (though it seems they get most of their business through the rush orders which take a few days) and it cost me $82 for the total of 25 inches or so including fixing a chip on one of them.

I brought them home and tried to cut off a thin slice of a grape and I did adequately well, I think. If there was a flaw in performance it wasn't the knife's fault.

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 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 Envy apples now which are an outrageous creation of 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 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.

A Time Of Glory

Either way, this degree of abundance is unbelievable to me. Now that I have a child, I think back to how my parents would remark with incredulity at the fact that electric power and motor vehicles were commonplace. In conscious memory, I have always lived with electricity and there have always been a few motor vehicles around, though not nearly as many as today. I see their existence as natural, not as some kind of modern luxury.

But in the US, I see piped drinking water as amazing. I usually rinse out the kitchen sink at the end of the night to clean it, and so many times I've caught myself staring at the sheer amount of drinkable water I'm flushing down. It's less than a litre, maybe a few hundred millilitres but even that seems like a luxury. I could have had that to drink!

We truly live in an era and place of unbridled prosperity. But Astra will grow up knowing it as normal. I wonder what wonders she will talk to her children about. About what will she say "You won't believe it, but when I was growing up we didn't have..."?