I have long noted how much better food and drink taste when dining outdoors. For many years, I thought this was simply a trick of psychology: I tend to be eating and drinking outside when on vacation, with friends - in a good mood, you know? Or, at the very least, I'm only eating outside if the weather is nice and that puts you in a good mood automatically, right?
Well, I still think all that is true, but today (while sipping on some of my latest batch of homebrew outdoors), I thought about how nice it is to be able to take off the mask that I wear when indoors in public spaces when outside because of how air circulates and whisks away any viral load. Then my brain connected that to the aromatics of food and drink which I have long understood to be over 90% of what we think of as taste. If the outdoor air is helping take the viral load of others' exhalations away, it is also taking away all those yummy aromatics too, right?
Our latest unit in physics class has been magnetic induction. We have spent the last couple of classes exploring Faraday's amazing discovery of how it is the change in magnetic flux that induces electricity. Just having the magnetic fields sitting there ain't gonna do it - you gotta make them stronger (or weaker) quickly to get some good induction! (it's how generators work for all of you who have no idea what I'm talking about)
So, when I actually sip or bite something outdoors, the internal taste that comes from the aromatics has a whole new intensity when it enters my mouth and nasal cavity, right? So the change in my olfactory sense is higher when outside than when dining inside. It draws my attention to what I'm eating and drinking in a primal way that I can more easily ignore when inside. Hence the pleasure of dining al fresco.
This new little theory of mine may be total bunk, but at least it has some nice intersectionality.
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