Insanity

What does it mean to be insane?  Circumstances prompted me to grapple with that after an assailant severed the anterior branch of my carotid with a boxcutter and I nearly died. Said assailant went to trial where they were found guilty of premediated attempted murder but the court also found my assailant to be insane so the person who nearly killed me was sent to a mental hospital instead of prison. 

I found my answer in the writings of G.K. Chesteron, specifically in the essay titled "The Maniac" in Chesterton's "Orthodoxy". I find Chesterton's writing to be efficient if not profound in his turn of phrase, so I paraphrase Chesterton at my own peril, but the gist is that anyone we might consider to be mentally insane has not lost their ability to reason; their ability to reason is the only thing they have left! The issue is a limited universe of 'facts', and with only these facts to bear, one cannot help but draw the same conclusion over and over.  I find this explanation to be entirely plausible. However, some (including Chesterton) would have you believe a lack of imagination is the root cause - the inability to imagine that some facts are actually true. Others suggest that the root cause is pride, which results in the need to be right about everything. Perhaps the causes are over-determined, but I submit that they can all be boiled down to a single root cause: fear of loss.

Sometimes the loss is material, in other cases it can be pain in the form of mental anguish, physical pain, or a potential recurrence of an event that resulted in some sort of pain an individual is desperate not to re-experience.

The main point is that fear is not rational. Therefore, it is not possible to 'cure' fear with a rational argument. I would further submit that the most effective way of helping those trapped in fear is to be kind with the goal of making them feel safe enough to consider embracing the pain when it's necessary to do so. The irony is that safety is often just an illusion. Even so, it occurs to me to stop here and take stock in how safe I feel, and why.

Salt

I'm reading a relatively new cookbook called Salt Fat Acid Heat written by Samin Nosrat. She might be cooking's answer to Jacob Collier's impact on music. She's taken a fundamentally different approach to explaining how to cook by defining it into four basic categories in the use of:

- salt; 

- fat; 

- acid;  

- heat;

I'm currently reading the section concerning salt. There are a lot of concepts about salt which I understood/assumed instinctively but never could articulate in any coherent way. For example: Salt has a greater impact on flavor than any other ingredient, and the flavor of salt should be clean, free of unpleasant flavors. 

This brings to mind the biblical metaphor of salt when it comes to flavor. Salt contaminated with impurities cannot be effective, and I suspect that that is the most common interpretation when believers elect to apply this teaching. 

But it occurs to me now that there's possibly a lot more. Salt's contribution to flavor is multidimensional: it has it own particular taste and it enhances the flavor of other ingredients. It minimizes bitterness (which is why some people add salt to coffee), balances out sweetness and enhances aromas. 

Moreover, salt's qualities are dependent on how it's formed which have an impact on its shape, size, color and taste. As a consequence, the same measure of different types of salt can result in under or over salting a particular dish. This is even true of different brands of the same type of salt. In other words, as salt, it's possible to be too much of a good thing, or to be undereffective due to being applied too early, or too late.

Having said that, the biggest mistake in cooking typically is under-salting, and as a result, foods are relatively bland. So the main imperative is to be salt. But even so, some discretion is involved in optimizing salt's impact. More on this later.