I slowly bring my hand closer to my mouth, where it pauses, suspended in midair for an eternity. “I can’t,” I say, abruptly pushing away, appeasing my gag reflex.
The spoon falls back into the bowl, and the mysterious something sinks safely back into the depths of my soup. I am blindfolded, trying a seafood coconut soup at Mai Thai.
Now, let me get one thing straight: I love Thai food. When I was little we used to eat it all the time at a little restaurant that looked like it was someone’s living room. However, when I say that I like Thai food, my experience had up until now been limited to the tiny spectrum of vegetable rice, pineapple chunks, and fried ice cream—the Tom Ka soup was definitely none of those familiar things.
It’s said that we first eat with our eyes. Doesn’t looking through a cookbook trick your brain into thinking that the food is right there waiting for you? My mouth, at least, never fails to start watering.
Eating blindfolded felt like being in your bedroom as a child in the dark—the nightlight created horrible shadows on the walls that turned the ordinary objects of my bedroom into strange, menacing shapes. This happened to the food I was eating. Without my sight, the food was removed from its ordinary context and assumed fantastic new qualities.
At one point, a bean sprout furtively dropped into my lap, unnoticed until my hand brushed against it. I shuddered at the contact with that smooth, cold, wet thing, and threw it off my lap onto the floor, picturing little snakes everywhere. The funny thing is, I knew it was a bean sprout after one second, but I panicked because of some very primal instinct, triggered by losing the essential sense of sight.
The sense of unease that came with what I was eating heightened my feeling of vulnerability.
Then again, my experience was amplified by my past: When I was about 10 years old, I developed a phobia of eating shrimp. One day, after eating them for years, I suddenly imagined that they could come alive in my throat and wriggle around.
This irrational, yet horrible, fear kept me from eating shrimp for many years, until I finally got over it. Fears have a way of burrowing deep within the unconscious, and when my noodles came with a huge shrimp with full tail and I almost ate it, that fear resurfaced.
In order to try and control some of that panic, I focused on my other senses to get a clearer picture of what was happening, removing some of the uncertainty.
As my dinner companion and roommate Lara noticed, I ate with a deliberate slowness, all of my actions much more measured and precise. I could hear the waitress come to the table, and I listened to the clink of the plates as she set them down. The blindfold heightened my awareness of myself and my surroundings. This may be part of the reason why unknown bits of food attained a massive physical presence in my mind—the way shadows in the dark seem huge and menacing. This also made me take smaller bites, and I was full way before I normally would be. In my mind, I had eaten a gigantic meal.
The attunement of this sense did not allow me to deduce everything. Both Lara and I got seafood soups, and based on the taste, I was convinced that mine was a very clear, spicy broth, while hers was a richer, curry-like one. Senses are fallible though, as I discovered, and the opposite was true of the soups. So take this to heart: don’t always believe your eyes.
Food is one of the vehicles that involves the most number of the human senses, like sex. In fact, our modern lexicon now includes, because of the tumblr community, the words foodporn and foodgasm. Let my blind dinner experience illustrate this point: fear is usually not fully justified, and maybe all you are afraid of is not a snake, but just a bean sprout. Maybe close your eyes to savor something every once in a while.
