The Taste of Emotions!
To anyone wondering what Bun-Maska means, it literally is “bread and butter.” However, bread and butter conjure up a much different emotion than bun-maska does. That brings up three of my favorite things - food, emotions, and language. More so, the interplay between these seemingly disparate entities.
If you have read my post (Man’s Search for Naming!) about my search for a meaningful name you will know that I do not identify with ‘sweet’ names. Begs me to ask - why? Why are some words inherently attached to certain stereotypes or feelings? Sweet brings on thoughts of love, joy, and pleasant emotions. Contrarily, bitter, sour, and spicy are associated with more negative emotions.
Amazingly, these concepts seem to be the same across cultures and languages. Where do these come from? Is it intuitively built into us that sweet is good? Half or more of our diet is carbohydrates which are essentially what sweet foods contain. Similarly, bitter and sour tastes could evolutionarily have signaled danger or risk. So, maybe our brains have connected tastes to certain emotions. Maybe language played a role in establishing the connection too?
Literature is full of connections between taste and feelings. Juliet's famous quote about the ‘sweet’ smell of roses being one of the more famous usages. We don’t want to grow up ‘bitter’, no one likes a ‘sour’puss, and although we want to bring down the ‘heat’ on us, we wouldn’t mind ‘spicing’ things up a bit. Some linguists point out the noticeable use of sweet and bitter in Shakespearean literature which may have caused these abstract concepts to gain popularity.
However, references for the association between tastes and abstract virtues can be found even in much older texts. The Upanishad alludes to eating a sweet fruit making one happy and a bitter fruit making one sad. There are many references to sweet and bitter in the Bible and other texts too. However, having not read these texts in their original language, I wonder how much of these are additions in translation. The words usually used in the original Sanskrit texts are related to ‘swad’ the literal word for taste in Sanskrit/Hindi. It is interesting that ‘swad’ and ‘sweet’ may have evolved from a similar root according to the Oxford university press. How sweet is that?
That brings me to question – why have I been thinking about food, taste and emotions? I wonder if it was triggered by someone mentioning their struggles with weight because of ‘eating their emotions.’ Or was it because someone was still ‘salty’ from the latest performance review? I feel like I can almost taste the answer, almost…
There will be more about disordered eating and emotions, stress eating and similar topics in later posts I hope.