3quarksdaily

Airplanes, Asparagus, and Mirrors, Oh My!

by Meghan D. Rosen

Last month, I asked you to submit a science-y question that you'd like to have answered in simple terms. You asked about light, and mirrors, and spices and space— I was delighted by the scope of the questions posed. 

This month my fellow SciCom classmates tackled three. Steve Tung glides through the mechanics of flight; Beth Mole spouts off about asparagus pee; and Tanya Lewis reflects on mirrors. 

Enjoy! 

If you have more burning science questions, just post them in the comments. We'll be back next month with more answers.

And if you don't have a science question, but do have a thought or a picture to share, check out www.sharingamomentofscience.tumblr.com

How can an airplane fly upside down?

Daredevil pilots execute stunning aerobatic maneuvers― loops, rolls, spins, and more― sometimes while upside down for a long time. How do they do it? It might seem that the force keeping a right-side-up plane aloft would push a flipped plane down.

The trick is how the plane is angled in the air. Pilots can adjust the tilt to lift the plane, even when it is upside down.

You may have stuck your hand outside of a moving car and felt the rushing air push it up or down. Tilt your hand more, and that force is stronger. Turn your hand upside down and it still happens, though it might not be as powerful.

Plane wings, flipped or not, work the same way― tilt them up more, and air lifts the plane more. There are drawbacks and limitations, however. Higher angles cause more drag, slowing the plane. Tilt too far and the plane loses its aerodynamic properties and falls like a rock.

But not all airplanes can fly upside down. Some depend on gravity to fuel the engines; some would break under the different stresses of flying inverted. Stunt airplanes use specially designed wings, bodies, and engines to be more agile, more durable, and more versatile.

Steve Tung once dreamed of designing airplanes and rockets. He now dreams of pithy, memorable prose. (He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in fluid mechanics from Cornell University) Twitter: @SteveTungWrites

Many years ago Mel Brooks asked the one question which had haunted him all these years: "Why, after I eat a few stalks of asparagus, does my pee pee smell so funny?"

It wasn’t until recently that scientists started to unravel this odorous riddle. The answer lies with both the whizzer and the whiffer.

When we digest asparagus, its sulfur-containing compounds can break down into stinky subunits that strike as early as 15 minutes after eating. Although the culprit behind the smelly bathroom visits hasn’t been caught, the most likely suspect is methanethiol.

But in bathroom exit surveys, only some asparagus eaters say they can smell the excreted evidence.

In 2010, scientists went digging through a database that linked genetic data with survey data including answers to questions like ‘Have you ever noticed that your pee smells funny after you eat asparagus?’

They found that people who have particular DNA changes around a set of genes responsible for olfactory receptors—molecular smell detectors in your nose—are more likely to be able to smell asparagus pee.

So for those that can’t smell asparagus pee, it might not mean that you can’t make it.

Last year a different set of scientists waved pee vials under people’s snouts to sniff out who could make asparagus pee and who could smell it.

They confirmed that some schnozzles can’t smell asparagus evidence. But they also found that some people don’t seem to make it either, at least not in detectable amounts.

Since scientists haven’t pinned down the stinky subunit responsible, they can’t say for certain if it’s not there at all or just at really low levels that we can’t smell.

For now, it seems likely that our abilities to make and smell asparagus pee probably exist on sliding scales, and whether or not you can smell it seems unrelated to whether or not you can make it—so, continue to ponder in the potty.

Beth Mole earned her PhD in microbiology at UNC Chapel Hill studying a potato pathogen and did postdoctoral research on antibiotic resistant bugs at UNC's Eshelman School of Pharmacy. She started writing about science in 2008 for Endeavors magazine and is currently enrolled in the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz.

Why does a mirror reverse left-right but not up-down?

When you look in the mirror and point your right arm out to the side, your reflection in the mirror points its left arm. But when you point up above your head, your reflection doesn’t point to its feet. Even if you lie on your side and point your arm out, the mirror seems to “know” to switch which arm your reflection points, even though that’s now up or down relative to the ground.

What’s going on? Actually, mirrors don’t reverse things left-and-right, they reverse them in-and-out. Imagine casting a rubber mold of yourself, then turning the mold inside-out. Your reflection would face you, but your arms would appear to switch sides.

Another way to think about it is this: write something on a piece of semi-transparent paper and hold it up to the mirror. The reflected writing is, of course, a mirror image. But now turn the paper around so the writing faces you, and look at the reflection in the mirror. The writing is the right way round again. The reflection is like a stamp, making a “light print” of the writing on the page.

Tanya is a graduate student in the science communication program at UC Santa Cruz. She is an incurable science geek with a penchant for storytelling. She can be reached at tanlewis (at) gmail (dot) com or on twitter @tanyalewis314

A Gut Feeling

by Meghan Rosen

Are you in the market for a healthy, stable, long-term relationship?  Turns out you may not have to look further than your gut.  Or, more specifically, the trillions of microbes that inhabit your gut. Yes, you and a few trillion life-partners are currently involved in a devoted, mutually beneficial relationship that has endured the test of time. Don’t worry though, they’ve already met your mother.  

We’re exposed first to our mother’s microbial flora during birth; these are the pioneering settlers of our gastro-intestinal (GI) tract.  In the following weeks our gut becomes fully colonized with a diverse array of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Although our gut microbes are generally about an order of magnitude smaller in size than human cells, when counted by the trillions, they add up. 

In fact, these intestinal interlopers (along with their fellow skin, genital and glandular neighbors) can account for up 2% of a person’s total body mass).  That’s right, a 175lb man could be carrying more than 3 pounds of microbes in and on his body. Most of these microbial tenants, however, are crowded together in the lower part of his large intestine: the colon.

If we travel up the GI tract a bit and inspect the contents of the small intestine, the concentration of microbes drops nearly a billion-fold; compared to the colon, it’s practically germ free. (Although these germs are harmless when living in the gut, if the intestinal lining is breached, they won’t pass up an opportunity to spread to and wreak havoc in other areas of the body.)  

While it’s easy to see the lifestyle advantages for a colon-dwelling bacterium (warm food, cozy housing, nearby relatives), the benefits and health implications for humans are not as well understood.  Do we gain anything from toting around these vast microbial populations or are we merely a free meal ticket? 

We know from studies in mice that gut microbes can influence health and metabolism. In fact, mice that have been delivered by cesarean section into sterile environments (and therefore lack the usual complement of intestinal microflora) are not as healthy as siblings that are birthed normally. These germ-free rodents have defective GI and immune systems compared to their microbe-ridden brothers and sisters.

While it’s clear that an animal’s gut microbes are a valuable part of a healthy intestine, their role in human metabolism and body weight remains ambiguous. We do know, however, that these microbes can enhance digestion.  Normally, anything a mammal cannot digest passes through the GI tract unscathed; the energy present in this food is ‘locked up’, and therefore excreted.  Obese mice, however, hold a few extra keys to calorie consumption.  

The gut microbes of obese mice contain a vast array of genes that encode uncommon digestive enzymes. These enzymes help break down an expanded set of caloric compounds, and allow the mice to extract nutrients from otherwise indigestible food substances.  Consequently, obese mice have fewer calories remaining in their feces than their slimmer relatives. 

 If obese mice have a different cohort of intestinal bacteria with super-digestive abilities, is the same true of obese humans?  Is there a link between different body types and different gut microbial communities? Researchers at the Center for Genome Sciences at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri are attempting to answer these questions by comparing the identity of these gut community members, or the ‘gut microbiome’, in groups of differently sized people. Jeffrey Gordon’s lab examined fecal samples from 54 sets of adult female twins and sequenced the DNA of each and every microbe that passed through the volunteers’ intestines.  

Although the majority of the twins selected for the study were identical, nearly every pair of sisters had one drastic physical difference: their body mass index. Gordon’s team of researchers specifically chose twin sets with one obese and one lean member to help understand the role of the gut microbiome in human obesity. 

Although most gut microbial genes were shared between all volunteers, a significant portion of microbial genes varied from person-to-person, particularly among the obese and the lean. For instance, the obese member of a twin set generally had a gut microbiome loaded with extra genes involved in fat, carbohydrate, and protein metabolism. Are these mighty microbial metabolizers so efficient at squeezing calories from food that they actually contribute to their landlord’s obesity? Maybe, but we can’t say for sure just yet. 

We do know that our gut is a kind of multi-species digestive super-organ, and that changes in the intestinal microbiome are associated with vastly different body types. In fact, Gordon’s lab has shown that you can actually fatten up a lean mouse by feeding it microbes from the guts of an obese peer. Although it’s still unclear exactly how the organisms in our intestines contribute to obesity, this research provides something for follow-up studies to chew on.  Is it possible then to lose weight by dining on the gut bacteria of a skinny friend?  Perhaps.  Just don’t try it at home.

References:

1. Bajzer, M and Seeley, RJ (2006, December). Obesity and gut flora. Nature, 444, 1009-1010. 

2. Hord, N. G. (2008). Eukaryotic-Microbiota crosstalk: Potential mechanisms for health benefits of prebiotics and probiotics. Annual Review of Nutrition, 28, 215-31.

3. Ley, R. E., Turnbaugh, P. J., Klein, S., & Gordon, J. I. (2006). Microbial ecology: Human gut microbes associated with obesity. Nature, 444(7122), 1022-3.

4. Othman, M., Agüero, R., & Lin, H. C. (2008). Alterations in intestinal microbial flora and human disease. Current Opinion in Gastroenterology, 24(1), 11-6.

5. Sekirov, I, and Finlay BB (2006, July). Human and microbe: United we stand. Nature, 12(7), 736-737.

6. Turnbaugh, P. J., Hamady, M., Yatsunenko, T., Cantarel, B. L., Duncan, A., Ley, R. E., et al. (2009). A core gut microbiome in obese and lean twins. Nature, 457(7228), 480-4.

7. Turnbaugh, P. J., Ley, R. E., Mahowald, M. A., Magrini, V., Mardis, E. R., & Gordon, J. I. (2006). An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest. Nature, 444(7122), 1027-31.

Kipple and Things: How to Hoard and Why Not To Mean

by Daniel Rourke

This paper (more of an essay, really) was originally delivered at the Birkbeck Uni/London Consortium ‘Rubbish Symposium‘, 30th July 2011

Living at the very limit of his means, Philip K. Dick, a two-bit, pulp sci-fi author, was having a hard time maintaining his livelihood. It was the 1950s and Dick was living with his second wife, Kleo, in a run-down apartment in Berkley, California, surrounded by library books Dick later claimed they “could not afford to pay the fines on.”

In 1956, Dick had a short story published in a brand new pulp magazine: Satellite Science Fiction. Entitled, Pay for the Printer, the story contained a whole host of themes that would come to dominate his work 

On an Earth gripped by nuclear winter, humankind has all but forgotten the skills of invention and craft. An alien, blob-like, species known as the Biltong co-habit Earth with the humans. They have an innate ability to ‘print’ things, popping out copies of any object they are shown from their formless bellies. The humans are enslaved not simply because everything is replicated for them, but, in a twist Dick was to use again and again in his later works, as the Biltong grow old and tired, each copied object resembles the original less and less. Eventually everything emerges as an indistinct, black mush. The short story ends with the Biltong themselves decaying, leaving humankind on a planet full of collapsed houses, cars with no doors, and bottles of whiskey that taste like anti-freeze.

In his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick gave a name to this crumbling, ceaseless, disorder of objects: Kipple. A vision of a pudding-like universe, in which obsolescent objects merge, featureless and identical, flooding every apartment complex from here to the pock-marked surface of Mars.

“No one can win against kipple,”

Dick wrote:

“It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

In kipple, Dick captured the process of entropy, and put it to work to describe the contradictions of mass-production and utility. Saved from the wreckage of the nuclear apocalypse, a host of original items – lawn mowers, woollen sweaters, cups of coffee – are in short supply. Nothing ‘new’ has been made for centuries. The Biltong must produce copies from copies made of copies – each replica seeded with errors will eventually resemble kipple.

Objects; things, are mortal; transient. The wrist-watch functions to mark the passing of time, until it finally runs down and becomes a memory of a wrist-watch: a skeleton, an icon, a piece of kipple. The butterfly emerges from its pupae in order to pass on its genes to another generation. Its demise – its kipple-isation – is programmed into its genetic code. A consequence of the lottery of biological inheritance. Both the wrist-watch and the butterfly have fulfilled their functions: I utilised the wrist-watch to mark time: the ‘genetic lottery’ utilised the butterfly to extend its lineage. Entropy is absolutely certain, and pure utility will always produce it.

In his book Genesis, Michel Serres, argues that objects are specific to the human lineage. Specific, not because of their utility, but because they indicate our drive to classify, categorise and order:

“The object, for us, makes history slow.”

Before things become kipple, they stand distinct from one another. Nature seems to us defined in a similar way, between a tiger and a zebra there appears a broad gap, indicated in the creatures’ inability to mate with one another; indicated by the claws of the tiger and the hooves of the zebra. But this gap is an illusion, as Michel Foucault neatly points out inThe Order of Things:

“…all nature forms one great fabric in which beings resemble one another from one to the next…”

The dividing lines indicating categories of difference are always unreal, abstracted from the ‘great fabric’ of nature, and understood through human categories isolated in language.

Humans themselves are constituted by this great fabric: our culture and language lie on the same fabric. Our apparent mastery over creation comes from one simple quirk of our being: the tendency we exhibit to categorise, to cleave through the fabric of creation. For Philip K. Dick, this act is what separates us from the alien Biltong. They can merely copy, a repeated play of resemblance that with each iteration moves away from the ideal form. Humans, on the other hand, can do more than copy. They can take kipple and distinguish it from itself, endlessly, through categorisation and classification. Far from using things until they run down, humans build new relations, new meanings, carefully and slowly from the mush. New categories produce new things, produce newness. At least, that’s what Dick – a Platonic idealist – believed.

At the end of Pay for the Printer, a disparate group camp in the kipple-ised, sagging pudding of a formless city. One of the settlers has with him a crude wooden cup he has apparently cleaved himself with an even cruder, hand-made knife:

“You made this knife?” Fergesson asked, dazed.

“I can’t believe it. Where do you start? You have to have tools to make this. It’s a paradox!”

In his essay, The System of Collecting, Jean Baudrillard makes a case for the profound subjectivity produced in this apparent newness.

Once things are divested of their function and placed into a collection, they:

“…constitute themselves as a system, on the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together [their] world, [their] personal microcosm.”

The use-value of objects gives way to the passion of systematization, of order, sequence and the projected perfection of the complete set.

In the collection, function is replaced by exemplification. The limits of the collection dictate a paradigm of finality; of perfection. Each object – whether wrist-watch or butterfly – exists to define new orders. Once the blue butterfly is added to the collection it stands, alone, as an example of the class of blue butterflies to which the collection dictates it belongs. Placed alongside the yellow and green butterflies, the blue butterfly exists to constitute all three as a series. The entire series itself then becomes the example of all butterflies. A complete collection: a perfect catalogue. Perhaps, like Borges’ Library of Babel, or Plato’s ideal realm of forms, there exists a room somewhere with a catalogue of everything. An ocean of examples. Cosmic disorder re-constituted and classified as a finite catalogue, arranged for the grand cosmic collector’s singular pleasure.

The problem with catalogues is that absolutely anything can be collected and arranged. The zebra and the tiger may sit side-by-side if the collector is particularly interested in collecting mammals, striped quadrupeds or – a particularly broad collection – things that smell funny. Too much classification, too many cleaves in the fabric of creation, and order once again dissolves into kipple. Disorder arises when too many conditions of order have been imposed.

William H. Gass reminds us of the linguistic conjunction ‘AND’ an absolute necessity in the cleaving of kipple into things:

“[W]e must think of chaos not as a helter-skelter of worn-out and broken or halfheartedly realised things, like a junkyard or potter’s midden, but as a fluid mishmash of thinglessness in every lack of direction as if a blender had run amok. ‘AND’ is that sunderer. It stands between. It divides light from darkness.”

Collectors gather things about them in order to excerpt a mastery over the apparent disorder of creation. The collector attains true mastery over their microcosm. The narcissism of the individual extends to the precise limits of the catalogue he or she has arranged about them. Without AND language would function as nothing but pudding, each clause, condition or acting verb leaking into its partner, in an endless series. But the problem with AND, with classes, categories and order is that they can be cleaved anywhere.

Jorge Luis Borges exemplified this perfectly in a series of fictional lists he produced throughout his career. The most infamous, Michel Foucault claimed influenced him to write The Order of Things, the list refers to a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which:

Animals are divided into

1. belonging to the Emporer,
2. embalmed,
3. tame,
4. sucking pigs,
5. sirens,
6. fabulous,
7. stray dogs,
8. included in the present classification,
9. frenzied,
10. innumerable,
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. et cetera,
13. having just broken the water pitcher,
14. that from a long way off look like flies…

In writing about his short story The Aleph, Borges also remarked:

“My chief problem in writing the story lay in… setting down of a limited catalog of endless things. The task, as is evident, is impossible, for such a chaotic enumeration can only be simulated, and every apparently haphazard element has to be linked to its neighbour either by secret association or by contrast.”

No class of things, no collection, no cleaving of kipple into nonkipple can escape the functions of either “association OR contrast…” The lists Borges compiled are worthy of note because they remind us of the binary contradiction classification always comes back to:

• Firstly, that all collections are arbitrary
• and Secondly, that a perfect collection of things is impossible, because, in the final instance there is only pudding “…in every lack of direction…”

Human narcissism – our apparent mastery over kipple – is an illusion. Collect too many things together, and you re-produce the conditions of chaos you tried so hard to avoid. When the act of collecting comes to take precedence over the microcosm of the collection, when the differentiation of things begins to break down: collectors cease being collectors and become hoarders. The hoard exemplifies chaos: the very thing the collector builds their catalogues in opposition to.

To tease apart what distinguishes the hoarder, from the collector, I’d like to introduce two new characters into this arbitrary list I have arranged about myself. Some of you may have heard of them, indeed, they are the brothers whom the syndrome of compulsive hoarding is named after.

Brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer lived in a mansion at 2078, Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Sons of wealthy parents – their father was a respected gynaecologist, their mother a renowned opera singer – the brothers both attended Columbia University, where Homer studied law and Langley engineering. In 1933 Homer suffered a stroke which left him blind and unable to work at his law firm. As Langley began to devote his time entirely to looking after his helpless brother, both men became locked inside the mansion their family’s wealth and prestige had delivered. Over the following decade or so Langley would leave the house only at night. Wandering the streets of Manhattan, collecting water and provisions to sustain his needy brother, Langley’s routines became obsessive, giving his life a meaning above and beyond the streets of Harlem that were fast becoming run-down and decrepid.

But the clutter only went one way: into the house.

On March 21^st 1947 the New York Police Department received an anonymous tip-off that there was a dead body in the Collyer mansion. Attempting to gain entry, police smashed down the front-door, only to be confronted with a solid wall of newspapers (which, Langley had claimed to reporter’s years earlier his brother “would read once his eyesight was restored”.) Finally, after climbing in through an upstairs window, a patrolman found the body of Homer – now 65 years old – slumped dead in his kippleised armchair. In the weeks that followed, police removed one hundred and thirty tons of rubbish from the house. Langley’s body was eventually discovered crushed and decomposing under an enormous mound of junk, lying only a few feet from where Homer had starved to death. Crawling through the detritus to reach his ailing brother, Langley had triggered one of his own booby traps, set in place to catch any robbers who attempted to steal the brother’s clutter.

The list of objects pulled from the brother’s house reads like a Borges original. FromWikipedia:

Items removed from the house included baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, a kerosene stove, a child’s chair, more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of an old Model T Ford, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, 14 pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines.

Finally: There was also a great deal of rubbish.

A Time Magazine obituary from April 1947 said of the Collyer brothers:

“They were shy men, and showed little inclination to brave the noisy world.”

In a final ironic twist of kippleisation, the brothers themselves became mere examples within the system of clutter they had amassed. Langley especially had hoarded himself to death. His body, gnawed by rats, was hardly distinguishable from the kipple that fell on top of it. The noisy world had been replaced by the noise of the hoard: a collection so impossible to conceive, to cleave, to order, that it had dissolved once more to pure, featureless kipple.

Many hoarders achieve a similar fate to the Collyer brothers: their clutter eventually wiping them out in one final collapse of systemic disorder.

But what of Philip K. Dick....?

In the 1960s, fuelled by amphetamines and a debilitating paranoia, Dick wrote 24 novels, and hundreds of short stories, the duds and the classics mashed together into an indistinguishable hoard. UBIK, published in 1966, tells of a world which is itself degrading. Objects regress to previous forms, 3D televisions turn into black and white tube-sets, then stuttering reel projectors; credit cards slowly change into handfuls of rusted coins, impressed with the faces of Presidents long since deceased. Turning his back for a few minutes a character’s hover vehicle has degraded to become a bi-propeller airplane.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, another stand-out novel from the mid 60s, begins with this memo, “dictated by Leo Bulero immediately on his return from Mars”:

“I mean, after all; you have to consider we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it. You get me?”

 

by Daniel Rourke

Deep Vanilla

by Jenny White

Gus Rancatori is a Renaissance man who owns an ice cream parlor. Cambridge-based Toscanini’s is a hangout where you’re as likely to run into a Nobel Laureate in chemistry and a molecular foodie as a furniture maker or novelist. One day I met a dapper man with gray hair who had been a physicist at MIT and gave it all up to start a business making high-end marshmallows. Tosci’s staff is memorably pierced and talented. One of the managers, Adam Tessier, is a published poet and essayist who last year filmed a customer a day reading a Shakespeare sonnet. Some scoopers are music majors, hard-core rockers who play for bands with names like Toxic Narcotic. You might receive your khulfee cone from the hands of the next big pop star. Gus Rancatori circulates through the wood-paneled room beneath displays of art, the host at a rotating feast of words, ideas and, above all, ice cream. Gus is discreet, but has some favorite customer stories.

A very famous MIT type used to attempt to pay with his own hand-drawn funny money and then he would launch into a lecture about the symbolic value of money, which I tried to squelch by claiming to remember that class from Freshman Economics.  If you asked to help him, he would say, "I'm beyond help."  When another MIT student found out that I didn't have a computer he offered to give me one, so strong were his evangelic instincts and also, like many of the customers, he was exceptionally generous.

With one hand Gus makes what The New York Times has called "the best ice cream in the world”; the other takes the cultural pulse of the city.

 He has published a mini-memoir, Ice Cream Man, and writes a column for The Atlantic  -- close observations on what we can know about society through ice cream.

Customers! They're so nice. They're so weird. Some of them are so naked. We get a big cross section.  We're near MIT but we're also in Central Square near a housing project. We get people who don't speak English because they're incredibly smart and have come to MIT and we get people who don't speak English because they just snuck into this country. We get people from nominally Spanish-speaking countries who don't speak Spanish. I like to hire people who can speak other languages. It can help in the store. 

We often discuss the customers after a long night and I think most of us would agree that some of the most difficult customers are suburbanites who come into town on weekends or during the summer and are a little lost.  Maybe I'm seeing anxious tourist behavior, but it often seems that adults from the suburbs like to play a little stupid when they're out of their element, "Look at this, honey, they have Saffron ice cream!"  Any customer is capable of asking a question that is not really what they want to ask. "What's in the Goat Cheese Brownie?" really means, "Can I taste the Goat Cheese Brownie?"  A customer once pointed at the chocolate ice cream and asked if it was vanilla.  My playful brother, Joe, said, "Yes.  It is."  The customer thought for a minute and said, "I thought vanilla was white."  My brother feigned surprise and slapped his forehead, "My God. You're right.  That is chocolate."  When customers arrive while we're mopping the floor and all the chairs atop tables, they ask "Are you closed?"  Obviously we're closed, but they want to ask, "Can we still get something?" and if it is at all possible we try to serve them something, but something to go, so we can finish cleaning and go home ourselves. 

Time takes on a cultural dimension in the shop, as people develop a circadian rhythm in which the cosmos aligns with their stomach: I can do this important thing here and only here, now and only now, and I need French Toast to do it.

Some customers are like Japanese trains.  Every morning at 8:45 AM they get a double espresso or every night they come to study and begin with a White Peony tea.  One customer only drank nocciola frappes and when he died suddenly his friends at MIT all came to the store after a memorial service and drank nocciola frappes.  An accountant often arrives just before we stop serving weekend brunch and is upset when we are out of breakfast items. "This is very important to my week.  Why do you always run out of French Toast?" Another was indignant when we asked people to leave after our 11 PM closing. We need to get home, catch a bus or subway, or simply lock the doors to keep any night goblins outside. Many people do not like our policy prohibiting the use of computers for a few hours every week.  People think we are intentionally serving unusual flavors they like when they're not in the store; we make Cocoa Rum Chip every other week, but they only come occasionally.  We try to set aside special flavors for special people, but customers also have "commitment issues" about ice cream flavors.

For the IgNobel Awards, an internationally broadcast spoof of the Nobel Prizes held at Harvard University, Gus developed a new ice cream flavor as homage to the discovery by 2007 IgNobel Chemistry Prize winner, Mayu Yamamoto, that you can extract vanillin from cow dung. (Gus admitted that his recipe for Yum-a-Moto Vanilla Twist did not include poop.)  When I pointed out to Gus that he treats ice cream the way a novelist regards a blank page, he responded,

The idea of ice cream as a blank page might be very appropriate.  I think about many things but it is easy for any idea to slip across the surface of my mind and end up as an ice cream flavor.  Flavors come about from mistakes and misunderstandings.  Ginger Snap Molasses was the result of wordplay.  Steve's Ice Cream made Ginger Molasses and I wanted to get the cookie, the word "snap" and the idea of that snap into the flavor or at least flavor name.  Black Bottom Pie came about while reading a cookbook one morning when I should have been getting to work. Jeremiah Tower, the first chef at Chez Panisse, described a favorite dessert from Alabama and I realized I had all the ingredients but should probably invert everything.  So instead of making a chocolate rum pie with a ginger snap crust, I made a Chocolate Rum ice cream containing pieces of ginger snap cookies.  I have a lot of curiosity and even a food as simple as ice cream can provide a large playing field.

Running rough-and-tumble on the playing field of food, fun, and social analysis, Gus, together with the  anthropologist Merry “Corky” White, puts on a semi-underground annual food film festival that in its execution itself becomes a piece of performance art. Graduate students from Harvard and MIT volunteer their technical and lugging skills. The festival uses scavenged equipment and university rooms opportunistically acquired for that evening’s showing. Sometimes the films are shown in a room repurposed from a small swimming pool, chairs set inside the tiled chin-height walls. While watching the movie, you imagine Harvard men in knee-length bathing suits taking bracing morning constitutionals.

The films are usually accompanied by a speaker reflecting its theme, and Corky, an accomplished cook, makes film-appropriate food. After “Ratatouille”, the animated movie about a rat assisting a young Parisian from beneath his chef’s hat, the food critic Corby Kummer regaled the audience with stories from the field, but what the audience saw was the snooty food critic in the film, to whom Kummer bore a remarkable resemblance. Then Corky served up samples of ratatouille. When Gus and Corky realized the series was attracting a covey of attendees who skipped the movie and came just for the food, the series went even further underground in a game of cat and mouse (or rat) with the film grazers.

Food and drama embrace on screen and off. “The Kings of Pastry” is a documentary that follows three pastry chefs in the grueling competition for France’s most prestigious pastry title. Some of the men broke down under the pressure, their enormous sugar confections toppled, lifelong dreams ground to sugar dust. The audience in the borrowed Harvard room was tense; in the film, the judges were about to announce the winners. Just then there was a commotion at the door; members of the student shooting club claimed to have booked the room and demanded that we surrender it immediately. But we all remained in our seats, eyes glued to the drama on the screen, our noses twitching at the platter of Corky's cream puffs waiting on the table.

What is the secret of this enthusiasm for food -- not just for nurturance, but as a philosophical platform and for “deep play”?

The mysteries of ice cream?  Moving past the maternal link I think the fundamental appeal of ice cream is juvenile.  It is a food you get to play with and is actually improved by that combined stirring-melting spoon business.  As you soften the ice cream it warms.  Cold numbs taste buds so warming up the ice cream actually does make it taste better.  It is the little boy's equivalent of letting wine breathe. 

Playing with your food can be hedonistic and it can be dramatic, fusing our passions in one grand gesture of denial. You cannot have my Dulche de Leche. You may not pass. One customer was mugged when he refused to surrender a pint of ice cream to teenage thieves. And on another occasion the police caught a fleeing thief after first bringing him to heel with a well-aimed Toscanini frappe.

(Photo credit: Merry White)

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Via All Things Pakistan: