We Live in Context

A story of five salts

Let’s talk about Science.

Wait, no, let’s talk about science.

Wait, no, let’s talk about the scientific method.

Which one? Oh, uh…

Okay, let’s talk about the process of exploration, about learning new things, about how we learn new things. About ourselves. About our world.

There are three tools people often employ when trying to explore and learn something new: isolation, abstraction, and extrapolation. These are very useful tools. But they have their issues.

The trouble begins with the need to isolate. If you’re going to do any kind of useful exploration, you have to start by finding something to explore. The deeper you want to explore that thing, the more you need to ensure you are exploring that thing and not some other thing that happens to be nearby. Exploration of this sort is inherently myopic. By isolating the thing you want to see, you blind yourself to its context. And here’s the thing: we live in context. You can isolate a frog from its pond for study, in fact, you have to if you want to be sure you are studying the frog and not its habitat. But this stems from an interesting presumption: that the frog and its habitat are in fact two things and not one.

If you want to see how a hand grasps, and you believe you must isolate the hand (which would be reasonable), you may begin by amputating it and find, to your dismay, that it simply does not grasp at all. You may conclude from your study, then, that “hands do not grasp”. Of course, this seems silly. It is. But why is it that the frog example seems normal and the amputated hands example seems corrupt?

I don’t have an answer. I will leave it to you for consideration.

Let me tell you a story about salt. I had the pleasure of guest teaching a class not too long ago. The class was about how we live through the seasons; seasons of year, seasons of life. I was teaching about nutrition and Chinese medicine. In Chinese medicine, Old Yin, the Water phase, is tied to the winter season and to the salty flavor. It was winter, so I was discussing salt. I thought it would be fun and informative to have the class taste some different salts and compare them. We normally think, “oh, it’s just salt” but there are many many many kinds of salt. I only had five but that would do.

So, I presented the group with the five salts. They were: grey sea salt, Himalayan pink salt, iodized table salt, flake finishing salt, and a fancy fine powder salt. I asked the class to try them, plain, one at a time and consider the flavors and textures. Were some saltier than others? Did they have interesting non-salt flavors to them? Etc.

The tasting was going fine. It was interesting to hear people talking about, really thinking about, something so mundane as salt. But then there was a hiccup. When it came time to taste the iodized table salt, as I poured it out onto the platter the group grimaced in concert. It smelled so vile that not a single student was willing to taste it. Instead, they asked if they could eat more of the fine powder salt.

Time went by and I hadn’t thought of this until just recently when I was reading a post by Adam Mastroianni and saw this footnote:

I was immediately reminded of the salt tasting. I thought to myself, “yes, people have tested the salt timing; Serious Eats had a long post about it” but also, “if iodized salt is so off-putting that my students wouldn’t even touch it, why could no one in the referenced study tell the difference with pickles?”

First of all, it’s not possible for me to tell whether the study is accurate or not. It reads, “To evaluate the effects of iodized and noniodized salt on the physical characteristics of pickles, a form was designed. The properties to be evaluated were: colour, consistency, taste and overall acceptability.” which is nice and all, but they don’t provide a sample of the form they designed and then only provide a table of mean results. They then say, “A hedonic scale was used by the testers to give a score for each sample. The average score of each sensory characteristic for every tester was calculated.” but I don’t see any averages in the study, only mean numbers.

In any case, I think the answer to the question of what separates these pickle tasters, my salt tasters, and Martha tasting noodles is context.

We don’t know who these pickle people were. We don’t know how the tasters were picked, what their backgrounds are, how many pickled carrots they ate as a child, nothing. We do know that “Ten days were needed so that every panelist could taste the 40 samples.” which I think is somewhat absurd. They only had 30 panelists, why did it take 10 days? They don’t say. I think it’s important, however, because moods and sensitivities — context — changes all the time. Did each taster taste different pickles each day or was the batch of tasters different each day? The study doesn’t say. Not only that, but since we don’t know these people’s proclivities and we only know the mean values from the study, we don’t get to see how individuals reacted. Did anyone refuse to eat a pickle because it smelled like iodine? The study doesn’t say. Maybe all 30 tasters grew up eating pickles made with iodized salt and were used to the taste? The study doesn’t say.

Now, in my class we were tasting raw salt. No veggies or spices to hide or alter flavors. Additionally, everyone in my class was being trained specifically to pay attention to their entire experience; they were sensitized and guided. They were not in a clinical setting. They were not filling out forms and being forced to pick numbers on a “hedonic scale”. They were providing feedback immediately by deciding not to eat nasty salt.

Something else. Smell makes up a large portion of taste. I’ve personally used iodized salt when making pasta in the past and it smelled bad. The pasta tasted worse, too. Not because it tasted bad. Because it smelled bad. Now, pickles are notoriously cold. Even a room-temperature pickle is significantly colder than a nice hot plate of pasta, and the thing about temperature is that the warmer something is, the more volatile chemicals get tossed into the air and lodge in our noses¹.

Which all leads me to ask: what about the people using the salt to make the pickles? The study says they weren’t clued in to the salt they were using; that the salt wasn’t labeled except as A and B. But what if it smelled bad? What if some of the pickle producers who “were asked to prepare mixed vegetable pickles and pickled cucumbers using their own traditional recipe” decided to use less of the nasty smelling iodized salt? They asked the producers to make two “identical batches” but don’t mention anything about actually confirming that the instruction was followed. They even say, “It is important to note that the traditional methods of pickle preparation were not consistent. The women who prepared the vegetables used different additives such as onions, pepper, garlic and cloves.”² Maybe the iodized batches got a little more pepper and garlic. It’s even possible that changes could have been made without intention to do so, considering how off the cuff most traditional cooking is.

I’m not saying this is what happened. But the possibility is there and the study seems to have done nothing to prevent it. The conclusion of the study, in my eyes, cannot be relied upon.

So, context. Cold pickles, hot pasta, raw salt, pickled vegetables, dry food, wet food, potential childhood iodine-related altercations, possible historical pickle-eating habits… there are too many variables to actually account for but if we ignore them, if we take the frog out of the pond, we don’t actually make these variables go away³.

Since we lose context when we isolate, when we then abstract a single concrete instance into something fuzzier (these people, on the mean, didn’t distinguish between pickle tastiness → pickles taste the same) and finally extrapolate from that abstraction into a general rule (pickles taste the same → iodine content doesn’t affect taste) we run the risk of being completely off base and are likely to get caught with our pants down when reality comes knocking.

One of my favorite sayings is:

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.⁴

And another is:

The dose-response curve is cohort-dependent.⁵

If I can take those two together and make something coherent out of them, it would be that if you take a frog out of its pond for study, you are no longer studying a pond frog. That doesn’t mean the study isn’t worth it. It certainly could be! But don’t be surprised if there are marked differences between pond frogs and study frogs, and please don’t conflate the two together.

Finally, if you’re concerned about iodine, just eat more seaweed and oysters. They taste a lot better than iodized salt. You could even put them in your pasta, if you wanted to, though I doubt pickled oysters would be very tasty. Then again, if they are… let me know.

1. The beer guys talk about it a lot.

2. It’s unclear to me whether this comment only applies to the pickled vegetables and not to the pickled cucumbers or whether it is an illustrative example that applies to all of the pickle recipes; they don’t provide the recipes used.

3. And don’t get me started on the statistical hat trick that is “controlling for variables”.

4. No, that’s not who said it first.

5. As far as I can tell, this one is mine alone (not the sentiment, perhaps, but the quote).