Synesthetic Cookery

By Leo Gura - October 11, 2024

I was studying synesthesia when I came across the following curious story:

A man who is able to taste colors sees a unique color for each type of food. So he invents recipes to maximize the taste of his colors. He will cook up a roasted chicken breast with strawberries and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Why this combination? Because each item in the recipe corresponds to the same color, say, dark blue, and he eats to maximize the taste of a specific shade. Imagine that when you eat chicken you experience dark blue. And if you stack that chicken with strawberries and vanilla ice cream you get the purest, strongest dark blue.

So this man is on a culinary quest to taste the most beautiful and delicious colors. Whereas the typical human distinguishes between about 5 shades of a color — sky blue, navy, sapphire, indigo, cobalt, etc — a typical synesthete will distinguish up to 30. So he can make 30 recipes to maximize the taste of 30 different blues.

Attending a dinner, one synesthete remarked that the chicken was not pointy enough for his liking, because he tastes geometric shapes and he likes the pointy ones.

There are over 30 different types of synesthesia, some as common as 4% of the population, some as rare as one in a million.

This gives you a little taste of the power of Consciousness.

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