One of many fantastic charts in Nik Sharma’s cookbook The Flavor Equation is a table titled Food Mouthfeel Categories. “Some scientists classify us by our preference for different food textures,” he writes — chewers! crunchers! suckers! smooshers!
Page 31 in Nik Sharma’s The Flavor Equation lists four food mouthfeel categories: chewers, crunchers, suckers, and smooshers.
The reason why we can even ponder whether we’re a chewer vs. a smoosher is because of somatosensory receptors, i.e. specialized cells in specialized organs like our mouths, but also our eyes, ears, noses, and some organs inside our bodies. “Some of these [cells], the mechanoreceptors, sense when food touches the mouth, the pressure the weight of a heavy liquid such as oil or a piece of food presses against our tongue, the texture of a ruffled chip or waffle, the sponginess of a slice of bread, and the fizz of bubbles of carbon dioxide trapped inside beer or champagne.”
While I’m a fan of chewing, crunching, sucking, and smooshing, at the moment I identify most with crunchers and chewers. My desire to bite down on something is heightened when I’m stressed or tired, which I have been lately. (Crunchers and chewers — the most likely to have firsthand experience with TMJ!)
This has been a month of taxes and phone replacements and an unforeseen hectic couple of weeks at work. I am in an overall uninspired but familiar snacking place, full of popcorn and apples and clumpy granola and hard pretzels and dried mango and chewy oatmeal cookies and lots and lots and lots of nuts. Oh, and last week I bought a bag of Fritos for the first time in forever. I’m snacking standing in the kitchen, staring at the wall. But my mechanoreceptors are engaged and interested.
Right before I ate the last chewy oatmeal cookie.
I’m not alone in chewing through stress and worry and tiredness, obviously. I think of Fox Mulder with his sunflower seeds, and every NBA player who is currently intent on gnawing his mouthguard in half (it is the NBA Playoffs! the most wonderful time of the year!). Famously orally fixated Steph Curry has made his mouthguard habit such a part of his game that the Bay Area’s NBC channel went deep on basketball players who chew.
I’ve seen some advice that chewing can somehow enhance attention and help manage anxiety and even depression, but a recent meta-analysis that’s cited in some general audience articles has been retracted. All I know is that at some point in high school I absorbed the idea that chewing gum could help you concentrate, so I started chewing gum during math tests. Many years later, I now own an assortment of facial massaging thingies and regularly fascia-floss my neck because I have persistent jaw tightness. Oh well! I have said it before, but I would never have finished architecture school were it not for Haribo.
All that chewing was covering up some stuff, sure, and helping me barrel through other internal signals when I needed a break. But it also carried me through an intense, busy, joyful time, a time when I met some of my best friends, and when I felt more intellectually alight than I ever had before. I smell a whiff of that old expectant, tingly energy with spring in full bloom.
I think a lot about how we’ve made snacking, like so much of eating, into an immoral activity. We have to earn it, or it has to nourish us nutritionally. But sometimes we snack to distract those mechanoreceptors so we can carry on with whatever it is we need to do. Sometimes a snack is a distraction or an outlet. Sometimes it is just pleasure, the pleasure of a Frito curl shattering onto the tongue, or a bit of dried apricot squidging between the teeth. Sometimes it is the thing that keeps us alert enough to finish the damn draft.
With my history of disordered eating, I have feared this tactile rather than nutritional need, rejected the chewer and cruncher in me. But now, I look at this month and everything I got to do and the people I got to spend time with, and while I know I don’t want to be in this zone forever, I am thankful to have had this crunchy-chewy month. Besides, I don’t have time to fix myself a precious feast. The game is about to start. The mouth guards are out, they are not safe, and god, I’m so happy it’s the playoffs.
Snacks
+ Go Knicks.
+ If you’re on Instagram and don’t yet follow Nik Sharma (author of The Flavor Equation, Veg-Table, and Season) — do! With a background in molecular biology (!), he’s one of my favorite recipe developers and cookbook authors, he’s constantly debunking myths and explaining why we cook in certain ways — and posting important updates about Paddington (just click) — AND he writes a great newsletter.
+ I was a guest on WNYC’s All Of It for Earth Day and on air used the phrase “farters of the animal world,” but otherwise it went okay!
Today I learned I'm a smoosher and a chewer