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Falsifiable Italy.

Si sal evanuerit, in quo salietur? – Jesus

Dinner-time conversation in my house, as is custom for those who have already found wedded bliss, occasionally strays to the topic of personal solutions to our unwedded friends’ singledom. For one of our friends the solution seems obvious: “Mr. Darcy” – and why not have some fun and call him that? – “should just do more yoga. He should just make the rounds of all the NYC yoga studios, where there will be lots of cute liberal disposable-income women who look good in yoga pants, and isn’t that really all he wants?” “I told him that, but he’s found too often that a crazy factor that attaches to yoga – the ‘it’s so sad anyone has to die of cancer when they could’ve just drunk wheatgrass juice, which cures cancer in like three months but the Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-establishment won’t let you know that because chemotherapy is like the single largest business in America right now.’” “Oh,” Catherine replied, “so he wants falsifiable yoga chicks.”

She said it as if to say, “I give up, your friend has no chance” but I thought it was a good, workable goal.  I actually googled it, because I thought someone might have started a Falsifiable Yoga Studio, where the yoga instructors limited themselves to claims about yoga or life that could be substantiated, but I got zero results. Having a religious streak myself and hence having to deal with people who have religious beliefs, I do appreciate the problem. The world is an amazing place as it is, and it gains immeasurably in its mysteriousness and capacity to fill us up when allowed to be itself; whereas all our projections and fictions are far less interesting.

I feel the same way about writing about Italy: it’s a real place with real problems, and to reduce it to gastronomico-sexual-artistico la-la land does not interest me.

So my demons got roused when Catherine said, apropos of our first meal in Italy, “My God, even the http://iowacomicbookclub.com/s_ne.php salt tastes better here.”

Now I know that salt is salt – the salty part of it is just sodium chloride, and it’s the same everywhere. You can flavor salt and add silly little minerals and things but that’s not what makes it salty. Nothing but salt is salty. “If salt is not salty,” said Jesus, “how the hell will you salt anything?”

But I had to pause because – well, it Bondo did seem like the salt tasted better. And not like anything else – just particularly salty.

Now it may just be because it was warm and our bodies had lost some salt while sweating and so we craved the stuff. But it sure did taste nice. I put a pinch of it into my hand. It also looked different: it wasn’t like the big flaky sea-salt products, which always seem to me to just bounce off food anyway, and it wasn’t like the regularized factory-perfect salt cubes either. It was highly irregular: irregular as to size, and irregular as to shape, many of the fragments elongated into odd shards like daggers. Looking at it, it actually reminded me of the grains of the Roman bread I had next to my plate: in the bread could be seen all kinds of irregularities, large bits of chaff, much of it of the same elongated, dagger-like shape. The Italian mechanisms for grinding may produce a similar, nation-specific shape for both salt and wheat. It is also possible that this was some specially milled salt: it was just the salt that was in the shaker in the apartment we rented. We know nothing else about the stuff.

Looking at it I concluded that it was possible that the shape of the salt meant that it probably bounced less and stuck to food more, with the result that we were eating a bit more salt than we were used to. It certainly did taste good.

But who knows, perhaps falsifiability is impossible in Italy.

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