I Have Stopped Tasting It

Tonight we are making buttered noodles with garlic and parsley, and there are four ingredients and one of them is water.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put a pot of water on and salt it until it tastes like the sea, which is the single most important instruction in this entire article. Cook whatever pasta is in the house. While it cooks, melt a generous amount of butter in a wide pan over low heat with three cloves of garlic, sliced thin, and keep it gentle so the garlic goes pale gold and never brown. Keep a mug of the pasta water. Move the pasta straight into the pan with a good splash of that water and toss it hard for a minute, which turns the butter and the starch into a sauce that coats everything. Off the heat, black pepper, parsley if there is any, and cheese if there is cheese. It feeds two, it costs almost nothing, and done properly it is one of the best things a person can eat.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the noodles.

It is a question, and I would like you to actually try to answer it.

What did you eat last night?

Not what you usually eat. Last night, specifically. And if the answer arrives slowly, or arrives as a guess, or does not arrive at all, then you are the person this was written for.

You eat in front of the television most nights. The food goes in, and it is fine, and forty minutes later the plate is empty and there is no memory of the meal anywhere in you, because your attention was somewhere else the entire time.

The verse that asks for one specific sense

There is a line in Psalm 34 that asks for something surprisingly physical.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. (Psalm 34:8, King James Version)

Taste. Not think about, not consider, not believe in. He picks the one sense that cannot be done at a distance, and that requires a person to actually be present in a body with a thing in front of them.

You cannot taste something absentmindedly. That is the entire nature of tasting. A person who is elsewhere does not taste, they only swallow, and the psalm chose that verb on purpose because it is a verb about attention.

You are invited to be present rather than merely fed, and God has never once handed somebody a good thing and expected them to miss it. Psalm 34:8 asks for the one sense that requires a person to be in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at seven in the evening.

You have not lost the ability to enjoy anything, and heaven has never once written a person off for a numb season. It is written that we are to taste and see that the Lord is good, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the garlic is going gold.

What the screen is taking

Now let me be careful about this, because I am not going to lecture anybody about television.

The screen is not the villain here and giving it up is not the assignment. Most people eat in front of something most of the time, and it is often good, and there are evenings when a person genuinely needs to not be alone with their own thoughts for forty minutes.

But there is a cost and it is worth naming. Attention is single. It cannot be in two places, and when it is on the screen it is not on the food, and the food goes past unregistered.

You have not lost the ability to enjoy anything, and a numb stretch has never once been a permanent condition. Psalm 34:8 asks for the one sense that cannot be done at a distance, which is the written word and not my optimism, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person back into the room.

And over years that adds up to something specific: a person eats roughly a thousand meals a year and remembers almost none of them, and one of the ordinary reliable pleasures of a human life quietly stops being available.

Not tasting your dinner is not a verdict on anything at all. It is attention being spent somewhere else.

You are not broken, and God has never once considered a numb stretch a failure of gratitude. The passage invites a person into a sense rather than accusing them of missing it, and the Spirit of God is the one who returns something that was not lost, only unattended.

You have been fed a thousand times a year and present for almost none of it, and nobody has ever pointed that out. Psalm 34 is written by a man who had been genuinely afraid and who calls people back into the physical present, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that in an ordinary kitchen.

Three mouthfuls with nothing else on

Here is the practical part, and it is deliberately three mouthfuls rather than a whole meal.

Cook the noodles. Sit down at a table, or anywhere that is not in front of the screen, and eat the first three mouthfuls with nothing else happening at all.

Three. That is the whole ask. After that, put the television on if you want it, and finish the meal however you like, and I mean that without any hidden disapproval in it.

The reason three works is that it is short enough to be possible and long enough to notice something. Salt, butter, the sweetness that garlic gets when it is kept pale, the black pepper. That is a real experience and it is genuinely good and it costs almost nothing, and it has been going past you unread for a long time.

You are permitted three minutes of your own dinner, and God has never once made presence an advanced spiritual exercise. Psalm 34:8 asks for a taste rather than for a discipline, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes three mouthfuls into the beginning of something coming back.