It’s nine o’clock in the morning and I’ve got that damn stick in my mouth again. And it will be going back in each day for the rest of my life, lest I return to the hygiene practices of my youth, wherein I would forgo the brush, place a pillow of toothpaste under my tongue, and call it clean.
I’ve never liked brushing my teeth. Ok, yes, I can appreciate the feeling of a clean mouth, can conceptualize that one cannot happen without the other, but it hasn’t made me like the actual experience any more. When the brush touches the roof of my mouth with its thousand baby fingers, I wretch. If brushing teeth holds any value for me, it’s a metaphorical one, something about how spitting the frothy residue into the sink each morning serves to ritually prepare myself to reject anything that the day brings. And then later in the night to spit back up whatever the day managed to sneak past my defenses. Luckily, you don’t need to think about the taste of toothpaste to indulge in this metaphor.
Today though, I want to focus on what toothpaste actually tastes like. Earlier this morning I grabbed my roommate’s toothpaste, thinking that the taste of my own toothpaste might transport me back to the half-awake spell that I normally encounter it under, an infinitely less rousing version of Proust’s Madeleine. The first thing I notice is that it tastes… there’s no other word for it – spicy. There’s a slight burning sensation when it meets my gums. The longer it sits in the carriage of my mouth, the weaker the sensation becomes, as if the cleaner my mouth gets, the less the toothpaste burns. I am reminded of Carolyn Korsmeyer and her assertion that tasting is a way of knowing; I think about how this sensation of heat in my mouth is a message, communicating that my mouth is becoming clean. It’s a particular sort of metaphor, one delivered through taste, turning my mouth into an overgrown forest floor and casting the toothpaste as the gentle wildfire that moves through and cleanses.
What’s concerning about this oral metaphor is that it is ultimately a lie. The compound that creates this sensation in the toothpaste is menthol, an inactive ingredient used only to impart this sensation and unrelated to the compounds responsible for the actual cleansing. The burning has nothing to do with the cleaning. I think about how, as an infant, the mouth is the central locus of understanding – an object enters a baby’s mouth and it leaves with its properties all the more understood. Industrial technology is exploiting this way of knowing, rewiring it. Our senses are losing their ability to reflect the world as it is, in the case of mentholated toothpaste as much as in the case of gray salmon dyed pink to appear healthy. As sensory experience is hacked, our senses become less reliable reflections of the world around us.
As the burning sensation starts to dull, it becomes harder to determine what it is I am tasting. I slow down the movement of the toothbrush against my teeth so I can focus more clearly. Normally I brush my teeth rapid-fire. The slower my body moves, the more the sensory experience shifts from proprioception to taste and feel. In a way, throwing my wrist back and forth is a way of distracting myself from the taste of the toothpaste and the feeling of the brush against the walls of my mouth.
I wonder if this is true with all reflexive actions, that the two experiences – in the case of brushing teeth, excavating the mouth and having the mouth be excavated – are in competition with each other for attention. When the focus is on my mouth being excavated, it feels like I am being violated, that I am mistreating myself in some way, the victim of an uneven power dynamic. When I focus instead on brushing my teeth as something that I am enacting, I feel virtuous. Like other virtues that draw inspiration from Aristotle and Plato, this virtue comes from muzzling my “lesser” senses – that of taste and feel. I wonder what it feels like to brush the teeth of a child, someone too young to do it themselves. Whether you feel violative or virtuous.
I spit the frothy stuff up. This is the best part, and it is the saving grace of toothpaste that you get to do this again and again, how a pea-sized drop of toothpaste multiplies itself in the cocoon of your mouth into so many different expulsions. Each time you spit it up, you get to express your disgust for toothpaste. I would never swallow that. An old professor of mine asked us to question why people consume all sorts of sensory experience with a sense of irony, but never ones related to taste. Her theory was that putting something in your body served as a way of endorsing it. It’s nice that in completing the experience of brushing your teeth, you’re given the chance to reject it. This is what I will savor going forward, the part of the experience after I have fulfilled my moral duty to be clean when I get to performatively spit out the stuff of unknowable industrial poison.
Elijah Freiman is a second-year at Oberlin College majoring in Food Studies. He can be found in Tank Coop eating food out of a large pan. It is his dream to one day taste raw milk. His favorite poem about food might be Onions by William Matthews.
