Why Are You Eating This?

I wanted to conduct an experiment and I needed a bag of musk sticks. I stood in the aisle at supermarket scanning the candy rack after doing an awkward dance around a lady pushing her cart along the shelves.

I grabbed the bag just as she passed me. She looked over her shoulder smiled and said "Good choice."

I smiled back. I knew what that was about. With my purchase she thought I was firing another salvo in a silent war that has been raging in Australia for a long time over these pink log-shaped candies.

When Aussies woke up in October of 2018 to discover that musk sticks along with Vegemite and witchetty grubs made it into Sweden's Disgusting Food Museum, many were surprised.

The shock was not related to the presence of Vegemite or witchery grubs but by musk sticks' inauspicious place among the world's most disgusting food. They couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand is why everyone else was so confused. Musk sticks are horrible candies.

Much Loved Musk

When a child goes in search for a sweet, nowhere else in the world do they think I want something soft, chalky and tastes strongly of cheap perfume... not smells, tastes.

Here you will find them at almost every child's birthday party especially if it's a girl's party with a pink motif.

Among Australian confectionery musk sticks are to Aussies what mints or butterscotch candies are everywhere else. Just basic candy, a bear bones no frills classic.

The supermarket chain I was standing in, Woolworths, sells roughly 24 million musk sticks per year. When their nearest competitor Coles stopped selling them in 2015 the outrage was so immediate and severe they hurried to put them back on the shelves.

The Experiment

So back to this experiment.

When my wife was still my girlfriend she woke up one morning sick and asked me to make her a Vegemite sandwich. This was my very first interaction with Vegemite and I should have been supervised.

I had obviously heard of it before thanks to that Men at Work song "Down Under" but never saw a jar in real life until I went into her cupboard. I thought it was to Australians as peanut butter would be to us so I smeared it on two slices of bread, lovingly placed it on a plate and walked it over to her.

But curiosity got the better of me and I bit off a corner. When the flavour hit me I gagged and apparently shouted, "Why are you eating this?"

I say apparently because when I tasted that salty, fermented mess my brain short circuited and I don't remember saying anything after.

She dismissed my disgust and during the ensuing discussion she proclaimed that when we have children they will not only eat Vegemite sandwiches but they will actually love it. Fast forward two years later our son was born and proved her right.

The love of Vegemite, like musk sticks, is a very Australian thing so I wanted to see if his taste buds were completely Aussie or if he retained any of the tastes my genetics would afford him.

The Results

My son is our resident candy expert. At four years old his rating scale is quite simple; "Yummy", "Not Yummy" and "Spicy" (which I believe means sour because he's never had spicy candy).

And the verdict?

Musk sticks are officially, "Not Yummy".

So What do Musk Sticks Have to Do with Hypersanity?

So this is going take a while for me to explain.

Hypersanity is a thing... but then again it's not.

What I mean is, it's not an accepted psychological term but it is a term or rather a concept that psychiatrists are aware of.

From what I understand (and that's very little), it is the idea that the average sane person isn't able to see reality for what it is. We (and yes I'm including myself among the sane) are bombarded everyday by millions upon millions of different bits of information from our environment.

We also from time to time (possibly more often than we realize) encounter experiences that may be traumatic or else challenge our world view to the point where it threatens to shake the foundation upon which we build our reality.

To protect ourselves from going crazier than a tube of cat poop we consciously or unconsciously handicap ourselves and limit what we perceive the world and life to be.

Hyper-sane people can't or don't do this. They see everything in our society for what it actually is, their perception cuts through all societal pretense.

For them the norms and mores of our society are like colored crape paper that hang over an ugly granite wall, thin and superficial dressing that attempts to hide a monolithic reality. They understand more and as a result operate on a different level then everyone else, so much so that the rest of society sees them as crazy.

Stick with Me a Little Longer

Let me offer an imperfect example to illustrate this. Imagine living in the neolithic era, before hand washing was a thing, and you somehow were not only aware of, but could actually see that there were billions of tiny microbes living on your hands, some of which could make you sick.

Your friend Ug catches you washing your hands in the river and inquires as to what you were doing. You explain to him what you were doing it, why you were doing it and why he and everyone else in the village should be doing it.

You're not a crazy person. In fact your ability to perceive these tiny creatures is remarkable and should be celebrated, but try explaining that to poor Ug who is now worrying about his friend seeing invisible minuscule animals all over his hands.

There is another example that I have seen used quite often that I don't understand but I will leave it here for those folks smarter than I am. It goes like this...

Insane people are broken clocks, unable to function in the way they are expected and unable to control the way they function.

Sane people are working clocks that function as they should and are aware of how they should function.

Hypersane people are the people who look at clocks. They are aware of the function of clocks on a scale that is incomprehensible to both working and broken clocks.

Thanks for Sticking Around

So basically the more sane a person is, the crazier they appear to everyone else.

In an article in Psychology Today, psychiatrist, philosopher and author of Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, Dr Neel Burton sums up how little of life the sane understand compared to the hypersane and does so beautifully when he says:

"(The sane) lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture — and all, ultimately, for fear of losing themselves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life — mysterious, magical life — slips through their fingers."

I believe the only way to explain the Australian love of musk sticks is to conclude that Aussies are hypersane. They get something the rest of us don't.

Maybe we have set up a mental block that doesn't allow us to appreciate the taste of $5.00 cologne. I mean, that's the only way to explain why these things still exist and don't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Musk sticks are omnipresent in Australia.

You can find them floating in creative cocktails...

reclining casually on cupcakes...

or part of some outlandish sugar laden monstrosity.

But look, I encourage you not to take my word for it. If I listened to people I would have never tried blue cheese, green olives, anchovies or red wine. I fully support the adventurous foodie in anyone willing to eat anything once.

If you can't find musk sticks where you are however I have a simple solution. Go into your nearest mall, walk up to a perfume counter and ask them to lightly spritz their cheapest perfume directly onto your tongue.