How do smoking rates relate to food trends?

Every six months or so, after reading or watching a lot of Sherlock Holmes, I get the urge to smoke a pipe. I generally smoke a couple bowls, remember that I don't particularly enjoy it, and then store the pipe again.

During my most recent episode, I became particularly annoyed with the degree to which smoking utterly destroys the sense of taste. I could hardly discern even the strongest flavors for more than an hour after I'd put the pipe down.

This got me to thinking about the relationship between smoking and food:

1. Smokers famously weigh less than others, a fact that's generally credited to the effects of nicotine and other chemicals. I'd guess, however, that smokers also tend to eat less because they've destroyed their sense of taste and get less pleasure from food.

2. Restaurants have, in general, increased the intensity of the flavor in their dishes over the past few decades, a period that has seen smoking rates halve. At first this struck me as counterintuitive. Shouldn't flavors grow more subtle as a society's tastebuds become more sensitive? Then I decided that perhaps chefs didn't even bother back when fifty percent of men (who paid the bills) were smoking.

3. Perhaps the terrible reputation of mid-century cuisine stems from the fact that many chefs and many restaurant critics were themselves smokers. If so, how could smokers with dead tongues not get crowded out by non-smokers who could actually taste things? Yes, a lot of people smoked fifty years ago, but it was never even half the adult population.

Review: Breaking Bad, Season 5: Making a Monster?

Breaking Bad attempts to portray, step by step, a good family man's gradual descent into evil and his sleazy partner's gradual salvation. Nearly every review claims it succeeds brilliantly. Every viewer I know agrees.

They're all wrong.

Don't get me wrong. Breaking Bad rocks, but it still misses the mark it set for itself.

(If you haven't seen the first 4.5 seasons, stop reading and go watch the show. The rest of this piece abounds with spoilers.)

The best argument for Walter White's slow moral decline juxtaposes Season 1, when Walt refused to kill a man in self defense, with Season 4, when Walt happily endangered an innocent child to regain Jesse's allegiance. What a vivid change!

Except, of course, that the argument ignores Walt's trade.

Walt — even the "good Walt" of Season 1 — cooks meth. Meth kills people and ruins lives. Walt's super-pure meth doubtless kills even more people, including innocent children. And Walt is smart enough to realize this from day 1.

He is, in other words, a cheerful child murderer by the first episode.

If the show's creators had really wanted to illustrate a slow decline, they needed to choose a lesser criminal enterprise: marijuana, gambling, anything where Walt's day-to-day conduct, rather than his trade itself, would be the only thing that could make him truly evil.

As things stand, with Walt making meth, the only difference between early-Walt and late-Walt is that late-Walt is honest with himself and treats the people he knows with the same malice as the strangers he murders.

The same, of course, applies to Jesse in reverse. Jesse's bold stand for the kids that Gus exploited was just nonsense. How can you castigate Gus for using some kids as pushers when you kill far more kids with the meth you make?

I simply cannot understand how the show's creators think they are writing a show about moral transformation or how others believe they are watching one.

The only possible moral arc I see is in Walt's motivations. He began the series by murdering people to provide for her family. By Season 5, he murdered innocent people to aggrandize himself. I suppose that's somewhat worse, but, when you're murdering innocent people by the score, motives matter little.