Though eating dairy is becoming more widespread in China these days, letting milk go bad and then adding salt and extra bacteria into the mix still sounds pathological.
Even very mild cheeses like cheddar or jack cheese are considered basically inedible, it seems — melting them on bread can help, but they rank very low on the taste totem pole, my Chinese friends tell me. Such strong differences of opinion about what's delicious and what's disgusting crop up whenever you begin to compare the way different cultures eat. Is Vegemite something you look forward to slathering on your toast in the morning?
Is beef tripe a savoury street food best eaten over noodles, or inedible rubber, tainted with a whiff of the latrine? In a sense, these contrasts shouldn't be that surprising: we learn from those around us what's worth eating and what should be avoided, and those categories vary between regions.
But somehow, the reminder that taste is so very relative, and so very learned, never fails to shock. In trying to characterise the broad differences between cultures' palates, nutritionists refer to sets of tastes that they rely on — the spices and flavourings that feel like home. The combination of tomato, garlic, oregano, and olive oil feels distinctively Italian, and a dish with dried shrimp, chilli peppers, ginger, and palm oil feels Brazilian. Chinese: soy sauce, rice wine, and ginger. Those tastes seem to describe a safe zone for eating.
Chinese tourists in Australia, surveyed on their meal preferences, remarked that eating non-Chinese food was often unsatisfying.
But these are general categories, describing what's most comfortable, not what's edible. At the more extreme end, cultural variations do sometimes describe a wholly different mode of understanding what makes food good. Fuchsia Dunlop, who writes about Chinese food and cooking, points out in her memoir Sharks' Fin and Sichuan Pepper that quite large realms of Chinese gastronomy have little intrinsic appeal to even an adventurous Western palate.
Goose intestine and sea cucumbers, for instance, when cooked just right, have no flavour and a texture like rubber tubing. Westerners love cheese, but many Chinese people find its taste disgusting Credit: Getty Images. You can certainly learn to enjoy such foods primarily for their texture, as Dunlop herself has.
But there is no denying that it's not the first thing on a Western gourmet's lips. As lighthearted as comparing tastes across cultures can be, there is more at stake than entertainment. Finding that what someone else consumes with abandon you cannot even bring to pass your lips can open a kind of void between you. Perhaps that void can be bridged if we confront the fact that a lot of what we hold dear is not particularly natural. For instance, the current thinking is that bitter taste receptors evolved to warn us off bitter things, which can be poisonous.
New babies have an immediate negative response to bitter tastes , a far cry from their response to sweet things. And yet, many people have learned to drink coffee every day, and dark chocolate's a favourite for gourmets.
Charles Zuker, a biologist who researches taste receptors at Columbia University, has said that he thinks that our current taste for bitter foods comes from a search for excitement and novelty — perhaps even danger. Salt is required for regulating the level of bodily fluids. Sour indicates the presence of spoiled food as we might find in old milk. Many toxic compounds found in plants produce a very bitter taste. And fat is another important source of energy as well as essential fatty acids.
Our sense of taste evolved to detect non-volatile molecules that we cannot smell. In contrast to the small number of basic tastes, humans are able to recognize more than 10, different odors. Unlike taste, humans are amazingly sensitive to smell. We sense the smell of food by two routes. Sniffing through our nose is called orthonasal smell, while the aroma released up through the back of our mouth into our nose when we chew and swallow food is called retronasal smell.
Orthonasal and retronasal smell appear to be processed in different parts of the brain. The taste and aroma of food are sensed through special receptors proteins on the surface of taste and olfactory cells in our mouth and nose. They provide a direct link between our brain and the outside world. Some of the receptors for taste are linked together, such as sweet and umami, which probably explains why we like foods that are both sweet and savory.
There are other interesting interactions. For example, salt helps mask bitterness although bitterness does not mask salt , and saltiness is reduced by fat. When it comes to health one very important recent discovery is that taste receptors, especially for sweet taste, are located throughout our gastrointestinal tract 5. Receptors for bitter and umami are also present 6. This brings us to genetic differences in our ability to taste food.
It has been known for many years that some people are extremely sensitive to the taste of bitter substances, while others perceive little or no bitter taste.
The terms super-taster and non-taster are attributed to Linda Bartoshuk, now a professor at the University of Florida, and a pioneer in studying the genetic differences of taste 9. Whereas super-tasters cringe at the taste of even the smallest amount of PROP, average tasters perceive only a faint bitter taste. The reason for this difference turns out to be fairly simple and obvious.
Super-tasters have many more visible taste papillae than tasters and non-tasters. This is illustrated in the figure below. This means they have many more taste cells with receptors for bitter taste. Super-tasters are also more sensitive to sweet, salty and umami tastes, but to a lesser extent It would seem that super-tasters might have an advantage over everyone else in their ability to taste and enjoy food.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. Because they are so sensitive to bitter they tend to be very picky eaters and dislike many foods. Average tasters tend to like most foods. They are not repelled by food that tastes overly bitter and unpleasant, yet their sense of taste is keen enough that they can enjoy most food without drowning it with salt or sriracha sauce.
Based on the following reported observations genetic variation in taste may affect food preference, diet and health Although consensus has not been reached on the significance of these observations 16 , numerous correlations of health outcomes with sensitivity to PROP and bitter taste demonstrate a strong relationship exists between our sense of taste and smell and overall health status.
More research is clearly warranted. PROP test strips are safe and easy to use and available online if you would like to determine your taste status.
Or simply try examining your tongue in the mirror. Skip to content The Nutrition Source. Harvard T. The Nutrition Source Menu. Search for:. The flavor of food is not something we actually sense, but is created in our brain based on what we taste with our mouth and smell with our nose 2. Taste, smell, and flavor are distinctly different from each other. Our sense of taste is built into our genes and can be observed in newborn children within six months of birth, whereas recognizing smells is a learned experience 2.
There are five well-recognized tastes: Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami a savory, meaty taste. There is also growing acceptance of fat as a sixth basic taste 3.
We are able to detect the aroma of certain volatile compounds at the level of one part per trillion, and a few at levels even times lower. Our exquisite sense of smell apparently evolved to help in locating food as well as avoid consuming spoiled food before tasting it.
You may have experienced your sensitivity to smell when you detected a natural gas leak. Gas companies add a trace of a very smelly volatile sulfur-containing compound called methyl mercaptan to natural gas so we can detect even very small leaks. Humans are able to detect this compound at 2 parts per billion, which is a very small amount, but still times more concentrated than one part per trillion.
Some of the compounds we can smell at levels of a part per trillion and lower include those in green bell pepper, mold, roasted oats, and, the record holder, another sulfur-containing compound formed in boiled seafood.
While the number of taste receptors is limited, it is estimated there are about different types of receptors for smell. Cells that contain the receptors for taste and smell are replaced every days. As we age the total number of these cells decline, especially after age These are the visible bumps on your tongue. Sensing the presence of sugars, the sweet taste receptors in our gastrointestinal tract initiate glucose absorption, insulin secretion, gastrointestinal motility, and the release of hormones that generate signals to the brain that affect the feeling of fullness satiety and termination of the meal 7.
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