Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (5 page)

My bald spots were clearly the result of damage, said Linda Bartoshuk, director of the Human Research Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida and one of the world’s foremost experts on the science of taste. My heart sank further. Then Bartoshuk—spurred on by the findings inside my mouth—began to explain a bizarre taste phenomenon called the
release of inhibition.

“What makes this particularly complicated is that another area in your mouth that doesn’t have damage,” she said, “may be released from inhibition and the sensations may be more intense in that area. This overshadows your bald spots. You get the counterintuitive result of a small amount of damage actually intensifying the experience of tasting.”

Wait. Did I hear that correctly? The damage on my tongue might make me a more acute taster than someone without barren spots? Do damaged tongues work better than virgin ones? Should I go out and murder a few more taste buds? My mind was spinning with the conflicting input. I had no idea my tongue was going to be so interesting.

While you may be thinking that some sort of horrific accident compelled me to visit a doctor who examines tongues in the middle of a steamy, sweltering summer in Gainesville, Florida, the truth is, it’s actually a love story.

It begins in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California where one of my girlfriends and I had been skiing on the slopes of Northstar-at-Tahoe. A storm moved in and snow starting falling. Eventually a cheek-whipping wind and blinding snow sent us down the mountain to Timbercreek Inn for a fortifying glass of wine and a bite to eat. Little did we know that the storm would soon be classified as a blizzard and the roads leaving the ski resort would be shut down by the highway patrol. We were just happy that we had a coveted seat in the bar area, a glass of wine in our hands, and lunch on the way. As the storm worsened, more and more skiers accumulated in the restaurant, seeking the same refuge and sustenance. After an hour or so, we struck up a conversation with a couple of guys from San Francisco, one of them named Roger. He and I first connected over the wine I was drinking. He, too, was a fermented grape juice aficionado. We talked about our favorite grape varietals, our favorite winemakers, and our common love of the California wine country, especially Healdsburg in Sonoma County. The conversation about wine led to a discussion of our favorite restaurants in the city of San Francisco, where we both lived: Range, Ton Kiang, Myth, Delfina, Okoze, Andale, Yank Sing, and others. Six hours later we were still talking. It was time for another meal. The four of us sat down at a table in the dining room in front of a roaring fireplace. I ordered the salmon; Roger had the steak. We drank a bottle of soft, cherry-chocolate red zinfandel. We stayed at the restaurant until the highway reopened, sometime after 11:00 p.m., talking food, wine, life, and love. Our casual first date had lasted almost ten hours. We were off to a wonderful start, but I would soon learn that Roger has, ahem,
issues
with food.

An important fact about me: my education and career have been focused entirely on food. I absolutely love my job inventing new foods and making them come to life for my clients. And even though I work in the food industry, I still love to read about food and wine when I’m off the clock. I choose vacation places specifically for the food. My favorite sport is dining out. I approach cooking with enthusiasm, curiosity, and reckless abandon. When I was searching for a mate, it was important that I find a man who shared these passions. Roger seemed to fit the bill and was adorable, smart, and chivalrous. Buttercream icing on the cake.

When Roger and I went on our first official date, we ate at Café Kati, the San Francisco restaurant that in the mid-1990s made vertical food—fancy eye-popping, precariously tall plate presentations—popular. I had the roast chicken and Roger had the fillet of beef. A few days later at Tres Agaves, I ordered the pollo con mole, Roger the carne asada. Cortez: I had the lamb; Roger had the rib eye. Bistro Aix: I ordered duck confit; Roger had steak frites. Town Hall:
me, sturgeon; Roger, beef cheeks. Myth: me, sea bass; Roger, beef short ribs. At some point in our courtship, I realized that this man with whom I was falling in love ate from a very limited part of the menu. To describe his menu choices, I could use the last two words that would describe my own: meat and potatoes.

When most fledgling couples have “the talk” about their future, they usually discuss their desires around starting a family, their religious beliefs, or their hopes and dreams. I had to talk to Roger about his food choices.

“How can you call yourself a foodie when all you eat is meat and potatoes?” I asked him one evening after he ordered another meat-and-potatoes entree. The other choices on the menu were so intriguing I could barely limit myself to one. People choose to live in the San Francisco Bay Area for the diversity of food choices, among other things (which are all secondary, in my food-centric opinion). Yet Roger kept choosing such bland, boring entrees that he might as well live somewhere else where the summers were sunnier, the housing prices were more affordable, and the threat of earthquakes nonexistent.

“I’m a very sensitive eater,” Roger explained. “I can’t handle strong tastes.” Once I considered this, I realized I had seen him push aside green vegetables, flinch at having to eat salmon at a dinner party, and request that truffles—
truffles!
—be removed entirely from his plate, so that they would not contaminate his meat and potatoes. At first I attributed this to his being picky and refusing to expand his culinary repertoire. But the more I asked him to please try whatever I was eating, the more I questioned my preconceived notions about him. When he had been open to tasting things in the courtship phase, his reaction to them had often been violent. He squirmed at bitter, spicy, and sour foods. Displeasure surfaced on his face when I made him taste my vegetables. The same face emerged when he tasted a big, bold, bitter red wine. Then came my revelation one night when we were eating at Quince. I’d ordered a creative pasta dish that came with a complex sauce that I simply couldn’t reverse-engineer in my head, one of my favorite things to do while I’m dining. Roger tasted it (pasta is in his limited repertoire) and proclaimed that it contained lemon zest.

“No lemon zest. Vinegar. Wine, maybe. But no lemon zest,” I said.

“Let’s ask the server,” Roger replied. So we did. There was lemon zest in it. And from that point forward, Roger was smug in his ability to detect subtle nuances of tastes that I, the food professional, sometimes missed. As our relationship progressed, this morphed into a bit of a taste bud rivalry. Roger was good at detecting things he didn’t like but he was terrible at articulating why he disliked them. He lacked the vocabulary, the terminology, to explain what he was experiencing
in his mouth. I decided I would teach him, and that was another step down the path toward writing this book.

Fast-forward to the laboratory at the University of Florida, a steamy, sweltering summer some five years later. Roger and I, then living together, were visiting the Center for Smell and Taste because I was doing research for this book. But we also wanted to know who was the better taster. The stakes were high: bragging rights.

We entered the Smell and Taste lab by way of a waiting room, no different from the one at your dentist. After navigating a series of halls, we found Linda Bartoshuk’s small group. Bartoshuk is a robust presence. Her hearty belly laugh is infectious and frequent. She’s a seventy-two-year-old grandmother of five, who frequently gets so excited about her work that she has to stop to catch her breath. When I offered to treat her to dinner at any restaurant in Gainesville, she chose a mom-and-pop Asian restaurant and showed up in sensible shoes. The first time I met her at the annual Association of Chemosensory Scientists meeting, she welcomed me to the table like an old friend, even though we’d only exchanged a few e-mails. Her plate was piled high with roast beef and potatoes that she ate with gusto, talking the entire time about whom I should meet and what talks I should attend, meanwhile introducing me to her tablemates. She didn’t pay much attention to what was on the plate, because Bartoshuk is less interested in what’s on the plate than what’s on your tongue.

Bartoshuk’s interest in taste was sparked by the death of her father, which happened when she was in college. He had lung cancer, and as he got sicker, one of his favorite foods began to taste metallic to him. Bartoshuk’s older brother died of colon cancer years later. He, too, experienced—and complained about—changes to his sense of taste. This propelled Bartoshuk into science to figure out what had happened.

By simply examining your tongue, Bartoshuk can determine your
taster type.
With a glance, she’ll know whether you’re likely to be a Supertaster, a term she has coined to describe people like Roger. She dyes the surface of your tongue with blue food coloring, then looks for the taste buds, which don’t absorb the blue dye as much, and as a result show up as turquoise bubbles against a vivid royal blue background. Bartoshuk and her colleague Jennifer Stamps examine your tongue for the density of those turquoise taste bud bubbles distributed across its surface.

This is the surface of University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Rozin’s tongue. He is anatomically a Supertaster due to the density of taste buds, which show up as bubbles against the dark blue-stained background. Jennifer Stamps calls his “a beautiful tongue.”

The poster child of tongues belongs to Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Almost the entire surface of his tongue (shown here) is covered with turquoise taste buds. Anatomically, he is a superlative Supertaster. If you’re curious about your own tongue and don’t have access to a smell and taste center (some are listed at the back of the book), you can count the number of taste buds in a certain area of your tongue, specifically an area the size of a notebook paper reinforcement label.
²
These doughnut-shaped stickers are used to repair tears in the antiquated form of media known as paper. This taste bud exercise is easy to do at home with blue food coloring and a reinforcement, detailed for you in at the end of the chapter. Stand in front of a mirror over a sink. This is important, lest you spot-stain your rug with blue food coloring as Roger and I did in our home. Using a cotton swab, dab the blue dye onto your tongue until it’s good and blue. Try to keep it sticking out or your lips, too, will be dyed. Place the reinforcement on your tongue and count the number of round bumps that show up inside the little hole.

If you have up to fifteen taste buds inside the inner circle of the reinforcement, you are probably one of Bartoshuk’s Tasters or even a Nontaster. According to Bartoshuk, if you have forty buds or more, you are likely to be a Supertaster. The quantity of taste buds on your tongue has been correlated with the intensity at which you taste most things. In other words, the more buds, the more you taste. Other research has shown that Supertasters also experience other things as more intense. Salt is saltier, sweet is sweeter. Bitter for you is bitter
er.

“Supertasters are one end of a distribution,” says Bartoshuk, meaning that there’s a typical bell curve distribution of tasters in the population. People at the left end of the range have limitations to their ability to taste certain things. Bartoshuk called these people Nontasters: 25 to 30 percent of the population falls there. Supertasters reside at the right end of the distribution, comprising another 25 to 30 percent of the population. Supertasters may taste the same food three times more strongly than a Nontaster would. There’s a huge range of abilities that fall in the middle and these people—about half of the population—Bartoshuk called Tasters.

I like Bartoshuk immensely, but I dislike the term Supertaster as strongly. It conjures up the image of a superior breed of being, dressed in blue tights with a cape, leaping over tall buildings. It promises super powers and super insight. It also assigns judgment: something that’s super must be better than something that’s not. As for the term Nontasters, it is not only insulting, it is misleading. The people Bartoshuk classifies as Nontasters
can
taste most things; it is mainly bitter things that they cannot taste. I prefer to use different terminology to describe the difference in human taste perception.