Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (51 page)

R
oger and I were seated at the bar having lunch at a lovely bistro in Healdsburg in the Sonoma wine country. Our grilled asparagus arrived and we fought over the pencil-thin spears: grilled just right, tarted up with freshly squeezed lemon juice, and finished with aged Parmesan cheese. It was a taste of summer, sunny with sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami breezes. We enjoyed our leisurely wine-country lunch with requisite glasses of the local agricultural product. My choice, a flinty pinot gris; Roger’s, a soft pinot noir. My iceberg wedge salad was crowned with a latticework of perfectly crisp strips of bacon, chunks of funky blue cheese, and a zingy buttermilk dressing. Roger’s lamb burger was served with matchstick frites. Both dishes were so good we cleaned our plates down to the last crispy potato crumb. It was a near-perfect meal.

As we were settling our check, I reached for one last swig of water before we headed out the door to begin the dreaded trek back to the city: the event that symbolizes for us the ending of the weekend and the start of the next week. I took a deep drink and thought,
Those damn wine country chefs are always putting fresh herbs in everything. Really, who wants herbs in ice water, for god’s sake?
As I brought my hand up to get the twiggy thing out of my teeth, I realized I had been drinking water throughout the meal and hadn’t noticed a sprig of herb until now. I froze, slowly pulled out a wriggling spider, and screamed.

I didn’t taste the insect, as I was preoccupied with its spriggy-herb texture. When it turned out to be a live creature, the dissonance between what I thought I
had in my mouth and the wriggling thing I was holding in my hand was so great that I leaped up and threw the spider onto the bar. The busboy who was clearing our place settings looked at me as if I had, well, as if I had just pulled a spider out of my mouth and thrown it onto his bar.

That week I was scheduled to meet with Paul Rozin, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has done extensive research into why things disgust us. When I told Rozin my spider tale, he clapped his hands and shouted, “Oh, that’s a wonderful story!” He then countered with his own.

While he and his then-wife were traveling in Europe, they were invited to dinner at a colleague’s house in Switzerland. The man’s wife brought a casserole to the table and spooned out a serving for each guest. Paul quickly noticed and unthinkingly blurted out, “There’s a long blond hair in mine,” clearly associating the strand with the blond hostess. As soon as he realized his mistake, he knew exactly what he had to do to remedy the social gaffe. He promptly pulled the hair out of his food and as his fellow diners watched—since all eyes were now on him—put it in his mouth and swallowed it.

At the University of Pennsylvania since he left Harvard in 1961 with two degrees in psychology, Rozin pursues research across many diverse areas, including food preferences, food appetites, and food beliefs.

I asked Rozin how food can be a source of pleasure one moment and the next moment cause us to gag. The ultimate appetite-suppressing act, according to my research, is seeing someone else chewing with his mouth open, spitting out food while talking, and in general, being a sloppy eater. Why should this disgust us so?

“We live in a disgusting world,” he began. “The inside of our body is disgusting. Anything that calls attention to that—that’s really upsetting. It’s calling attention to something that’s happening all the time, to the icky, mushy, wet mass we create when we put food in our mouth, chew, and prepare it for swallowing.” He continued:

Adult eating involves an incredible virtuosity because you are sitting, facing another person, stuffing food into your mouth, making it disgusting in your mouth, and talking through the same hole—at the same time—while looking at the other person, yet you are not presenting them with this disgusting spectacle. That is, you’ve learned to talk, breathe, and chew this thing without exposing the other person to it. And if they see it for some reason, they’re really put off.

We’re playing this very delicate game when we eat. We’ve got this disgusting
thing right on the other side of our face. You have a disgusting thing right on the other side of your colon, but you’re not at risk of exposing that.

Disgusting things don’t need to have disgusting sensory properties. For example, until I knew what I was eating, I thought the spider in my mouth was an herb, which is generally viewed as having positive sensory properties. And the hair that Rozin put in his mouth and swallowed probably had so little flavor he wouldn’t have been able to describe it. Yet both of them are disgusting as defined by our culture.

As we saw in the chapter on smell, babies are born without innate smell preferences or aversions (except to aromas that also have a tactile burn, such as ammonia). One-year-olds are completely unfazed by the smell of a full diaper and, until they see mommy’s scrunched-up face, don’t associate the smell of feces with disgust. It’s the same with food: we learn which foods are disgusting not from trying them but from what we tell each other.

The word
disgust
shares a root with the term for taste,
gustation.
Disgust literally means “bad taste.” The face you make when you are disgusted is generally the same as the face you’d make if you were trying to get something out of your mouth. The most violent feeling accompanying disgust is nausea, which is also a way of getting food out of your body. Says Rozin, “Disgust originated as a rejection response to bad tastes, and then evolved into a much more abstract and ideational emotion.” We in the food business can take pride in the fact that food culture drives popular culture . . . when it comes to disgust.

The most oft-cited disgusting things are human and animal waste products. Rozin writes, “There is widespread historical and cultural evidence for aversion and disgust to virtually all body products, including feces, vomit, urine, and blood (especially menstrual blood).” And feces, says Rozin, “are nothing more than processed food.”

We are animals and we consume animals. To reconcile this near-cannibalistic behavior, we have developed a way of distancing ourselves from the fact that we eat dead, chopped-up, heated carcasses. We come up with euphemistic names such as pork instead of pig, beef instead of cow, sweetbreads instead of thymus glands, and Rocky Mountain oysters instead of calf testicles. While we humans are probably the greatest omnivores on Earth, even we don’t eat other carnivores.
Why? “Other meat eaters don’t taste great . . . the meat just doesn’t taste good,” says Dereck Joubert, wildlife filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, talking about the big cats in his film
The Last Lions
. Apparently cats don’t eat other carnivores because they don’t like the flavor. This is, ostensibly, one of the reasons that we don’t eat cats. The fact that we harbor miniature, tamer versions of cats as pets also can’t hurt in keeping them off our dinner plates.

There are reasons to shun many disgusting foods, but even reason can be trumped by cultural disgust. Some cultures eat insects but in America we do not. It would stand to reason that we’d be afraid to eat cockroaches because they crawl around on dirty things and eat all manner of disgusting stuff. But what if we farmed a pen of cockroaches, fed them nothing but organic vegetables for a month to clean them out, and sterilized them before offering them up on a plate (lightly breaded and pan-fried, I’d suggest, with a sweet chili dipping sauce)? According to the results of a 1986 study conducted by Paul Rozin, even this would be rejected. In fact, my friend Chris and I did something similar.

After learning that domestic yard snails are the same as those raised specifically for eating, we collected a few dozen from my backyard garden. We “farmed” them for a few months in a pen by feeding them vegetables, and then served them up to a dinner party of friends, slathered in butter and garlic. Even our assurances of their organic, hyperlocal (right here!) provenance could not get some of our guests over the psychological hump of eating backyard snails. I mean escargots.

Rozin has also proved that North Americans are reluctant to eat a mound of what looks like fresh dog poop, even after they’re told it’s made from chocolate fudge. We know that fudge is yummy, but our acculturation to the disgustingness of dog poop simply overwhelms logic. Lucien Malson studied children who had grown up in the wild without human contact of any kind. In
Wolf Children
, he wrote about what types of adults these unacculturated kids became. Without parents or friends to teach them, they did not show any signs of disgust, further proving that culture determines what nauseates us. One culture’s Époisses cheese is disgusting stinky sneakers to another; one culture’s
natto
is another’s disgusting slimy snot.

The fact that humans eat—and enjoy—chile peppers defies explanation. If an extraterrestrial being landed on Earth tomorrow, how would you defend the practice? Imagine the conversation:

E.T.: What are you eating?

You: Chile peppers.

E.T.: What are they?

You: They’re vegetables that induce pain.

E.T.: What kind of pain?

You: They burn. Some burn more than others.

E.T.: Is everyone on this planet as stupid as you?

You: No, I actually enjoy the pain!

We are the only species on Earth that seems to enjoy the pain response caused by capsaicin, the active ingredient in chiles. (Some species, like birds, don’t feel pain from eating it.) Paul Rozin has also done research in this area. He conducted an experiment on rats in which he fed them a spicy food diet instead of their normal rat chow. Eventually the rats learned to tolerate the spicy food. They became desensitized to it. But they never really liked it. After they were used to it, Rozin gave the rats a choice: the spicy food or their former regular chow. They chose the regular. Creatures can learn to tolerate heat but they can’t be taught to enjoy it. The love of spicy chiles is distinctly human, but even humans have to be born with the preference.

Human babies don’t like the irritaste of chiles and, up until the age of two, will reject it. In chile-eating cultures, a mother may even apply a bit of chile to her breast if she’s trying to wean her baby from nursing. But in those same chile-eating households, when the kids are about four years of age, some develop a liking for hot peppers after repeated exposure. Others never get there, even if they are subjected to social pressure from their families, which ranges from simply watching their parents eat chiles to having their parents offer them passively (“Try this salsa, sweetie”), to chiles in home cooking or being exposed to them in restaurants. Kids are desperate to be seen as grown-ups, so that’s all it takes with some of them. The kids who never learn to like spicy foods are most likely HyperTasters, with so many sensitive fibers on their tongues that chiles—like many bitter foods—are simply too intense for them.

Some substances require a little bit more of a push. Whereas we can be lightly goaded into liking chiles by our family, other initially icky tastes require a different form of peer pressure, such as alcohol (which burns and has a bitter taste) and tobacco (which stings and tastes bitter). Neither is delicious in a
traditional sense, but both offer a reward that some people like and, as a result, become accustomed to the taste. Remember the first time you tasted beer? I’m guessing you didn’t love it at first sip. If you did, you’re likely a Tolerant Taster. If you don’t drink alcohol at all because of its bitter taste (not because of health, moral, or religious reasons), you’re likely a HyperTaster.

There’s some evidence that consuming chiles is an example of benign masochism: seeking a sensation that on the surface produces discomfort. Other examples include watching a tearjerker movie, riding a scary roller coaster, and gambling. People who enjoy these sensations are slightly more likely to enjoy the pain of chiles.

A food you love can become absolutely awful if it’s served at the wrong temperature. Consider a cup of hot coffee. The aroma of a freshly ground, properly brewed cup of coffee has almost no equal. The smell alone is enough to wake the senses. But if that cup of coffee sits too long and you pick it up and take a swig and find that it’s cool, it can be unpleasant. This is because a number of things change when coffee cools. Its fragrance practically disappears as the aromatic top notes settle down and stop volatilizing—something they only do at hot temperatures. Because cold coffee has less active volatiles, it has less flavor. Some of the bitterness that was masked by the beautiful aroma is now sharply apparent. Chemical changes also occur in coffee as it goes from hot to warm to tepid. So the cold coffee is actually physically different from the hot.

In my twenties I hiked the Inca Trail, the path to Machu Picchu, located high in the Andes Mountains. My then-boyfriend and I were not prepared for the physical challenge that the hike would entail. From the time we put our feet on the ground in Cuzco at 10,000 feet, he battled altitude sickness. Fortunately, I did not.

On the third day of the hike, we planned to arrive at Machu Picchu. When you are hiking at 13,000 feet, the simple act of breathing is difficult and walking on ancient stone trails exhausting. I had skipped breakfast because of my excitement.
We arrived at the ancient, mist-shrouded Incan shrine six strenuous hours later. I was beyond famished and couldn’t think about anything but finding the snack bar. There I was on sacred ground and all I could think was
I need food. Now.

When I finally got my hands on a bag of Combos—a pretzel snack filled with suspicious cheeseish filling, I devoured it in a low-blood-sugar frenzy. A snack choice I usually wouldn’t make nonetheless satisfied me in a way that nothing else ever has or will. Food simply savors better when you’re hungry.