YOU MIGHT think tasting your way around the natural world is limited to edibles, but you’d be wrong. While I’m certainly not suggesting that you go around licking rocks, nibbling on tree trunks or taking bites out of birds, bugs and other beasts at will, the idea of using taste as a way of gleaning information about the world isn’t completely out of bounds.
If we’re going to step back and away from our self-inflicted taboos and socially inflicted pressures and simply look at the human body, as an organ of exploration and in order to be able to take stock of its raw abilities, then we have to notice that we are all fairly well adorned with sensory receptors in our mouths. If we didn’t at least pay some kind of heed to the diverse collection of taste receptors, chemoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and the thermoreceptors found here then we could be accused of being incompletist.
Admittedly, our sense of taste takes a bit of a back seat when it comes to the other senses in the field, but it does have its applications, although they are rather specific ones. One of the issues with using your sense of taste is that it is usually a precursor to consumption; most things that touch the tongue are on their way down already. It’s a doorway into our insides. We are rightfully nervous about the risk of poisoning and infection and therefore we have in place a strict set of admission rules to our guts. Some of these are fairly basic common sense, others stem from what is culturally accepted. You wouldn’t eat rotten food, would you? Well, you almost certainly do – fermentation is controlled decomposition; when you eat yoghurt or miso you are consuming products that are, in effect, rotting. How about a fish head, putrefying in its own juices for weeks underground – well, in Alaska the heads of salmon are treated in just this way before being mashed up and eaten – a delicacy known by the matter-of-fact name ‘stinkheads’? So you see, what we let into our bodies and what we don’t isn’t quite as clear-cut as you might think. One of the quintessential rules of exploring is to be open to new experiences, to not be judgemental and to keep an open mind.
I’m not concerned about actual consumption here, and that aspect of gustatory exploration is of more relevance to those seeking wild foods and foraging. However, part of the process, the first part, that is, when a substance is taken into the mouth and tested, is a legitimate way of exploring, and while not one commonly used, it does have its place.
How we taste is not a simple thing to describe. Most commonly we think of taste in relation to taste buds – there are some ten thousand of these in the mouth, most of which are distributed on and around the tongue although there are others spread around the buccal cavity and throat. Each one of these taste buds sits around a hundred taste receptors which, between them, are known to register the five different taste sensations – saltiness, bitterness, sweetness, sourness and meatiness, also called umami. However, taste is just one of the many factors in a slightly more difficult to pin down sensation that we refer to as flavour.
Naturalists using taste as a tool to explore the world isn’t anything new. For example, there have been famous historical characters who have made a habit of tasting pretty much anything they can get their hands on. These proponents of the pursuit of zoophagy are now viewed as eccentric, but the father-and-son duo William and Frank Buckland were fine practitioners of what they thought of as a legitimate science.
During the nineteenth-century heyday of zoophagy this method of exploring the natural world with the taste buds was merely a form of adventure into the world of curious questions; its proponents were seeking experiences using the means that their own evolution had provided – in some respects, you could say they were rewilding, revisiting processes that undoubtedly had taken place at some point in our history.
While it may seem that these sorts of exploits should remain confined to history, Frank Buckland wasn’t seen in his time or by his contemporaries as being all that eccentric, he was merely embracing the age of exploration and enlightenment in yet another way. Global exploration was revealing a world of bizarre and hitherto unimaginable beasts, and human cultures with strangely different diets; the Bucklands were very much at the forefront of exploring the potential of other food types and assessing their qualities and potential as mainstream food sources as part of the acclimatisation movement.
However, the limits of zoophagy are really a subjective matter. After all, the only thing stopping us finding squirrel or crickets in the supermarket aisles is social conditioning and taboo. For the true and open purpose of this book, and for keeping the Bucklands’ sense of exploration alive, we will briefly touch on it, but within the context that we are utilising our taste buds in ways that are not associated with consumption of food and if used at all, are more about precursory explorations of our world, in particular in areas where our other senses can’t help much.
The curious case of the dancing slugs
I’ve always liked slugs. It’s something to do with my natural propensity to stick up for life’s uglies, its evolutionary underdogs and the creatures people like to hate. Slugs come pretty high on that last list, thanks to the predilection of a mere handful of species to ravage our radishes, predate our pansies and desecrate our dahlias.
Where I live, the moorlands of southwest England seem to almost ooze with shell-less molluscs from spring right through to autumn. One species in particular, the great black slug, is exceptionally prolific and noticeable. During a five-minute slow walk along one of Dartmoor’s narrow tracks, I counted 188 of the things, each seemingly a good dollop of animal protein for any species fond of escargot.
However, one thing struck me: these animals seem to be flaunting themselves in a very un-slug-like way and in the twenty plus years I’ve been living here I’ve never witnessed any animal eating one, save for one brave or naive mistle thrush that seemed to flick one around for a few minutes like an unwanted dumpling covered in glue.
This, and the fact that they are slow-moving, obvious to all and big, has led to the development of a personal pet theory. Pick one up and poke it around a bit as if your finger was the sharp end of a curious bird-like predator and they retract, their previously impressive length of over fifteen centimetres snaps back like a piece of living elastic to a large gooey lozenge, with the appearance and texture of an oversized wine gum.
In doing so, the thickened mantle skin, something analogous to a medieval leather shield, is presented to the attacker, then, if the attack persists, the slug starts to ‘dance’. No fancy footwork, that’s difficult if you’ve only got one foot, but more of a slow, lubricious wiggle.
My curious nature wanted to know why. There are a lot of questions posed by this animal. Why does nothing appear to eat them? Why do they seem so bold and brazen? Why do they do the little slow and sensuous wiggle dance? They are toxic, which explains all except the dance. My theory is that the dance is actually a physical way to distribute the super-viscous slime across the surface of its body. After all, they can’t spread it around like we would a body lotion, they’ve got no hands.
I had sat on this theory for some time, until I happened to find one of these slugs while out with a group of clients who had joined me for a moorland ramble, and I went through the story explained above. I got to the last bit and it seemed that my audience wanted more from me. I would not advise anyone to do this, but since I didn’t really want to leave them hanging and I wanted to make my point, plus the fact that this question had bothered me for some time, I licked the slug.
It was not a long-drawn-out lick, more of a quick and cautious one. It tasted nasty – a taste difficult to describe but a bitter chemical-like flavour. It was certainly distasteful and immediately I could put some of my initial questions to bed. The chemical constitution of my slug’s slime was almost certainly a big part of its courage, its apparent audacity to be out in the open when other invertebrates were tucked up and hiding, awaiting the cover of darkness. It certainly wouldn’t be a nice meal. I carried on with the nature walk, occasionally picking the odd ball of slug gloop from my lips while somewhat contentedly mulling over the fact that my theory was shaping up nicely.
I stopped and was about to point out a spider on a gorse bush when I noticed I couldn’t feel my lips quite as well as I could a few moments before, and my tongue had gone tingly and numb. It turns out these slugs have some kind of chemical that is an anaesthetic in its slime too.
While there are a few assumptions made about how any prospective predator may perceive the taste of the slug, via my own taste-test experience we can certainly begin the investigation. Using one’s own taste receptors to check for noxious compounds might seem like an accident waiting to happen; after all, one is ingesting potential poisons. In the realms of chemical defence mechanisms there is probably little risk of ingesting anything that will give us a serious reaction, especially if we carry out a few extra precautions. To carry out an effective sensory experiment one doesn’t need to swallow; usually just a dab on the tongue will provide all the information we could possibly want, then we can spit out the rest and rinse our mouth out with extra water if necessary.
Though I am describing a situation that I by no means advise anyone to repeat, what I aim to illustrate is the role of taste in our natural lives. To investigate some of the elements of the natural world like this might not be to everyone’s taste or, indeed, inclination, but if the definition of adventure is to push ourselves to experience new things, then surely the relatively unexplored realm of tasting nature matches this more than adequately. It’s a very natural instinct and a vital part of the learning process; up to the age of about eight months and before your other senses developed, your mouth and the millions of sensors it contains would have been your primary sense organ.
To me the world is full of taste sensations or flavours that can help us make sense of other observations. My mysterious slug was just one such moment.
Recently, I was made aware of a scientific study carried out in 1970 in the forests of Costa Rica, where a senior scientist persuaded his graduate students to be volunteers in a tadpole taste test. The scientist, Richard Wassersug, had noticed that in the anuran-diverse tropical ecosystems the ecology of tadpoles hadn’t been studied in all that much depth and he had noticed that some were very dark and obvious, a bit like our slugs, others were almost transparent, and others were strikingly coloured. The question he set out to answer was, did they vary in palatability? And if so, did the distasteful nature come from the skin, the tail or the body? So in a standardised procedure the students were given fresh tadpoles to eat – the first test was to hold them in the mouth, the second was to bite the tail and the third was the full chew. The testers (who must have wanted that beer bribe pretty bad) were then asked to rate each of the experiences from ‘tastes good’ to ‘highly disagreeable’. The results were that they did vary quite a bit, as did the responses of the students, but the universally least tasty were the tadpoles of the cane toad, a species that is of the same family as the one I tasted in my pond. They were described by the experimenters as very bitter and it seems that the source of this unpleasant sensation was in the tadpole’s skin – in other words, the taste didn’t get any worse once the animal was chewed. The boldness of these highly noticeable tadpoles was their warning. While the procedures here may be enough to make you cringe, the actual knowledge gained goes a long way to explain why animals such as otters, mink and herons will go out of their way to remove the skin of adult toads and why the tadpoles seem to be left well alone by many other creatures they share their environment with; it’s all down to the bufotoxins giving them a highly disagreeable taste.
The same investigative technique can be deployed to answer all manner of other conundrums, such as why ladybirds are brightly coloured. Many sources will tell you that their bold coloration is of the aposematic kind, a billboard of warning, a conspicuous advertisement to all, and that what lies inside the body of the beetle will take the edge off the meal by being unpleasant to eat or poisonous. The thirty-eight different chemical compounds that ladybirds exude are unpleasant to taste. But what do they taste like, how bad can they be? Driven by that same curiosity and the need for some first-hand experience of the world, I set out to investigate. A smart individual would perhaps have started with a small dab of the yellow exudate that oozes from between a ladybird’s leg joints when it is alarmed, a form of reflex bleeding, whereby the toxic blood of the insect is put out there as a warning.
Ladybirds don’t like being even mildly threatened – the astringent, soapy taste is not something I’ll forget and that, of course, is the whole point of the survival strategy. The badge that they wear, the bold colour and patterning that catches the eye, does so not for our own delectation but because it is part of a brutal survival strategy, hatched up over millions of years of the beetle’s evolution. The ladybird is brilliant in every sense of the word.
Now, every time I see a ladybird, whether it’s settled on a rosebud, tottering along the window sill or even displayed on the spine of a book cover, I can recollect that moment. The taste test, unorthodox as it may seem, has enriched my future experiences. Whether it is a dab of the blood that has just come jetting out of the eye of a horned lizard, an extravert slug, the ‘blood’ of the bloody-nosed beetle, or terrorising tadpoles, I have, by exposing my taste buds to it, developed a much greater insight into my world, a taste for life and its many processes.
While we’re on the subject of a taste for life, our sensory testing of fungi also serves to prove a valuable lesson in this respect. A while back I spent some time with a mushroom collector in Switzerland. Though many of our Continental cousins throw themselves into life with a little more vigour than a Brit like me, I felt my English reserve justified when it came to my reluctance to positively identify as part of my potential breakfast a basket of mystery specimens I had collected on one of my morning foraging trips along the hedges, over pastures and through woodlands.
I was rather surprised when my fungus-familiar friend started to take small bites from them. On first appearance, this appeared to be rather foolhardy. However, seeing the look of horror on my face, he explained that he was just taking the smallest morsel and holding it on his tongue for a moment before spitting it out. Apparently, this method can be safely used to taste even the most poisonous species as long as you completely clear your mouth and rinse it out and spit afterwards.
It turns out that if you’re tuned in to your taste buds, this is a perfectly practical technique for getting a quick idea of the edibility of your specimens. Many of the old field guides also recommend this and use taste as one of the distinct identification features of a raw mushroom (along with smell, as briefly covered in the previous chapter). The key, however, is not to go randomly chewing your way through any old mushroom or toadstool you find but to be sure you’ve got an edible one.