Identifying the (sometimes surprising) benefits of foods that taste good
Adopting new foods and flavors
Nutritionally speaking, taste is the ability to perceive flavors in food and beverages. Preference is the appreciation of one food and distaste of another. Decisions about taste are physical reactions that are dependent on specialized body organs called taste buds. Although your culture has a decided influence on what you think is good to eat, decisions about food preferences may also depend on your genes, your medical history, and your personal reactions to specific foods.
Tackling Taste: How Your Brain and Tongue Work Together
Your taste buds are sensory organs that enable you to perceive different flavors in food — in other words, to taste the food you eat.
Taste buds (also referred to as taste papillae) are tiny bumps on the surface of your tongue (see Figure 15-1). Each one contains groups of receptor cells that anchor an antenna-like structure called a microvillus, which projects up through a gap (or pore) in the center of the taste bud, sort of like a thread sticking through the hole in Life Savers candy. (For more about the microvilli and how they behave in your digestive tract, see Chapter 2.)
The microvilli in your taste buds transmit messages from flavor chemicals in the food along nerve fibers to your brain, which translates the messages into perceptions: “That’s good,” or “That’s awful.”
The five (maybe seven) basic flavors
Your taste buds recognize five basic flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami — a Japanese word describing richness or a savory flavor associated with glutamate (or glutamic acid), the amino acid responsible for the distinctive flavor of soy products, such as soybeans, tofu, and tempeh.
At first, scientists believed that people had specific taste buds for specific flavors: sweet taste buds for sweets, sour taste buds for sour, and so on. Modern science proposes that groups of taste buds work together so that flavor chemicals in food link up with chemical bonds in taste buds to create patterns that you recognize as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and, yes, umami. The technical term for this process is across-fiber pattern theory of gustatory coding. Receptor patterns for the sweet, sour, bitter, and salty have been tentatively identified, but the pattern for umami remains elusive.
Nutrition researchers now suggest that there are also taste bud patterns to recognize the flavor of fatty acids, and perhaps a receptor cell known as T1R3 that enables people to identify the taste of calcium. Right now, the evidence for fatty acid receptor patterns is stronger than that for the calcium receptor, but stay tuned — you never know what other wonders your sensory system may eventually reveal.
Your health and your taste buds
Some illnesses and medicines alter your ability to taste foods. The result may be partial or total ageusia (the medical term for loss of taste). Or you may experience flavor confusion — meaning that you mix up flavors, translating sour as bitter, or sweet as salty, or vice versa.
Table 15-1 lists some medical conditions that affect your sense of taste.
Table 15-1 Things That Make It Difficult to Taste Your Food
This Condition
May Do This
A bacterial or viral infection of the tongue
Produce secretions that block your taste buds
Injury to your mouth, nose, or throat
Damage nerves that transmit flavor signals
Radiation therapy to mouth and throat
Damage nerves that transmit flavor signals
Tricking your taste buds
Combining foods can short-circuit your taste buds’ ability to identify flavors correctly. For example, when you sip wine (even an apparently smooth and silky one), your taste buds taste something sharp. Take a bite of cheese first, though, and the wine tastes smoother (less acidic) because the cheese’s fat and protein molecules coat your receptor cells so that acidic wine molecules can’t connect.
A similar phenomenon occurs during serial wine tastings (sampling many wines, one after another). Try two equally dry, acidic wines, and the second seems mellower because acid molecules from the first one fill up space on the chemical bonds that perceive acidity. Drink a sweet wine after a dry one, and the sweetness often is more pronounced.
Here’s another way to fool your taste buds: Eat an artichoke. The meaty part at the base of the artichoke leaves contains cynarin, a sweet-tasting chemical that makes any food you taste after the artichoke taste sweeter.
Determining Deliciousness
When it comes to deciding what tastes good, all human beings and most animals have four things in common: They like sweets, crave salt, go for the fat, and avoid the bitter (at least at first).
These choices are rooted deep in biology and evolution. In fact, you can say that whenever you reach for something that you consider good to eat, the entire human race — especially your own individual ancestors — reaches with you.
Listening to your body
Here’s something to chew on: The foods that taste good — sweet foods, salty foods, fatty foods — are essential for a healthy body.
Sweet foods are a source of quick energy because their sugars can be converted quickly to glucose, the molecule that your body burns for energy. (Check out Chapter 8 for an explanation of how your body uses sugars.)
Better yet, sweet foods make you feel good. Eating them tells your brain to release natural painkillers called endorphins. Sweet foods may also stimulate an increase in blood levels of adrenaline, a hormone secreted by the adrenal glands. Adrenaline sometimes is labeled the fight-or-flight hormone because it’s secreted more heavily when you feel threatened and must decide whether to stand your ground — fight — or hurry away — flight.
Salt is vital to life. As Chapter 12 explains, salt enables your body to maintain its fluid balance and to regulate chemicals called electrolytes that give your nerve cells the power needed to fire electrical charges that energize your muscles, power up your organs, and transmit messages from your brain.
Fatty foods are even richer in calories (energy) than sugars. So the fact that you want them most when you’re very hungry comes as no surprise. (Chapters 5 and 7 explain how you use fats for energy.)
Which fatty food you want may depend on your gender. Numerous studies suggest that women like their fats with sugar (think chocolate). Men, on the other hand, seem to prefer their fat with salt (think fries).
One explanation for the increase in obesity among Americans (see Chapter 4) may be the food industry’s manipulating our natural desire for rich foods by creating layered products: sugar on top of fat on top of salt. Or vice versa. Need proof? Look no further than the diabolically delicious pretzel M&Ms introduced in 2010: sugar coating on top of fatty chocolate on top of salty pretzel dishing up 150 calories, 4.5 grams fat, 24 grams carbohydrates (17 of them sugars) per ounce. Yum? Or yipes?
Loving the food you’re with: Geography and taste
Marvin Harris was an anthropologist with a special interest in the history of food. In his perfectly delightful classic book, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (Simon & Schuster, 1998), Harris posed this interesting situation.
Suppose that you live in a forest where someone has pinned $20 and $1 bills to the upper branches of the trees. Which will you reach for? The $20 bills, of course. But wait. Suppose that only a couple of $20 bills are pinned to branches among millions and millions of $1 bills.
Now, substitute chickens for $20 bills and large insects for $1 bills, and you can see why people who live in places where insects far outnumber the chickens spend their time and energy picking off the plentiful high-protein bugs rather than chasing after the occasional chicken — although they wouldn’t turn it down if one fell into the pot.
Therefore, the first rule of food choice is that people tend to eat and enjoy what is easily available, which explains the differences in cuisines in different parts of the world.
Here’s a second rule: For a food to be appealing (good to eat), it must be both nutritious and relatively easy or economical to produce.
A food that meets one test but not the other is likely to be off the list. For example:
The human stomach cannot extract nutrients from the indigestible dietary fiber cellulose in grass. So even though grass grows here, there, and everywhere, under ordinary circumstances, it never ends up in your salad.
Cows are harder to raise than plants, especially under the hot South Asian sun; pigs eat what people do, so they compete for your food supply. In other words, although they’re highly nutritious, sometimes neither the cow nor the pig is economical to produce, a reasonable — though not the only — explanation for why some cultures and some religious beliefs take exception to the use of pigs and cows as food.
Taking offense to food and flavors
You may truly dislike the flavor of a particular food because (a) your genes tell you to, or (b) your past experience with the food was unpleasant. Being allergic to a certain food isn’t really a taste disqualifier, but in some cases, your stomach may make the decision for you.
You blame it on your genes
Virtually everyone instinctively dislikes bitter foods, at least at first tasting. This dislike is a protective mechanism. Bitter foods are often poisonous, so disliking stuff that tastes bitter is a primitive but effective way to eliminate potentially toxic food.
According to Linda Bartoshuk, of the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and Human Nutrition (Gainesville), about two-thirds of all human beings carry a gene that makes them especially sensitive to bitter flavors. This gene may have given their ancestors a leg up in surviving their evolutionary food trials.
People with this gene can taste very small concentrations of a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide (PTC). You can test for the trait by having people taste a piece of paper impregnated with 6-n-propylthiouracil, a thyroid medication whose flavor and chemical structure are similar to PTC. People who say the paper tastes bitter are called PTC tasters. People who taste only paper are called PTC nontasters.
If you’re a PTC taster, you’re likely to find the taste of saccharin, caffeine, the salt substitute potassium chloride, and the food preservatives sodium benzoate and potassium benzoate really nasty. The same is true for the flavor chemicals common to cruciferous vegetables — members of the mustard family, including broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, and radishes.
Another group of people who don’t like what they taste includes those for whom the green herb cilantro tastes like soap. Yes, soap. Here’s the connection: The chemicals that create the flavor of cilantro include fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. Making soap requires breaking up fat molecules, a process that produces, yes, aldehydes.
Although nobody has yet pinned down the genetic trait that makes some people loathe the smell and taste of aldehydes, the scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia believe that further research will eventually identify it. In the meantime, if you’re in the anti-cilantro camp, the solution is simple: Substitute parsley.
You once ate this food and it made you sick
People who’ve gotten truly sick — I’m talking nausea and vomiting here — after eating a specific food, definitely remember the experience. Sometimes, says psychologist Alexandra W. Logue, author of The Psychology of Eating and Drinking, 4th edition (Routledge), people’s revulsion may be so strong that they’ll never try the food again — even when they know that what actually made them ill was something else entirely, like riding a roller coaster just before eating, or having the flu, or taking a drug whose side effects include an upset stomach.
You’re allergic, but you love the food
If you’re allergic to a food or have a metabolic problem that makes digesting it hard for you, you may eat the food less frequently, but you’ll enjoy it as much as everyone else does. For example, people who can’t digest lactose, the sugar in milk, may end up gassy every time they eat ice cream, but they still like the way the ice cream tastes.
Your digestive system says no
Does digestion depend on whether you like your food? To some extent, yes. The simple act of putting food into your mouth needs to stimulate the flow of saliva and the secretion of enzymes that you need to digest the food. Some studies suggest that if you really like your food, your pancreas may release as much as 30 times its normal amount of digestive enzymes. However, if you truly loathe what you’re eating, your body may refuse to take it in. No saliva flows, and your mouth becomes so dry that you may not even be able to swallow the food. If you do manage to choke it down, your stomach muscles and your digestive tract may convulse in an effort to be rid of the awful stuff.
Changing the Menu: Adapting to Exotic Foods
New foods are an adventure. Some people dive right in to the dish. They like new foods and flavors the first time they try them. Others may not like them the first time around, but in time what once seemed strange can become just another entry on the dinner menu.
Learning to like unusual foods
Exposure to different people and cultures expands your taste horizons. Some taboos — horsemeat, snake, dog — may simply be too emotion-laden to be overcome. Others with no emotional baggage tend to fall to experience. On first taste, people often dislike very salty, very bitter, very acidic, or very slippery foods, such as caviar, coffee, and oysters, but many later learn to enjoy them.
Coming to terms with these foods can be both physically and psychologically rewarding:
Several bitter foods, such as coffee and unsweetened chocolate, are relatively mild stimulants that temporarily improve mood and physical performance.
Strongly flavored foods, such as salty caviar, offer a challenge to the taste buds.
Foods such as oysters, which may seem totally disgusting the first time you see or taste them, are symbols of wealth or worldliness. Trying them implies a certain sophistication in the way you face life.
Happily, an educated, adventurous sense of taste can be a pleasure that lasts as long as you live. Professional tea tasters, wine tasters, and others who develop the ability to discern even the smallest differences among flavors continue to enjoy their gift well into old age as long as they continue to provide stimuli in the form of tasty, well-seasoned food.
In other words, as they say about adult life’s other major sensory delight, “Use it or lose it.”
Stirring the stew: The culinary benefits of immigration
If you’re lucky enough to live in a place that attracts many immigrants, your dining experience is flavored by the favorite foods of other people (meaning the foods of other cultures). In the United States, for example, the melting pot isn’t an idle phrase. American cooking literally bubbles with contributions from every group that’s ever stepped ashore here.
Table 15-2 lists some of the foods and food combinations characteristic of specific ethnic/regional cuisines. Imagine how few you might sample living in a place where everybody shares exactly the same ethnic, racial, or religious background. Just thinking about it is enough to make you stand up and shout, “Hooray for diversity at the dinner table!” (Check out Figure 15-2 for the visuals!)
Of course, enjoying other people’s foods doesn’t mean Americans don’t have their own cuisine. Table 15-3 is a list of made-in-America taste sensations, many created by immigrant chefs whose talents flowered in America’s kitchens.
Boston (Pilgrim adaptation of Native American dish)
Clam chowder
Boston (the word chowder comes from the French la chaudière, the large copper soup pot used by fishermen to make a communal soup)
Hamburger
Everywhere (originally called a Hamburg steak by everyone except the citizens of Hamburg, Germany)
Jambalaya
Louisiana (combination of French Canadian [Cajun] with native coastal cookery)
Potato chips
Saratoga Springs, New York (credited to George Crum, a Native American/African American chef at the Moon Lake Lodge resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1853)
Spoon bread
Southern United States (adapted from Native American corn pudding)
Vichyssoise
New York (commonly attributed to Louis Diat, chef at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York in 1917, who is said to have named the cold potato-and-cream soup in honor of the city of his birth, Vichy, France)
At first, scientists believed that people had specific taste buds for specific flavors: sweet taste buds for sweets, sour taste buds for sour, and so on. Modern science proposes that groups of taste buds work together so that flavor chemicals in food link up with chemical bonds in taste buds to create patterns that you recognize as sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and, yes, umami. The technical term for this process is across-fiber pattern theory of gustatory coding. Receptor patterns for the sweet, sour, bitter, and salty have been tentatively identified, but the pattern for umami remains elusive.