# What If You Don't Taste What I Taste? **URL:** \ **Category:** Lounge\ **Created:** [July 18, 2007, 5:06pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/what-if-you-dont-taste-what-i-taste/4705 "2007-07-18T17:06:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![PheroQuirk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@PheroQuirk](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/PheroQuirk)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2007, 5:06pm UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/what-if-you-dont-taste-what-i-taste/4705/1 "2007-07-18T17:06:32Z")
[2blowhards.com: What If You Don’t Taste What I Taste?](http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/07/what_if_you_don.html#004284) What If You Don’t Taste What I Taste? **Michael Blowhard writes:** Dear Blowhards – In a fascinating series for Slate, wine critic Mike Steinberger looks into the biology of taste. It turns out that **people are wildly different in their abilities to sense aromas and perceive tastes. You might be able to detect flavors that I’m unable to pick up. Not only that: People also differ in how the aromas and flavors that they do perceive affect them. W**hat’s repulsive to one person might be experienced by someone else as deeply satisfying. I may adore shaving a little Parmesan cheese onto my salad while the thought of doing such a thing makes you gag. (And for good reason: The main chemical contributing to the aroma of Parmesan cheese – butyric acid – is the same chemical that dominates the aroma of puke.) The series is interesting for the info it conveys as well as for the questions it raises. One example: H\*\*ow valid is food or wine criticism as an activity if each of us has a different makeup where our built-in – ie., biologically-set – capabilities and predilections go? Is there any way a wine or a dish can be declared “good” if it’s a simple fact of life that different people experience it differently? \*\* Another: What to make of criticism more generally if this same kind of thing turns out to hold true where reading, watching, and listening go? I wouldn’t be surprised if it does; **people seem to have many built-in preferences and rhythms. An example: Some people find narrative suspense to be a pleasant heightener. (That group includes me. I love suspense, and I’m fascinated by the mechanics and psychology of it.) But for others, suspense is anything but enjoyable. I have one relative who finds narrative tension so unpleasant that she gets up and leaves the room whenever a movie’s twists and surprises start to make the blood-pressure level go up.** One dimension that I’m sorry Steinberger doesn’t touch on is time – ie., how our biological abilities and makeups change with age. My body certainly isn’t the same thing it was when I was 15 or 20, and because of that I no longer crave the same kinds of experiences that I craved when I was that age. (Younger people have systems that fire off much more avidly than older people do.) I’ve learned from many people in the arts bits of folk wisdom about how older and younger people tend to react to stimuli and events. Sound engineers have told me, for example, that how a person experiences loudness depends on age and sex. Boys and young men find loud noises exciting; young women and girls find loudness OK, but far less immediately pleasurable. What teen girls and young women mainly like is having boyfriends. So if the boys like loud music and loud movies, well then, that’s OK with the girls. Once past the age of 30 or 35, though, nearly all people find loud noises first annoying and then painful. This is one reason, by the way, why so few older people go to the movies these days. Overcranked, Dolbyized sound systems make watching a movie in a movie theater painful – physically painful – for the cottontop set. Given the number of preferences and tastes that seem to be built into our biologies, how can it ever be said that one and only one reaction to a given work is the right one? And what does it suggest about the kinds of large-scale cultural judgments that result in things like reading lists and canons of the greats? Perhaps such rankings reflect little more than the biological makeup of the over-time majority. We can all educate ourselves, and class ourselves up a little, of course. Tastes can be opened-up, expanded, and refined. And a life spent avoiding adventure and exploration will generally be a dull one. But still: Perhaps what’s plainly “fabulous” to one person will be “a big goddam bore” to another – and perhaps there’s nothing finally to be done about it. Neither person is right, neither’s wrong; there’s no arguing-it-out until a definitive and correct judgment is arrived at; there’s only comparing notes, and giving the other guy’s p-o-v some consideration for a few minutes. Part one of Steinberger’s series is **here** ([http://www.slate.com/id/2168762/nav/navoa/](http://www.slate.com/id/2168762/nav/navoa/)). Part Two is **here** ([Am I a supertaster?](http://www.slate.com/id/2168768/)). Part Three is **here** ([Is it good to be a supertaster?](http://www.slate.com/id/2168868/)). Best, Michael posted by Michael at [July 13, 2007](http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/07/what_if_you_don.html#004284) | [perma-link](http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/07/what_if_you_don.html#004284) | (14) comments from the Slate article… Wysocki went on to explain that while the human olfactory system is capable of identifying thousands of smells, roughly two-thirds of the potential sensory receptors in our noses are, for genetic reasons, defunct, which creates certain aromatic blind spots in all of us—specific anosmias, as they are known. We quickly found one of mine. Wysocki handed me a plastic tube holding a clear liquid and asked me to take a whiff; I couldn’t smell a thing. The liquid contained andostenone, a mammalian [pheromone](https://a314.com/) found in boar saliva. In a random sampling of 100 people, around half will detect nothing, 15 or so will smell an inoffensive musky-floral-woody aroma, and the rest will be thoroughly repulsed by a liquid that, to them, reeks of stale urine or particularly nasty body odor. My faith in my nose was quickly restored by the next plastic tube he handed me; I opened it and took in a very pleasant floral scent. This was Galaxolide, a chemical used primarily in cosmetics; according to Wysocki, around 60 percent of us can smell Galaxolide, and the rest cannot. With enough time, Wysocki told me, he could find anyone’s olfactory blind spots. But he also said that studies have shown that specific anosmias can be at least partially overcome—that with repeated, heavy exposure to, say, andostenone, someone previously incapable of detecting its aroma might begin to sniff it out. (And who would want to miss out on the pleasure of smelling stale urine?) It was reassuring to learn that biology isn’t necessarily destiny when it comes to the sense of smell. It was less encouraging to discover how easily the nose can be led astray by the eyes. For his next stupid human trick, Wysocki produced two jars, one labeled “Food,” the other “Body.” I was told to sniff each. I actually was one of the few people not fooled by the experiment: I said both jars smelled like vomit. In fact, both jars contained the same chemical compound, butyric acid, which can be perceived as vomit but also as perspiration or Parmesan cheese. Wysocki told me he often conducts this test at seminars and that, on average, 60 percent of the people in the room will claim they enjoy the aroma in the “Food” jar, with most saying it’s redolent of Parmesan cheese; but when he asks if anyone found the “Body” jar pleasant, no hands go up—the participants invariably claim that it smells of puke or body odor. He mentioned similar work done with wine by Frederic Brochet, a French cognitive psychologist. Brochet has shown that people given a white wine that has been dyed red will describe it exactly as they would a red wine. He has also found that if he serves the same wine in two different bottles, one labeled a cheap _vin de table_ and the other a pricey _grand cru_, people invariably lavish praise on the latter and scorn the former. Brochet has dubbed this phenomenon “perceptive expectation.” … Wysocki’s colleague, the geneticist Danielle Reed, agreed to inspect my tongue. Not only that: She told me that she actually could test my genotype to determine if I had one or both of the dominant alleles associated with supertasting. Three years ago, researchers at long last confirmed Arthur Fox’s hunch and identified the gene responsible for PROP/PTC sensitivity. It is believed that most supertasters possess the two dominant alleles for the gene, known as TAS2R38, but it is also known that some people who are highly PROP-sensitive have only one. Tasters are thought to possess at least one dominant allele, while people with two recessive alleles are categorized as nontasters. Given my strong reaction to the PROP, Reed and I took it as a given that I would have at least one dominant allele and very possibly two. Before meeting with Reed, I had a brief chat over the phone with Bartoshuk herself. I told her about my reaction to the PROP and my low tolerance for sweetness. She said the latter was also consistent with being a supertaster; while humans, for evolutionary reasons, are disposed to like sweetness and abhor bitterness, supertasters tend to have much lower thresholds for sweetness. She told me that for nontasters—and she happens to be one—there is no such thing as too sweet; in fact, she said that she regularly adds sugar to her wine to sweeten it up. I also had a conversation with Tim Hanni, a Napa-based master of wine who has done extensive research into the science of taste—research that has convinced him that wine criticism is pretty much worthless, given how much individual palates vary. I told Hanni about my experience with the PROP, my aversion to sweetness, and my preference for lighter wines. He then asked me several rapid-fire questions: Did I like Scotch? Did I take my coffee black? Did artificial sweeteners taste different to me than regular sugar? Was I a heavy salter? Did my mother suffer a lot of morning sickness when she was pregnant with me? I didn’t know the answer to the last question, but the (emphatic) answers to the other four were no, no, yes, and yes, all of which indicated to Hanni that I was either a very sensitive taster or a supertaster. … How so? To begin with, supertasters do not particularly enjoy the flavor of alcohol and often complain that it leaves a burning sensation in their mouths. They are also sensitive to astringency and acidity, which can be equally problematic as wine goes. (Evidently, eating is no joy for them, either; according to Linda Bartoshuk, they can’t abide spiciness, they don’t like fatty foods, and they tend to find all sorts of vegetables overly bitter. All in all, a fun bunch.) The British wine writer Jamie Goode, in his excellent book _The Science of Wine_, calls attention to the work of Gary Pickering, a professor of oenology at Canada’s Brock University. Pickering has been investigating the relationship between PROP sensitivity and wine appreciation and believes that being a supertaster is no blessing when it comes to wine. “I would speculate that supertasters probably enjoy wine less than the rest of us,” Pickering told Goode. “They experience astringency, acidity, bitterness, and heat (from alcohol) more intensely, and this combination may make wine—or some wine styles—relatively unappealing.” … As wine writing goes, supertasters may also be at a disadvantage demographically. Researchers believe that just 25 percent of Americans are supertasters; around half are tasters, and the remaining 25 percent are nontasters. The categories also divide along racial and gender lines: It is estimated that 35 percent of Caucasian women are superstars, but only 15 percent of Caucasian men fit that bill. … ---
**Author:** ![Rbt](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/pheromonetalk.com/rbt/32/2066_2.png) [@Rbt](https://pheromonetalk.com/u/Rbt)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2007, 4:08am UTC](https://pheromonetalk.com/t/what-if-you-dont-taste-what-i-taste/4705/2 "2007-08-04T04:08:09Z")
This is one reason why I find “taste test” type evaluations in many consumer magazines etc to be a total waste. Same with cologne/perfumes. At one time I could tell the difference between a jelly and peanut butter sandwich and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (depending on which one was “on top”). I can nurse a thimble-full of good trokenbeerenauslese (“raisin” wine) for hours…, drop by drop. Everyone “detects” flavors, odors, sounds, colors, patterns, etc differently. One man’s meat in another man’s poi, son. (Hawaiian joke…) PS “cottontop set”??? HA! HA! PSS re: cheese and puke. I heard somewhere that the “flavoring” for the Harry Potter “vomit” flavor jellybeans was from a failed attempt to create a “pizza-like” flavoring… I have noticed the pizzas I buy with Parmesan cheese on them do have a “pukey” odor to them.