Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey Read Free Book Online Page A

sweetened with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup). This wouldn’t be the case if she had used tomatoes or berries or beef, which vary by location, variety, season, and how they’ve been stored. Bartoshuk asked consumers to rate the sweetness of Coke on a scale in which the bottom of the scale is “no sweetness at all” and the top of the scale is “the sweetest you’ve ever tasted.” In this first test, almost everyone put the sweetness at the same place: about two-thirds of the way up.
    “You look at that and you think, Wow! People’s senses of taste are really very similar, ” says Bartoshuk. But this is where things get interesting. In a second phase of the test, she outfitted the testees with earphones and a sound dial. In this round of testing, Bartoshuk used a technique called crossmodality matching. Here, a modality is a sense. Crossing modalities means using one sense (hearing) to gauge another (taste). She asked the tasters to adjust the volume of the sound they heard through their earphones to match the sweetness of the Coke. The results showed that the group of HyperTasters adjusted the sound up to the level of a train whistle, or about 90 decibels. Conversely, the group of Tolerant Tasters adjusted the sound level down to that of a telephone dial tone, about 80 decibels. A difference of 10 decibels equates to a factor of two. In other words, “That tells us through this matching technique that people with the most taste buds experience twice the sweetness,” says Bartoshuk. Maximum sweet for a HyperTaster is twice as intense as maximum sweet for a Tolerant Taster.
    “PROP remains a very good way to identify taster types; if you taste PROP and you are one of the individuals who get a very strong bitter taste, you know that you are an anatomical Supertaster. However, some of those who cannot taste PROP can also have the anatomy of Supertasters; they just don’t taste PROP.” This is all to say that there’s no litmus test for determining your taster type. It’s confusing, to say the least.
    What’s also confusing is that the food choices of HyperTasters and Tolerant Tasters are highly unpredictable. If at this point you’re starting to wonder if you are doomed to a life of blandness because you may or may not be a HyperTaster,fear not. Being a HyperTaster is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Think of all the amazing bitter foods Roger and others like him simply can’t eat. In times of famine or shortage, Tolerant Tasters would be able to sustain themselves on bitter roots and plants while Roger would wither away and die without his meat and potatoes, unable to tolerate the bitter greens he’d be forced to subsist on.
    You can’t change the anatomy of your tongue, just as you can’t change your genetic makeup or height. But a height limitation doesn’t mean that you can’t teach yourself to be an excellent basketball player. And everyone—including you—can teach himself to be an excellent taster.
The Trouble with Statistics
    HyperTasters are characterized by an excess of taste buds on the tongue that results in excessive sensitivity. A logical question is whether this might correlate with an excess of any other sensitivity. It makes some sense to me that this might be true. If taste buds hold nerve endings that poke out on the tongue to receive input, it would stand to reason that some other nerve endings might be poking out somewhere else to receive different inputs at excessive levels of sensitivity. Some scientists noticed an interesting correlation in animals, so they set out to test it in humans. Their hypothesis was that an increased sensitivity to bitter tastes (like PROP and Brussels sprouts) might be indicative of more emotional behavior.
    The researchers recruited more than a hundred people and split them into three groups based on their sensitivity to PROP: HyperTasters, Tasters, and Tolerant Tasters. To eliminate the influence of personality traits, the participants