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

were asked to complete a questionnaire assessing their characteristics, which were then normalized. The experiment entailed watching movie clips chosen to elicit emotions.
    One clip was a three-minute scene from The Champ , a 1979 movie about a championship boxer. The scene shows a young Ricky Schroder distraught over the death of his father, trying in vain to wake him up. I’ve seen The Champ a handful of times and each time I’m reduced to sobbing out loud. To call this scene heart-wrenching is to understate how hard it is for me to watch. (This will be important!) After being exposed to the movie clip, the participants then rated their emotional state for comparison. At a later date they did the same thing for a clip from Pretty Woman , one that’s difficult to watch, in which a man tries to rapea woman, chosen to elicit anger. A third clip, from a documentary on the processing and usage of copper, which contained no human interaction, was thrown in as a control. It was pretty emotionless and didn’t incite any feelings.
    The scientists found significant differences among the HyperTasters’ response to the content that induced anger. Other studies have shown a link between PTC-tasters and depression. The conclusion drawn by the scientists is that HyperTasters may be more prone to emotions such as anger and tension because these emotions provoke reactions at the basic survival level. A sensitivity to bitter tastes also requires action for survival, namely rejecting bitter, possibly toxic food.
    As a HyperTaster I totally embraced these findings, since I am highly emotional in both positive and negative ways. But Roger is not. In fact, the reason we work as a couple is that his rock-solid stability anchors my roller-coaster psyche. So these results confused me once again.
    Ultimately, this type of conflicting data—two of the same taster types with totally different behavior—is the trouble with statistics. You may be a Hyper-Taster and not recognize Roger’s behavior as your own. In fact, Paul Rozin, owner of the “beautiful tongue” depicted earlier, makes food choices very different from Roger’s. He, too, finds many bitter foods almost unbearable, but he has come to like many of them, mostly through repeated exposure and coming to appreciate the strong sensation they give him. He considers himself an omnivore, and has traveled the world seeking out unique food experiences. I, too, am a HyperTaster and almost an omnivore. I seek out bitter foods like the aforementioned Brussels sprouts. Bitter foods taste bitter to me, but I love the sensation. Roger avoids it. I have to be superattuned to flavor nuances for my job and I’m pretty good at detecting these subtle flavors, lemon zest possibly excepted.
    I asked Bartoshuk how scientists are able to make correlations between types of tasters and the food choices we make. Trying to answer this question, Bartoshuk seemed to share my exasperation as she gave reasons why two people of the same taster type might choose very different diets. For example, I may have put a lot more time and thought than Roger into the concept of Brussels sprouts, eventually developing an appreciation of them. People who are brought up in cultures that believe bitter foods are good for them generally end up liking bitter foods. Conversely, if someone has a terrible experience with Brussels sprouts, such as vomiting right after eating them, that person may tend to avoid them because that experience conditioned him to do so, consciously or unconsciously.
    “The truth is, you just can’t make predictions for one person,” said Bartoshuk,“It’s just too complicated. We can statistically do a very good job. You give me a hundred subjects in one group and a hundred in another and I will be able to tell you some things about their average behavior that will be right on. But I will miss by a mile with individuals.”
    This is the ultimate problem with these groupings of taster type. After