I generally do try to avoid making public fun of NY Times Vows couples because I know all LOVE is IMPORTANT and DIFFERENT and I’m generally glad when people find happiness, no matter how much they sound like people I would not personally enjoy spending time with. However, there’s something in last week’s column that needs to be addressed.
Everyone stop saying “supertaster.”
First off, thank GOD they found each other because otherwise this man might be roving the country, administering tongue tests anytime someone can’t finish their Broccoli Rabe. Second, I KNOW IT’S A THING YOU DON’T HAVE TO TELL ME IT’S A THING. But does anyone else find it odd that we use the word “supertaster,” as if you are somehow better at tasting than the rest of us, when what it really means is that you cannot enjoy flavorful lettuces? Supertaster? More like Inferiortaster!
What I did not know is that it seems like a lot of people claiming to be supertasters just don’t like greens and cilantro and are trying to use some fancy medical terms to make up for it. I looked up that “supertaster test” and aside from bitter vegetables, the other hallmark of a supertaster is finding “highly fatty and sugary foods less palatable than non-tasters.” So no, dude who wiped his parsley off his dinner but continues to eat cheeseburgers every day, you are not a supertaster you just are predisposed for scurvy.
“Whoa, Jaya, this sure is a lot of vitriol for a condition that you, as a non medical professional, know very little about.” Well good thing there’s Google. Apparently there are some theories that being a Sensitive Mouth Person gave some people an evolutionary advantage because they avoided potentially toxic plants. Great. I will gladly get lost in the woods with a supertaster, you have that advantage.
Okay ugh fine taste however you want just don’t act like it’s the end of the world when your taco has cilantro on it.
okay but it IS the end of the world if my tacos have cilantro on them
proof: too many late night takeout burritos rendered inedible by evil leaves, leaving me vulnerable to the most vicious of hangovers
that’s just not fair, I love cilantro but a proper late night burrito should be as pure a cheesy goo puddle as possible.
We all know about you poor people for whom cilantro tastes like soap. I would not wish that either. I would never tell anyone to eat that. Frankly, parsley and cilantro taste like a salad. Other people don’t like that taste.
Parsley isn’t as bad–I can eat it but I don’t love it. Cilantro, though? Super nope. My poor husband put it in something when we first started dating and felt bad for weeks that I ate no dinner because the entire thing was contaminated.
I think cilantro tastes like soap but I like it anyway. Is that wrong? I mean, I’m not sitting around gnawing on a bar of Dial while I watch TV, or anything…
I thought I was the only one.
I find it a bit soapy, but I like it in small amounts, too! Or at least I did, until the time I was chopping my homegrown cilantro and discovered it was full of CABBAGE WORMS. So now the cilantro flavor just says “worms” to my brain and I just can’t enjoy it anymore. Anyway, ugh, cabbage worms. They also ate all the kale I was trying to grow for my rabbit. I’ve given up on gardening.
D: you have described the nightmare
I use the “soap gene” thing as an excuse, but deep down – and i’ve never admitted this to anyone outside my family – it doesn’t really taste like soap (I think). I just hate how it tastes. I don’t think I have a genetic excuse.
i have a cilantro story that doubles as a story about how much my ex sucks. sound fun? you bet.
one time we were making some sort of cold grain salad for a dinner party, and i prepared the chicken separately, because he is a vegetarian and i am not. as i chopped the meat, he chopped the cilantro. and then he goes, “oh wait, you don’t like cilantro do you” after dumping like TWO CUPS OF CILANTRO INTO THE SALAD. i almost started crying.
(also, i don’t even think i’m a soap-tasting person, i think i just don’t like cilantro. i still expect people to fall over themselves to accommodate my preference, obvi.)
Yeah, I don’t think it tastes like soap, but I do find the taste weird and intrusive.
eat him instead of the salad
Cilantro issues are real, man. And I don’t pretend it’s SUPER . It’s a miserable curse and a genetic deficiency and as a result any raw cilantro in any of my food ruins my day. And I like complicated foods! I eat marrow and organs and liver and all sorts of squishy things from the sea and fermented things, and I like spice and I’ll eat most anything. I draw the line at things like whale on moral grounds, but seriously, if I’ll eat a fermented brain slathered in some kind of sauce made from aged greens (which i would try) why would you set me up to hate it because some tiny little herb is sprinkled on the top?
Jaya, you treasure. (An absolutely correct treasure as well.)
OK but CAPTAIN VEGETABLE
IT IS I, CAPTAIN VEGETABLE!
WITH MY CARROTS
AND MY CELERY
EATING CRUNCHY VEGETABLES IS GOOD FOR ME!
“Wha-, what is this, some kind of bad dream?”
“Do I look like a bad dream?”
“…”
My name is Eddie
I love spaghetti
So I eat it whenever I can!
If it’s ready
Gimme spaghetti!
It’s a lovely thing
It looks like string
I felt so bad for my brother-in-law when I found out that even nori (sushi-style dried seaweed) tastes bitter to him.
When informed that, to everybody else, nori is pleasantly mild and smokey, he was honestly shocked. Apparently the only decent green that doesn’t taste like a mouthful of quinine to him is romaine.
He loves vegetables and salads, so this strikes me as a very cruel setback. I weep (bitter) tears for him.
I once met a guy who wouldn’t kiss his girlfriend if she ate a salad because he could taste the lettuce on her breath. I can’t tell if it’s because he was a supertaster or just an asshole.
I’m gonna go with “both.”
I think you can tell.
Like, for how long after? Because I’m a vegetarian, and date people who eat meat, and it’s generally not a thing. But I would occasionally not want to kiss my ex immediately after he swallowed a piece of something super meaty, because it was gross for me (and also because there is only so much making out in a restaurant I want to do, but that was a whole different issue). Sometimes he would get pouty about it and I could never determine which of us was the asshole. Though I can say with confidence that our fixation on that question did not help the relationship.
I’ve always wondered if I’m being an asshole, because I’m the same way–do not kiss me just after eating meat or something really eggy or cheesy. It’s just gross and I find it really, really unappealing.
Current boyfriend is totally sweet about it, thank god. He’s the first omnivore I’d dated in close to a decade.
I will do the same thing to my boyfriend if he has just eaten an orange, because I can smell it.
I am not a supersniffer, though. Just an asshole who hates the smell of oranges.
I am not an asshole but I won’t kiss my husband or stand within 2 yards if he’s had licorice.
Ok, ok, maybe sometimes I am.
You…you can taste lettuce on someone’s breath?
…
HOW?
One of my most-hated foods is cucumber. I can taste when it has touched other foods, or been on the same cutting board without a wash, and I can smell it from across the house–all of which can make me gag.
People who like cucumbers will tell me “but they don’t taste that strong! They’re just fresh and watery!” Yeah, to YOU. To me they smell and taste revolting. I can clearly smell/taste something in cukes that most people can’t.
I think it must be similar.
Calone, maybe? Do you dislike the smell of melon, too?
Yup. I can handle a bite or two of cantaloupe. But watermelon just tastes like sweetened cucumber to me, and the other ones smell too revolting to put anywhere near my mouth.
TRUE STORY: I once found a facebook group for people like me. We all hated melons, but we all liked pickled cucumber just fine. Whatever it is in cucumber that tastes and smells so terrible is destroyed by pickling!
That is so interesting! I like cucumbers and watermelon just fine, but the presence of cantaloupe on a plate renders everything else inedible to me. It infects EVERYTHING. I can never get a fruit cup, ever. Which sucks because I like most fruit!
I like cucumbers, but they make me sick. But pickled ones are fine for me too!
I loathe most melon but I love cucumber. I realise this is an inconsistent position to take.
Or it means there’s something other than the flavor compounds / texture they have in common that bothers you?
I am fond of cucumber. But melon is pretty hit or miss for me– I find sweet, non-acidic fruit to be meh in general. If you throw a lot of lime, salt, and chile at it, I might eat it, but not by itself.
YES. Cucumber is terrible and ruins all summer recipes. I can smell a cucumber from 30 yards away.
One of my great tragedies: I love tabbouleh salad. Thankfully most places near me don’t make it with cucumbers.
Once upon a time a friend ate a garden-fresh lemon cucumber behind me and I actually did gag before I realized he was behind me.
Also what is it with people saying “oh, just pick it out”???? Cucumber is juicy! It gets on everything it touches!!
I once bought some to-go wraps for my lunch only to find cukes in them, which weren’t listed on the label. I wrote them a truly pissy email and they apologized and sent me a gift card.
Agh, me too! When I worked as a waitress, I could always tell if someone at a table had ordered a certain salad because I would smell the cucumbers and start gagging as I walked by.
I don’t care for melon but it doesn’t make me gag the way cucumbers do. The only other thing that does that to me is bell peppers. Does anyone else have this same issue with bell peppers?
Cucumber, melon (except for watermelon) and bell peppers, YES. I can recently handle cooked red pepper, but raw sends me running for the hills.
No, I cannot just pick the melon out of the fruit salad, it’s tainted.
I like red peppers, cooked or raw, but green is NOPE. It’s not ripe! Red is ripe!
Wow, really? What does it taste like to you? Like does it taste bitter? Soapy? I’ve never known anyone who hated cucumber!
I have a hard time describing it. Somehow really floral and bitter? But not just that, because hoppy beers are floral and bitter and I love them. But cucumbers are just…..revolting.
Okay, yeah, cucumber does have a certain bitterness to it, particularly in the peel. And the floral note…a lot of fruits have a certain floral quality? It’s just that you happen to hate this particular bitter/floral flavor. I can see that!
As someone above noted, the whole cucumber/melon family has that same taste/smell. I honestly think it’s similar to the cilantro thing, in that some of us can taste a particular (terrible) bioflavanoid that most people are oblivious to.
It’s hard to discribe. You know those candles that have names like Rainy Day or April Shower? A kind of genertic smell with many parts that you can’t identify? It tastes like biting one of those and it’s juice gets everywhere and it’s terrrible.
This I can picture perfectly. What a terrible thing to taste.
Luckily, my nose lets me know of the danger before it gets anywhere near my mouth. I’m very rarely ever caught unawares, the only time in recent memory was a friend giving me gyros to tr.
YES THIS YESSSSS
EDIT: that also probably explains why I hate those candles so much.
The weird thing is cucumber and melon candles aren’t as bad as those Rainy Day candles. It’s not a great smell, and I don’t like it, but it’s nothing like the gross smell of real cucumbers or melons. Also it’s odd to see my exact opinions on cucumbers, melons and pickles written by someone who’s not me, I honestly thought I was the only one who felt that way about them.
It’s so true!! (Man, if I could find a candle that smelled like real petrichor….)
Us cuke-haters aren’t as common as cilantro-haters, but we’re out there! There really is a facebook group, even if it’s abandoned.
That would be calone, the most overused fragrance compound of the 1990s.
It’s a pity: I actually like cucumber, but I had a really terrible date with someone who wears Acqua di Gio, one of those “aquatic” scents, and it was a long time before I could enjoy tzatziki again.
Huh. I knew it was something, I just assumed it was a blend of a bunch of scents and my nose wasn’t good enough to pick out individual notes out of many (I remember growing up and women’s perfumes being this overwhelming wave of rose and jasmine and who knows what else). Never occurred to me that it was a synthetic smell that I wouldn’t have run into elsewhere. That’s really very interesting.
Also I’m mighty tickled to see a cucumber lover nod and say that it’s just like that scent, except most of the time you enjoy it. Terribly sorry about the date, I’m glad you eventually regained your love.
(I had tzatziki with gyros once, by a well-meaning relation who had forgotten my weirdness. I’m told my face was a portrait of betrayal when I had the first bite.)
I could not fully say what a cucumber tastes like, because I refuse to eat them. The smell alone makes my throat close up.
I have found my people.
Exactly, if I can smell cucumber from 40 feet away, I probably don’t want to be kissing someone who’s just eaten some. Also the great saddness of my life is that I like salads but when I go out I can’t order them because there’s nearly always cucumbers. Eeven if they pick it out I can still taste it.
The worst is when cucumber isn’t listed on the menu, but they bring out the salad and THERE IT IS.
The world really is full of weeping. It’s just so normal that they figure they don’t have to list it.
Wait wait wait. Nori is supposed to taste mild and smokey? This is blowing my mind. I’ve tried to like it, but it’s so garbagey bitter and gross when there’s no fish/ sushi rice to hide it!
Yes! Mild and smokey!
I will happily eat straight-up sheets of nori as a snack. It tastes kind of like crispy salmon skin.
As a child, I had a neighbor who would give away little individually wrapped sachets of nori for halloween. It was super tasty! I love the texture too.
So good! Although it does have the unfortunate tendency to adhere pretty strongly to the roof of my mouth.
YES and also my gums wayyyyy in the back.
I love going to Asian supermarkets and buying those huge flat packages of seasoned seaweed. There’s a Korean brand that marks it “laver” that I especially enjoy. It comes in sheets the size of a tabloid newspaper, a stack of them per packet, several packets per package.
And you can tell when I’ve bought one because suddenly there are little flakes of seaweed everywhere I sit. I plow through the whole thing in a few days.
The little boxes you can buy in places like Trader Joe’s are so overpriced in comparison that I can’t make myself buy them, even though I love the stuff.
My boyfriend loves these things. I don’t mind them, but don’t snack on them. But I definitely will not kiss him after he eats them because his breath smells like bad spinach. I guess this is the thread for me.
And yes, I know when he’s bought some because there are little flakes of seaweed dusting the table, counter tops, his desk, the floor. Just a trail of seaweed flakes.
It’s so that you can find us. If we’re lost. A little trail of seaweed flakes.
Yessss it’s so nice and savory and crispy.
To me it tastes slightly toasty (in the manner of a genmaicha or Ti Kuan Yin tea), salty, and oceanic. The ocean taste was the thing that took me a while to get used to: I thought the first package I ate of it was disgusting. The second package was gross, but I couldn’t stop eating it. The third, I loved.
same! I’m still unsure if I like it or not
Oh I hate dried nori (the softer kind in sushi is fine). It tastes awful to me (and I don’t have too many things I dislike the flavor of).
That’s fascinating – sushi nori IS dried nori, just moistened slightly!
Some “snack” nori may be toasted a bit longer and coated with oil and seasonings to make it a little more crisp and flavored. I wonder if you’re reacting to the additives in flavored nori brands, or just to the crispier texture. (Or both.)
Could be, or the other flavors in sushi are covering it up more so I don’t notice as much. But it is weird as I in no way consider myself a picky eater otherwise.
Haha, I’m pretty sure I’d eat sushi if it were wrapped in band-aids. Some things are worth it, eh!
Indeed!
I feel the same way. On its own it tastes like fish food flakes turned into a sheet. With sushi, I don’t really notice it.
Fish food flakes! You’ve described it perfectly. Except also really bitter too (and I like bitter foods).
OH NO. My ex husband once played the “close your eyes and open your mouth” game with me (NEVER AGAIN) and a strip of nori, which he enjoyed snacking on plain. It was the grossest thing I’d ever had in my mouth (up to that point). Does this…could I be…
THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE YOUR MOUTH D:
wow, yes. nori def. tastes like bitter clay to me. and i get the cilantro tinfoil thing too. but I think that it’s important to be and adult and learn to like new flavors that are not just fat and sugar.
But you can’t always learn to like new flavors! At one point I decided to learn to like cantelope, so I ate it every day with lunch for….I think I lasted a couple months? Until one day I cracked and couldn’t convince myself to eat it without gagging.
Side project: Write a romance novel around “Dr. Andrews introduced her to all kinds of mechanical contraptions.”
50 shades of Kale
that was my favorite line, yep
I’m pretty sure I just watched an MST3K about this called The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. The title is a really good synopsis.
Gutter Bumber Shoot! Gutter Bumber Shoot! Gutter Bumber Shoot!
If I could somehow put the Gene Belcher “mmm!” sound into text, that’s what would go here.
I regret I only have one thumbs up to give.
I’m just picturing George Clooney in Burn After Reading and his “mechanical contraption”
I read that and my mind goes straight to Dead Ringers.
FYI: If you want to make a psychological thriller with real staying power, try casting Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists who have gone off the rails.
There are definitely websites for this already, though I wouldn’t class them as “romantic” as such.
This is what my mind jumped to as well.
Your comment nearly made me spit out a mouthful of applesauce. Note to self: do not eat at the computer while reading The Toast!
To defend those of us who feel it’s the end of the world if the taco has cilantro: I lack a gene which allows me to taste the flavors of cilantro that people like. Therefore, to me it tastes like soap. Having your taco taste like soap is Not A Good Thing. So just remember, some of us are mutants and thus have an excuse 🙂
I too shall join you at Xavier’s academy for gifted tacoeaters
Me three, cilantro is soap flavor and nothing more.
yeah – the cilantro thing is not a supertaster thing, it’s a completely different mutant taste thing that makes it taste like soap.
(I am someone who finds many cruciform vegetables and chocolate (!) disgusting because they all taste like horribly bitter metal, but who can eat cilantro just fine, but who has a good friend that will cut you if you bring cilantro within 100 feet of her.)
I’m even more of a freak, because sometimes I get the Ugh Soap Noooo taste and sometimes it’s perfectly fine. Generally the Ugh Soap Noooooo happens when my gringisima mom (soy una gringa tambien but she takes it to a whole new level) puts leftover cilantro in places where it never should have been. Cilantro on tacos is great; cilantro on a bland Midwestern salad, seriously, Mom, why, is not.
chuckling steadily at misplaced Midwestern attempts at seasoning. <3
Is it in foods that don’t have a strong acidic component? Because I experience the same thing.
Yes!! I ate it for years without even noticing it, then ate a sandwich with a whole stalk of it in it, thought, “huh, something in that tasted weird” and got super sick to my stomach. And since then, I’ve avoided it, but have noticed that sometimes I can taste it immediately and instantly feel sick (like in a burrito, and once in a bloody Mary, WHY) and sometimes I have little pieces of it, don’t taste anything, and am fine. I’m not sure if it’s something about cooked vs raw?
Is there a stalk vs. leaves difference in compounds in cilantro like there is with rhubarb?
I don’t think stalk is the right word, I was just looking for something that captured the drama that a full…..weed? of cilantro stirs up in me
Is there a category for people like me — I like cilantro-y things, but with about a quarter of the cilantro the recipe calls for? My standard “fix” for recipes is twice as much of any other seasoning and a quarter the cilantro.
So, my partner claims that cilantro USED to taste like soap, but then he fixed it somehow through, idk, sheer force of will?? so…maybe there’s hope I guess?
“Oh, you don’t like the meals I make you? Let me find a scientifically provable way that you are weird and it’s definitely not my cooking ability or failure to take into account preferences!”
Men gonna men.
Also, STEM gonna STEM.
Ok, but seriously, a few years ago I had a boyfriend who claimed he didn’t like any greens (they’re all bitter!) or fruit (I just don’t like it!) which made cooking A BITCH. I would have liked to use this test on him, either to confirm he was an actual supertaster or that he was just a whiny baby.
(Considering that he liked veggies when they were in Thai food and enjoyed fatty foods, I’m pretty sure he was just a bizarrely picky eater.)
Oh, yes, it can definitely be hard to cook for a picky eater. But a test makes no difference! It’s not like it’s a diagnosis and then there is a treatment, or if she failed the test she would then have to like everything. People like different things. People should eat what they want! Other people should not give them a hard time! Your former boyfriend should have done more of the cooking.
While I agree with you generally, I DO think that there’s a sub-category of picky eaters where the aversion is primarily psychological. Like, ex-BF was so CONVINCED that certain foods were objectively gross and never, ever worth trying again… but then he’d eat them on accident when they were cooked in an ethnic cuisine and LOVE it. And, like, I’m deeply skeptical about how he would rule out entire categories of food like fruit; a raspberry, a pear, and an orange are all really different, and I doubt that every single fruit tasted horrible to him. He was also convinced that he was super allergic to chocolate, but there were a few times when he unknowingly ate things with cocoa powder and was… totally fine.
Basically, I think for him – and a fair amount of other picky eaters – sometimes the aversion is based more on psychological notions of purity and disgust. And while people have a right to make their own choices, food prep and consumption is inherently social, and it’s kind of lousy to expect others to cave to your preferences when they’re just based on an untested ~idea~ of what you find gross, rather than what actually doesn’t taste good to you.
There is also a subset of eaters who cannot believe that people don’t like the things that they like. I.e. “You don’t like custard? But it’s SO GOOD! Here, just have a bite of mine, no I’ll just help you, hold still stop moving your mouth, why are you being so difficult, it’s good I tell you, it’s VERY GOOD!”
nothing makes me more annoyed than my family member who does this. She dislikes certain foods, so everyone should, and she likes others, so clearly everyone should like them.
I mean, I’ll confess that I’m slightly sympathetic to the people who will try to have others taste their food if they’ve cooked it?
Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s a handful of common foods that I hate (canned tuna, ranch dressing, pickles, mayo), but I’ll usually try a bite of something after warning the host that I typically don’t like whatever ingredient, but am willing to give it a try because they went to the effort of making food for me. That said, it’s unreasonable to EXPECT someone to like anything and if the cook can’t handle it then that’s on them.
For me at least, this is a reaction to some male members of my family who are picky eaters. You don’t like most veggies? That’s your ish, and that’s fine! But don’t rudely complain to my 80-year-old grandma, who just made a large dinner for ten people, about the fact that there are ~too many greens~ on the table and where can you get some more rolls to fill up on???
I’m guessing my tuna salad of canned tuna, mayo, and pickles is not for you, then?
I’m open to trying and re-trying most foods, which has led me to reconsider some of my childhood foes; I now count kimchi, sauerkraut, and collard greens among my faves.
That said, tuna salad might actually be the foe that slays me.
Pretty much mine as well
For fucks sake yes. YES I do not like beer. NO I will not like your fancy/special/crafty/homemade beer. NO I don’t “just have to have the right one.”
I was worried this would happen when I lived for a summer with a good friend who’s a professional chef and likes just about everything, whereas I’m fairly picky. Fortunately she’s an angel who does not have that attitude and was very respectful of my “nope” foods, and in return I tried some dishes of hers that I didn’t think I’d like.
When I went away for a week she texted me and said “in honor of you not being here we’re eating all the things you hate. Mushrooms, cilantro, Steven Moffat….”
I have to stand up for fruit-haters. Fruit exists on a spectrum of disgustingness (mellons–>berries) but all fruit is horrifying. I am basing this on objective fact and not childhood fruit trauma.
I don’t like (most) berries. They all taste like funny-smelling lemons to me.
Also, and this is my really annoying eating thing, some of us have texture issues and its easier to just say you don’t like a thing than to have to explain to people why you don’t like it and have them look at you like you have said the weirdest thing on the planet and then sometimes either ask you if you are autistic or tell you that they think you are (I don’t really know much about autism, but I’m pretty sure that food texture issues are not a great way to conclusively diagnose it?).
But people have a hard time understanding that while I love salsa, spaghetti sauce and tomato soup I am not going to eat a raw tomato because it tastes and feels like cold vomit in my mouth. I am fine with the flavor of onion, but I cannot stand to actually get a bite of onion in my mouth (food processors are awesome; I can get all the flavor of an onion without any of the biting into a gross piece of slimeness). I hate the feeling of celery in my mouth as well, although I have no issue with the taste. So sometimes it’s easier to just say, “I don’t like tomatoes” than to explain all that, but then they think I’m nuts because I will eat a gallon of tomato soup.
I’m a tomato weirdo too, actually! I’ve gotten to a point where I actually kind of enjoy grape tomatoes, but any of the big ones are TOO WEIRD. Like, acidic mush and skin, which is not a nice mouthfeel.
I have not tried grape tomatoes. I periodically like to go back and see if I somehow now magically like raw tomatoes, since everyone keeps telling me about how tastes change. But maybe I will like a grape tomato! Its at least smaller.
There’s less squish and more skin, and they tend to be a lot sweeter than the big ones. That said, if they’re even remotely squishy I’m suddenly the pickiest tomato person in the world again.
I love tomatoes but I can only eat them cut up. We’re all friends here and I’m so happy we can share these things.
I also love salsa and spaghetti sauce and tomato soup but do not want a raw tomato anywhere near my food. I’ll occasionally leave it on a sandwich if it comes with it, but as soon as it starts sliding out of the sandwich (and it always does), I take it off.
I have finally found my people. Tomato relish? yes. Sun-dried tomato? YES. Anything tomato based – GIVE IT ALL TO MY MOUTH. There’s just something about the flavour of a fresh tomato that makes me gag. I can’t even leave them on sandwiches – they taint the whole thing.
I can do bruschetta, even! But sliced on a sandwich? Diced on a taco or in a salad? gtfo.
hi, are you me? no really, why do you have my name and my mouth problems?? raw tomatoes are so gross!!
It’s much easier to say “I don’t like [most] fruit” than, “I have problems with the seeds in berries, oranges are pulpy and weird, even when apples bite fine then you chew them and they get mushy and grainy, grape skin is terrible, watermelon is too stringy, etc., etc., etc.”
& it’s definitely partly psychological, for me, because most of the time I’m okay with cooked tomatoes but when I was madly depressed in college I couldn’t even stand the thought of the chunks in spaghetti sauce, so I ate all my pasta with butter and cheese. All my minor issues got way more debilitating when I wasn’t in a functional state of mind.
But even at my best I can only eat granny smith apples, and if I force myself maybe one or two orange slices or chunks of honeydew/canteloupe before everything rebels & I literally can’t make myself swallow more.
I also often default to pasta with butter as a meal. Sometimes I will do pasta with a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil. So I thought maybe you were me or I was you or we were us or something, except I don’t like granny smith apples. I like pretty much all apples except granny smith. But only in slices – never off the core. I probably waste like half the apple because I do not want to get too close to the core. I like bananas except for the end part and I like oranges although I prefer not to deal with the seeds.
Peaches, plums, and pears are all nos. Peaches I don’t know why – they just feel weird. Like hard and soft at the same time? But I don’t like canned peaches either. Too slimy. Plums are generally too mushy and pears are too grainy.
“I don’t care for (ingredient) cooked that way.” Or “I don’t like (food) with (ingredient in it.)”
Totally fine to tell people. I heart Banana flavored anything, and banana chips, but bananas are disgusting, for example, because it’s like eating a banana flavored rope with a slimy center. ICK
A lot of my exes hated onion texture, which makes me really sad because none were willing to chop onions and everything tastes flavorless without onions.
YES on the texture thing! I hate coconut for this reason. I cannot handle the texture of it. Same with avocado/guacamole. blech. There is an element of not liking the taste, but it’s mainly the texture thing.
I am also a picky eater primarily due to texture! Like there are foods that I just generally dislike (broccoli!), but the majority of my food issues have to do with texture. I also just default to the simple “I just don’t like [food]” instead of explaining because people don’t really get it.
Yes, I have that issue with fish and a few other things (like tomatoes) and people just don’t get it. Especially my mother.
There’s a chemical difference between cooked and raw tomatoes. Lots and lots of people like cooked tomatoes and not raw ones. You are not alone!
(I love both. I will eat an entire pint of cherry tomatoes with a little salt or Old Bay Seasoning.)
I ate nine tomato sandwiches in one day a few summers ago. This involved an entire loaf of French bread and I had to lie down afterward, but it was SO worth it.
Weirdly, I’m kind of the opposite. I can eat raw tomatoes (especially if they’re sweet), but I have trouble with tomato sauce/salsa/soup. I’m not sure why.
Yes, TEXTURE. There are many foods that I like raw, but hate cooked (carrots). I love cucumbers and berries, unlike many other people here. I love soupy oatmeal, but not gummy oatmeal. I do not like any casserole or salad where the ingredients are different sizes. I hate jello salads–I don’t like the combination of slimy and solid. If something is cooked, it must be cooked to death, none of this tender-crisp nonsense. All fruit, except cantaloupe and honeydew, is the best thing ever in the world. And no McIntish apples. They’re mealy.
What’s funny is I was a super picky eater as a child (food could not touch on the plate!) and now I think I’m pretty easy to please. My parents now are pickier than I am. We have reversed roles.
Hi, formerly VERY picky and now just regular picky eater here! I obviously cannot speak for everyone, but I think for most of us, there are very much both taste/physical AND psychological components. There are so many foods that I find unpalatable that other people love, and after an entire lifetime of these experiences, I prefer to stick to the things I know I enjoy, and approach new foods cautiously. I think the physical component also heightens a person’s awareness to what they do and do not enjoy tasting. Also, I think having a psychological aversion to certain foods is perfectly valid! TRUST, if I could not be picky, I would do it in a heartbeat. It’s embarrassing and frustrating, and sad that I don’t enjoy foods others do.
All that being said, I know it can be really frustrating to be around! I’ve become adept at finding something to eat on most menus. For every loudly whiny adult picky eater, there are certainly many quiet ones that keep it to themselves. THERE ARE DOZENS OF US!
Yesssss. I’m a currently very picky eater who’s trying to transition to being a regular picky eater, and it’s a huge relief to find out that I’m not alone, so thank you for sharing! My eating aversions are more psychological than physical but it’s definitely a mix of both and it’s definitely, highly embarrassing, and frustrating both for myself and for my partner (who is the opposite of me, food-wise), and probably also for his very kind and food-oriented family. Relationships with food are complicated and messy sometimes! I wish I could explain that better to people whose relationships with food have largely been positive! But I can’t, so I also stay quiet and keep it to myself. DOZENS!!!
I’m a semi-picky eater and it really upsets me! Like – people seem to get so much delight from sushi! (and seafood in general) I would like some of that delight! Why does my mouth rebel when I try to join in the fun?
I feel this way about fruit! Eating an apple looks so goddamn fun and easy. But it just tastes like mealy weirdness to me.
Until I had my second child I would have rolled my eyes and blamed your parents but I now realize pickiness is no picnic for anyone involved and HOLY SHIT I feel for you. Our second was always a picky eater and when he started falling off the growth cart we had to do a food aversion test and offer him only boiled potatoes and something else I’ve wiped from my memory for 24 hours. The idea was they were foods he didn’t like but not foods that were objectionably objectionable? So reasonable hungry 2 year olds should have eaten them and if he refused to eat them after 24 hours he would not be dead but helpfully diagnosed with a more-than-ordinary-toddler-pickiness eating issue?
In hindsight I cannot believe I was convinced this was medically necessary, but we did it and he did. not. eat. for 24 hours. And even worse, he didn’t even ask for other food. It was like the idea of food he didn’t like grossed him out so much it put him off any kind of food. Oh my god it was horrible. And now I have total respect and sympathy for picky eaters and I solemnly swear to never try and hide something you don’t like in anything I serve to you. (Also, the second born is totally fine, still not an adventurous eater but otherwise the subject of much parental back-patting.)
It only really took like a year of living on my own to stop me being a super picky eater. Basically I was reacting to the fact that other people were trying to push foods I didn’t want to eat on me and not the foods themselves. Or to social pressures, like not liking certain foods because they reminded me of people or places I didn’t like. If I can try a food cooked a new way on my own choice, I usually like it.
(I should also mention that Ex’s tendency to categorically dismiss things as “bad” without trying them extended to a lot of aspects of the relationship and is a big part of why we split after 2 years, and probably explains why I have so many feelings on this matter?
Like, I am off the charts when it comes to the Big-5 “openness to experience” category while I think my ex was almost in the negative range. Neither of those traits are inherently bad! Different strokes, different folks! But when one partner’s like “Want to watch Casablanca?” and the other’s like “I don’t like movies made prior to 1970″*, and this extends to a whoooooooole lot of other things, it’s a poor fit, you know?
*ALSO, UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN EVERY MOVIE MADE PRIOR TO 1970, I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU CAN MAKE A SWEEPING STATEMENT LIKE THAT, CASABLANCA WILL ALWAYS BE THE BEST AND YOU ARE WRONG, SORRY NOT SORRY.**
** All things considered it was a relatively civil breakup like a year ago, Ex is a fundamentally good dude, idk why I’m getting my dander up so much about this now.)
This dude does sound pretty unreasonable. I have a few close friends who have firm ideas of the things they do and don’t like, and are not flexible about it. I think it’s great to know that if there are loud noises, or it is past 11:00, you are not going to be happy. It is fine to decide not to do those things. But it is definitely frustrating that we only do their preferred activities because I’m up for whatever, but I know if I suggest things I think sound fun they won’t be interested. The correct solution to this is to find other friends to do those things with, but knowing that does not stop me from getting annoyed sometimes.
Plus, I think we all have things that we are extra sensitive to because people we were close to used to do them in a jerkish way.
I feel kind of bad, too, because I’m making him sound like some kind of neurotic monster when in reality that relationship was incredibly warm, happy, and affectionate for nearly all of its duration. He’s a great person who I would be happy to count as a friend!
But yeah, it was fascinating and kind of sad to see how minor quirks and differences of tastes – the sorts of things that would be completely FINE with my platonic friends – were actually indicative of how we had very different approaches to life and needed to split up. Like, it really did take a solid two years to realize this, because breaking up with someone wonderful because they don’t like art films and kale sounds insane.
I fully accept that much of my “stop being a picky eater I hate you rarrr”-reaction is based on my picky-eater ex. No, I’m tired, I’ve just been on my feet for 8 hours, you’ve been sitting in a coffeeshop working on your thesis all day (totally valid, but much less physically unpleasant), I need you to shut up and eat the stew I made, please be a grownup for at least 30 minutes, kthx.
…So in retrospect, the picky eating wasn’t really the problem.
Yeah, that’s how I feel. I actually have quite a few weird food quirks, so I’m sympathetic to someone genuinely not liking the taste of something. But a lack of respect for the effort of cooks, and a total rigidity when it comes to trying something new / revisiting something old every now and then? That bugs me a lot, and all the supertasters in the world won’t convince me otherwise.
I absolutely respect the “I’m sorry, I appreciate your work, I just don’t like [x]” response. I get that. Really, supertasters aren’t the problem; assholes are, and they’re in every group, drowning out the perfectly pleasant people.
I also have friends with IBS/food allergies/veganism, so there are varieties of picky that don’t bother me at all.
I really feel like I can understand you on this. Sometimes we have exes whose behavior sticks with us even if they were great in other respects.
I have an ex who hated cream cheese, bagels and cheesecake all of which I love but fine no big deal, he’s allowed to not like those things. Then when I said I didn’t like dark chocolate he told me one day my tastes would mature and I would like it. I felt all the rage. Also it’s 10 years later and I still don’t like dark chocolate so no dude, you were just wrong.
Fun story my sister declared that chickpeas were disgusting at about the age of three and wouldn’t touch them thereafter, until a couple of years ago I caught her happily chowing down on some falafels at a party. After I told her they were made of chickpeas she refused to eat any more and is now adamant that she has always hated them.
” certain foods were objectively gross and never, ever worth trying again… but then he’d eat them on accident when they were cooked in an ethnic cuisine and LOVE it.”
I’m like this with zucchinis exclusively. I like zucchini unless you tell me what it is, and then it tastes like vomit breath, I don’t know.
“See, honey? This test proves that you actually LIKE the things that you don’t like!”
If my parents could have done this test on me they absolutely would have, since they were quite vocal about their belief that my food preferences had nothing to do with flavor and texture, and everything to do with me just wanting “to be a pain in the ass” and I’m sure they would have loved to have some scientific evidence to back them up.
My parents were convinced I was being stubborn when I said I didn’t like bell peppers and could tell which of the tri-colour pastas were red (flavoured with red pepper) so they did a blind taste test and I could tell which were white, green (spinach), and red perfectly. Peppers taste like bitter burning to me, I understand they are sweet for most people, but please don’t make me eat them.
Huh, I always thought the red pasta was tomato flavored.
The kind of tricolor pasta I buy has the same spinach green and normal-white, but orange (carrot) instead of red. Tinkyada gluten-free vegetable rice spirals. Maybe it’s different for each brand.
It always seemed to be an injustice to me that my parents didn’t have to eat food they didn’t like, but I did. I wasn’t allowed to get up from the table unless I’d eaten everything.
Thankfully peas and lima beans have a waxy exterior–I learned to swallow them whole with kool-aid. My parents thought it was weird but let it go. And as an adult I am capable of swallowing a lot of pills if needed. (Occasionally I get on a supplement kick.)
Oh hey, I dated that guy as well. I finally yelled at him when he glared suspiciously at the fresh chopped basil I was putting on a pizza, and asked if I’d put any poison on his half. He also couldn’t handle cooking, as it tended to make him too anxious, and didn’t make enough money to order food very often, so I was stuck cooking, like, 5 things.
Although it was a good lesson for me when he made baked ziti, one of the only dishes he felt confident about, and I didn’t like it, because of texture reasons.
I finally yelled at him when he glared suspiciously at the fresh chopped basil I was putting on a pizza, and asked if I’d put any poison on his half.
How rude. POISON. Fresh chopped basil as POISON. And when someone is cooking for you! Good Lord! *sputters with indignation*
I mean, in his defense, I might have put something dreadful like kale or spinach or something on. But nope, just basil, freshly picked and chopped. I was actually in the middle of chopping more, so he left the kitchen very quickly until I was finished using the very large knife.
Did you openly menace him or did you simply stare at him while holding the very large knife? That’s my favorite tactic when people complain about/ask too many questions about whatever I’m cooking.
I did neither; I just yelled at him that no, I hadn’t put poison on his half of the pizza, it was basil, and it was really frustrating that he kept saying stuff like that. I may have also teared up (we’d been doing this dance for several months at this point). I was, however, holding a chef’s knife while doing all of this, so decided it was a good time for him to be elsewhere.
Seriously. My ex used to call anything I was eating or cooking that he didn’t like (or didn’t think he’d like) “crap” or “shit.” It’s so fucking rude.
Basil can taste extremely bitter to me – mostly dried basil, but he probably picked it up in fresh basil too.
I think that lots of people really can’t relate to having a wacky sense of taste. It’s like they assume that people who don’t like tomatoes (for example) taste the same mild, fruity, slightly spicy flavour that they themselves taste, but the tomato haters just don’t enjoy that flavour for some reason. But when I was a kid, tomatoes tasted extremely acidic. They had a sharp, sour flavour, like lemons. Almost nobody enjoys slices of raw lemons, so I wasn’t “picky” at all for not wanting to eat anything with raw tomatoes, I was behaving just like everyone who wouldn’t eat a salad made with raw lemon.
Almost nobody enjoys very bitter foods either. If your ex experienced strong bitter flavours when he ate basil (and probably when eating almost any other leafy green or vegetable), it’s no wonder he didn’t enjoy food and was suspicious to basil on pizza. It’s super difficult to get people to respect that something that tastes mild to them also can have an absolutely extreme taste (to someone else) that no one in their right mind would put on food. It’s like arguing about colours – a colourblind person isn’t “wrong”, colours really look like that to them.
Oh, he likes basil, and was happy to have it on the pizza. He thought I was putting greens on it, though, and hates greens (and onions, and most fruits), and would deal with that by making an “icky” face.
(this is the reason that pizza was our main food for the time he was living with me; I could put nutritious things on my half, and content myself by putting nothing more nutritious than basil on his half.)
(I am the weirdo who likes lemons. My front teeth are a mess because I wouldn’t stop eating lemons as a kid. I still put a lot of lemon in iced tea.)
I used to take whole lemons to school and eat them as my daily fruit.
Can we start a the-opposite-of-supertasters club? Because I’m pretty sure I only have about three and a half tastebuds
Same here! I love to cook, but have barely any sense of smell so I dump a ton of seasoning into everything.
I’ll happily eat basically anything except mayonnaise.
I can taste plenty of things, I just really really like tart things.
Hi! I overflavour everything I make, according to everyone else. And I will confess that I have eaten straight horseradish on toast on more than one occasion.
(I am the weirdo who likes bitter foods.)
I know we’re not necessarily going to dig into the rest of this Vows, but I still want to share my favorite line, in which the author pulls back the curtain on how they really feel, just for a moment:
“Dr. Andrews waited four months before introducing her to his children, a meeting that wasn’t awkward at all.”
“not necessarily going to dig into the rest….”
OH YES WE ARE [rubs trashy, gossipy hands together with glee]
No social media! She specializes in quirky greeting cards!
(Okay, the quirky greeting cards bit is cute, as I also like writing notes and letters. But it’s 2016, unless you are An Old and/or deeply introverted (my father) can we stop pretending that not being on ANY social media is anything more than a pretentious affectation?)
She ONLY communicates via greeting cards, because calling people on the phone isn’t old fashioned or quirky enough for her!!!
She probably doesn’t even have a cell phone! Haha! Look how quirky she is! Or else she has a 5-year-old Nokia! Haha! Look at how many exclamation points we’re using!
She probably has a landline with an answering machine! And she doesn’t actually call you back! She just sends you a greeting card!!
Such douche chills I got just now….
I actually DO have a landline with an answering machine.
But I also have two cell phones, one smart, one dumb. Plus a work landline.
I. . . may have a problem.
Honestly, though, if this is how she gets around a deep fear of phones, I would get it. I really would. I hate talking on the phone.
… I have a Nokia that’s more than five years old which used to belong to my mother. (It’s not to be quirky, I swear! I just hate making decisions and spending money!)
Hey, no judgment for those reasons. I actually respect those people who’ve made their Nokias last forever. Those are damn good phones.
I had a great little (key word little) Samsung flip phone that was still going strong after five years. I finally got a smart phone and its pretty great for toast commenting, but I do miss being able to stick my phone in any pocket.
An ex-therapist once had me read this book written by an autistic guy after I was like “pretty sure I have the autisms now what do I do”. The author insisted it was fiiiiine that he wrote long long greeting cards to people he barely knew, even though it creeped them out, and they should put up with it since he has autism and that’s how he chooses to communicate. Meanwhile I kept thinking “but maybe you’d do better meeting people halfway and not creeping them out?…”
yeah, it’s sort of at this point where it’s as inconvenient as not having an email address, in terms of keeping in touch with people. Plenty of non-pretentious reasons to not be active on social media, but most people I know with those reasons have at least a token facebook profile to get messages and keep track of birthdays.
My father at least has an email address and will text freely. He doesn’t LIKE having to be social, but you can get in touch with him if you need to. And you know, social media can be annoying! But it’s a part of our world now, like it or not, and people need to deal with that.
I’m not on facebook. I have some family members who are abusive and not respectful of boundaries, so was already disinclined, but the deciding factor was seeing friends angsting about whether it was worse to accept a current student or dissertation committee member’s friend request or not to accept it. I’m notionally on linked in, but I didn’t use it after I realized it spammed everyone in my address book. I do use e-mail, and I text.
I don’t mind that it requires more effort for me to stay in contact with people than it would using facebook. And I’m willing to accept that some people are not going to make reciprocal effort to keep in contact with me.
yeah, that sounds like the folks i know who don’t use social media – either needing privacy from certain people, or privacy around work stuff. with such a tough tradeoff between those needs & the extra effort it takes to get in touch, it’s weird seeing “not on social media” in the tone of “I don’t even HAVE a TV!”
*nods* I don’t have a TV, but it is not out of principle– it is out of being too cheap to pay for cable and liking a combination of Hulu / Youtube well enough. (Also, having a time-consuming but can’t-quit blog-reading habit.)
For years I didn’t have a TV, and whenever I admitted it in conversation people assumed I was acting superior, so I had to start pointing out “I spend all that time online instead–I have a screen addiction, just a different one!”
One of my exes refused to get a facebook account. We argued about it a lot because it made me his social secretary. Now he just never knows anything about anyone, and either he likes being isolated like that or he’s just fucking stubborn; knowing him I’d guess the second.
Oh boy, I’ve sort of been there. (You don’t get the smugness points for abstaining from social media if someone else is doing all the work to keep your social life running, dude!)
“If you could say I have a hobby, it is going greeting-card shopping,” she said. “In the bookstore, I’ll beeline it straight for the greeting-card section.”
I have nothing against nice cards, but really? Choosing them over books? What is this?
Not to mention, greeting cards sold at bookstores tend to be hella expensive. Not that any greeting cards are cheap, but it seems like the bookstore ones are even more ridiculous. For $6 I can take you to the second-run movie theatre AND buy you popcorn so we can giggle at Pitch Perfect 2 together.
OH shit, I somehow missed this when I read the Vows piece. WTF? You’re in a bookstore and you’re like LOOK AT ALL THESE NICE GREETING CARDS! That’s like going to a shoe store and leaving with earrings.
When I need to express more than can be conveyed by A Withering Glance, I send James the Footman around to deliver a Severely Worded Note.
For some reason, I’m reading this in the voice of Ned Flanders.
“Not awkward AT ALL! Not awkward AT ALL!”
Passive-aggressive reporting FTW.
“Supertaster? More like Inferiortaster!”
Too bad they don’t like fatty foods, because it’d probably be nice to slap some butter on that burn.
How did I miss this Vows column? It’s so quintessential: Roman emperor sheep! A quirky Bigfoot interest! A perfectionist without a social media account! A chandelier like “a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade”!
(No judgment, really. I suspect I’d hate myself and everything I stand for if I read about me in frothy Vows style.)
GREETING CARDS OR GTFO
People describe Dr. Andrews as an idiosyncratic intellectual, a scientist with many unscientific interests and hobbies.
OMG, he’s so idiosyncratic (quirky isn’t very intellectual, after all, and it’s just such a cute word)! A scientist who also likes non-science things! Can you imagine?
The hilarious part about that is his cooking and baking things are actually super sciencey if you want them to be. Making alcohol and bread and pickles is all chemistry!
Well yes, but they’re all folksy and womanly and frivolous, not like Real Science.
I judge everyone, especially the columnist, for this travesty.
I’ll take whatever (polite) name people want to use if it means that friends and family won’t act like I’m choosing to not like the way things taste. I’m sorry that thing that tastes good to you tastes bad to me! It’s a thousand times more annoying to me than it is to you!
I passed (?) the bitter paper test but then also all green herbs seem indistinguishable to me so I’m probably not a legitimate supertaster.
Yeah, I don’t know if I am one or not, since I do like spinach/arugula/nori and cilantro tastes like nothing, but asparagus/broccoli/kale/chard are the worst. That bit about fatty/sugary foods certainly rings true, though, so maybe I do have an excuse beyond random taste preferences!
(MOM, I’m sorry I never want to eat the asparagus you make for every holiday! It’s not you it’s me, etc.)
I am definitely a PTC taster, the memory of that strip has lingered for decades at this point, but I also like fatty and sugary things. Maybe we are half-tasters?
We did that test in High School Biology, and when it came time to do it again in college bio, I refused, because the memory of how terrible it tasted was so strong.
Taste is weird! I like fatty, sugary, salty and sour things, but I really don’t like bitter foods or things that are charred/burned.
OK OK OK
BUT!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op8h9_VVDmQ
it’s like a million pears!
(this was my first thought when I saw the headline and I knew some lovely Toastie would have already posted the link!)
Any day you can link to a TMBG song is a good day.
“…highly fatty and sugary foods less palatable than non-tasters.”
Can you picture it? Some Real Housewife, her poor body starved and wrangled into bony submission, saying “good thing I’m a SUPER TASTER and can easily avoid that disgusting (insert your favourite fatty and sweet food here) mess you call breakfast”.
I’m calling it for the 2016 season.
if I could train myself to like nori and cilantro I WOULD oh god
I feel the same way about peppers. Life would be so much easier if they didn’t taste like fiery, rotting mold!
and if they didn’t make EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH taste like rotting mold!!!
I will take your cilantro, I’ll have it. Send it to me. This is a service I provide.
I also volunteer. I will also eat everyone’s greens.
I will fight you for it.
Over here living my best life which has NO BROCCOLI in it because REASONS
My best life has no raw tomatoes in it and no onion chunks!
I love tomatoes both raw and cooked (though my reflux doesn’t always). Onion chunks are the worst, though. SURPRISE ONION.
I’ll take your broccoli if you’ll take my celery and then I can live my best life, too.
DEAL. I had 3 sticks of celery today and am still feeling the celery love.
Will you also eat kale on my behalf? Because ugh, KALE.
Kale is part of the cruciferous family of which broccoli is a part. So:
*broccoli
*kale
*cabbage
*brussels sprouts
*cauliflower
are anathema in this clubhouse. JOIN ME.
I WANT TO BE A MEMBER OF THIS CLUB. They’re all cultivars of the same evil, evil species so our membership rules will be elegant and simple!
I can also volunteer as the hazmat crew if needed: I can sometimes choke down broccoli if it’s the stalks only. (The florets taste like wet leaves to me and I will gag on them.)
RECRUITED. Come join me under the willow tree. I have huge cups of ice cubes for summer and down duvets for winter. We’ll be fine.
You are my new pal!
I’m okay with kale and cabbage but the texture of broccoli and cauliflower is just, ugh.
Aw damn I like brussels sprouts and cabbage (especially red cabbage) but the others and also asparagus are just no. Can I still visit the clubhouse?
Absolutely!!!
I will eat all of your cruiciferous vegetables with nooch sauce, if you eat all the eggplants and zucchini. Deal?
Sure, but then will you take my peas?
I’ll take ’em if they’re fresh and raw.
I am 1000% here for all Toast-produced scurvy coverage.
i am disappointed he did not also whip up perfect steak and potatoes for the engagement meal
That entire Vows column is a gift to humanity.
Well, the only context in which I’ve run into supertasters has actually been in the context of supersmelling, which is pretty neat but also anxiety-producing. Like, I work in a child advocacy and social services context and we do supervised visitation for non-custodial parents and their children. And one of our visit monitors is a supersmeller/taster/whatever the word you want it to be and can immediately tell when clients have had alcohol. So. Useful.
Wow! Do people bring him along on purpose to use his supersmelling? I don’t know if I’m a supersmeller, but I’ve always been the canary in the coal mine for awful smells. I don’t have a nice perfumer’s nose though, the ability to smell pleasant things really well, just bad and toxic things, ugh. I thought you were going to say he could smell chemicals or mold in the home.
My mom claims her sense of smell sharpened the first time she got pregnant (so, with me). She could walk into the door and know everything we’d eaten and that the garbage hadn’t been taken out, and it wasn’t even smelly yet.
I’m getting there even without pregnancy. I can’t wear perfume for longer than a few hours or I am desperate to get it off. Any strong smell bothers me in a hurry.
I swear I have the most acute smell ONLY for bad smells. If there is the world’s tiniest natural gas leak or someone down the hallway stepped in something on the way to work or there is one single person in a 100′ range who did not wear deodorant, I will know.
I wish my detection for cookie smells was as excellent.
‘Well good thing there’s Google.’
I love this whole thing, but that line most of all.
I really like the last sentence in the little screencap; it implies that being a supertaster is somehow causally related to her promotion.
“We’ve got a senior position opening up soon, perhaps we can discuss it over coffee?”
“No coffee for me, I’m a….SUPERTASTER.”
[gasp] “Cancel my 3:00 interview, I know who I’m promoting.”
JOB POSTING
Title: Senior manager for external affairs in the university’s office of the executive vice president for health affairs.
Qualifications:
ability to manage external affairs in a senior manner
willingness to introduce oneself as a “senior manager for external affairs in the university’s office of the executive vice president for health affairs” at cocktail parties
lack of Facebook account and preference for greeting cards a plus
NO NORMTASTERS NEED APPLY
I am sorry but I don’t think I could hire someone who asked if a boyfriend came with the job. I don’t care how many interviews she’d already apparently passed.
right? I was waiting for someone to bring that up, how in the world was her boss’s response “oh actually, this professor’s single!!” ???
POSSIBLY single. I like to think that the boss just grabbed an employee directory and was like, “Uh… sure, try him! He might be single, idk. Please leave my office now?”
“Here’s his social media profile, have fun stalking him a bit, this will in no way be weird if you have to interact in a professional setting.”
Who even thinks to ask that, anyway? When asked at the end of an interview if I have any questions, “Does this job come with a boyfriend?” has never once crossed my mind.
willingness to introduce oneself as a “senior manager for external affairs in the university’s office of the executive vice president for health affairs” at cocktail parties
However many times I read that job title, I cannot keep all of the details of it in my head. It would definitely put me off applying.
My evolutionary advantage is being able to eat everything.
But no seriously. Are, uh, areyou gonna to eat that?
I have a co-worker who will eat anything. He is remarkably handy when I get sick of eating the same two leftover dishes for lunch every day – “hey, you want some enchiladas tomorrow? They’ve been in my fridge for a week.” “Absolutely!”
Should be called like, “overtaster” or something. You are tasting TOO MUCH.
Hypertaster, maybe? Epitaster? Ubertaster?
I tried making a spreadsheet of all the things that my in-laws can’t eat (two parents, four sibs, three spouses, runs the gamut of vegans to dislikes to cancer-induced aversions) and gave up. It is a miracle that we can ever agree on takeout.
No one is a supertaster, we all just hate different things.
The worst person I’ve ever met was a man in his thirties who refused to eat vegetables. (He warded off scurvy with orange juice.) People threw around all kinds of “Oh, maybe he’s a supertaster!!!” excuses, but in retrospect it was the first sign that he was an overgrown child.
Adults who don’t eat vegetables are not to be trusted and are probably sociopaths, according to my completely unscientific criteria that I made up for diagnosing personality disorders based on nothing
I was gonna put ‘How rude, I hate vegetables, and I’m not an overgrown child!’, then I realised my actual thought process was that of an eight year old (‘Why are these suckers eating their greens? Guys, you’re grown ups, you don’t have to anymore!’)
one of my old roommates was convinced I was a supertaster because I would always complain when she baked things with stevia instead of sugar and I was like no girl I’m not especially good at tasting stevia just tastes awful
ugh yes thanks. pry my sugar from my cold dead hands
Stevia has an aftertaste of sadness.
… the time my roommate made cookies with only Splenda.
See, I like sucralose. I think it tastes the closest to real sugar.
Ugh I swear I can taste the tiniest bit of any sugar substitute (stevia, aspartame, splenda, what have you) in any food. Every time a new version comes out I get hopeful that it will be the one I don’t hate, but it never happens.
This is me. “Oh, this one’s made with a different exotic plant I’ve never heard of…let me put the tiniest amount possible in my tea and see if it tastes okay…oh geez, that’s horrible.” And then I feel guilty that I have to pour out that cup of tea.
I’ve bought food items and beverages that are made with splenda accidentally, too, and that surprise aftertaste is definitely on the list of my least favorite things.
Also the fact that stevia is something like 100 times sweeter than regular sugar means that if you want to use it in recipes you have to do extra math to get the right proportions, and that irritates me on principle.
Plus if you’re baking, the chemistry gets screwy if you use a sugar replacement instead of the sugar that’s called for. Sugar contributes moisture and tenderness, as well as boosting browning and tasting sweet. Baked goods just aren’t nearly as good, assuming the recipe works at all, because the chemistry gets thrown out of whack. This is why I choose the “eat normal baked goods rarely” option for enjoying cookies and stuff. No monkeying required to get the ideal result from my recipes.
Weirdly, I like using stevia in my tea but really dislike sugar. It has a kind of tinny taste. Taste is strange.
I was so excited to try a soda made with stevia, because I figured it would taste completely unlike Splenda. Nope, turns out it tastes exactly like Splenda.
And splenda tastes like rubber bands.
There’s just this aftertaste of despair and emptiness. I’m told that you stop tasting that after awhile, but I don’t see why I should subject myself to the pain long enough to become desensitized to it.
I feel that way about coffee. Why would I want to spend the time learning to like something that tastes that bad?
STEVIA. WHY. A fermented drink that keeps going on sale has stevia in it. This one protein powder I was trying for a while had stevia. The aftertaste is APPALLING. Let me add my own sweetener!
I’d rather be a supertaster than whatever I am, which is the type of person to whom all synthetic flavors taste like plastic and then make me throw up. I miss my MSG goddammit 🙁
(For real tho, Food Additive Intolerance is a Thing and it is the WORST. 0/10 would not recommend)
It sounds terrible. Especially since so many ingredient lists are kind of sloppy on those sorts of things. Like a multitude of sins can be covered under “Natural flavor.”
MSG has been so maligned. I once bought a bottle of it at a local Asian supermarket and carefully added it to my food, and in small quantities it really does make everything amazing. Too much and it all tastes like cheap processed crap!
Things that are natural sources of msg: nutritional yeast, Parmesan cheese, mushrooms
My doctor thinks my sensitivity is to something else involved in the extraction process for commercial MSG–but, to be fair, I also can’t eat mushrooms or Parmesan cheese very much anymore, either. Basically if it’s a synthetic flavor additive, preservative, or color I can’t have it without my hands/face/throat swelling (small quantities) or straight-up puking (large quantities/build up over time.)
Great for my waistline, terrible for my takeout options, annoying when I have to keep convincing people that I have metabolic issues and not an eating disorder or a gluten intolerance.
My Mother is highly sensitive to MSG (not that she’s ever been do a doctor about it, but it only happens when she eats Chinese food, process of elimination says MSG), it knocks her OUT for hours and then when she wakes up its like a hangover. Seriously, its like she’s been roofied or something ( She’s also got a terrible memory, so occasionally forgets that she has this awful reaction to Chinese food and will eat it anyway; occasionally my brother or I would dose her with it, the food that is, so she’d pass out on the couch and we could go out drinking without her hassling us.)
Since people from cilantro-loving cultures with the soap/cilantro thing still enjoy ciltantro, I try to give my cilantro/soap friends positive cilantro associations.
You tell them you’re going to do this, and then you give them a comfortable chair, a glass of wine, 1-3 kittens, and a plate of hors d’oeuvres where about a third have cilantro pesto. (Crushing cilantro and soaking it in lemon juice makes it a lot less soapy.)
It is… not very effective. I feel like I would need a more reliable supply of kittens to provide longer-term therapy.
I can tell you that over 30 years into my exposure therapy combining being of Mexican descent and having the cilantro soap taste combo, tacos and other delicious treats are still marvelous even when liberally coated in Dawn dishsoap in leafy form.
So keep it up with the positive associations! We can learn to love it! And will apparently be REAL easy to poison.
YUP. I grew up hating cilantro because of the soapy taste but over time grew to tolerate, and then love it. It still tastes like that to me, but somehow delicious now.
Hello, soapy twinsie! I also like cilantro despite the soapiness.
I was doing my sommelier training when supertaster was being bandied about for the first time (to my knowledge). EVERYONE in the class was a “supertaster”. Me? I’m all like “no, guys, celery tastes like slightly flavoured water, whatever, it is fine”. “Supertasters” are basically the reason i left the restaurant industry. Because: yes, I know you think that celery is gross, but trust me, once its cooked into the dish you won’t be able to taste it. No? You will still taste it? Yes, absolutely, I will ask the cook to remove the mirepoix that form the flavour basis for this dish, certainly. Not an allergy, right? No? Just a supertaster? Excellent, that’ll take an extra FOREVER BECAUSE I CANNOT TAKE THOSE THINGS OUT *rolls eyes*
I feel like this post is bringing out a lot of leftover resentment that I didn’t know that I still carried.
🙁 I can handle celery in mirepoix form, but beyond that, nope. Mostly I just meticulously pick it out of things, including, like … canned soup … rather than request its absence in dishes. I have no idea if I get on better with celeriac, but there is nothing “fresh” or “it tastes like crunchy water” about celery to me — it tastes like poison and has the texture of stringy/crunch poison. But that’s MY problem to deal with, not waitstaff’s.
O no, for ppl for whom this is a legit thing, it is FOR SURE a legit thing. Is why supertaster is in square quotes above. My issue was with the ppl who heard about being a supertaster and then were like “You are right, endive IS gross, I MUST BE A SUPERTASTER”. And in the training situation, there is no way that the entire room full of people that I was taking my training with represented the exact segment of the population that just happened to be supertasters. Just like you cannot tell me that everyone who wanted their ham salad sammiches on lettuce instead of bread because they were on the Atkins’ diet later legit found out that they were celiac. Especially because those same people NEVER said no to the cheesecake.
Yeah that’s a bunch of suggestible, faddish nonsense. (Also idek what’s up with my veg preferences, in that I LOVE cruciferous/”bitter” vegetables — braised or sautéed Belgian endive is my jam — and I just delightedly got Jennifer McLagan’s Bitter cookbook. But I can’t do celery, and I have a gag reflex to sharp horseradish/wasabi, and I can only deal with cilantro in moderation. And I ate cooked fireweed once and thought it was dreadful. WHAT ARE FLAVORS.)
I definitely read “fireweed” as fireWOOD and was wondering why you thought it should taste better than it did…
HAHA oh no! “I mean I chopped it superfine and soaked it first and everything, but it was still so fibrous”
“I mean, really. Whatever do termites see in that shit?”
According to the Boston Museum of Science I am a Taster and my husband is a Non-Taster and let me tell you it is one of the things I most enjoy taunting him about, nobody gets to take this away from me.
Pretty sure my husband is a non-taster, which is handy, as he will eat literally anything.
Cilantro is the Catcher in the Rye of foods. People who hate it really enjoy telling you how much they hate it and how unusual that is.
The existence (or not) of supertasters is the least annoying thing about this entire column.
Oh my God, I thought it was a joke until almost the end. So! Many! Things!
I have a reputation in my office as The Person Who Will Eat Anything, and it baffles me why some people feel so strongly about what other people decline to eat. My mother refuses to eat anything that is small and round (olives, peas, chocolate chips because the base is circular, blackberries because the pips are round, etc.), completely independently of what it tastes like, and as ridiculous as that may be (and we all laugh at her for it because we do have a sense of humor in my family), she is a fifty-nine-year-old human whose dietary preferences are kind of none of anyone’s business.
i know. You merely cook what your guests would enjoy. A lot of these are about someone who wouldn’t get reasonable.
JAYA THAT URL THO
I am not a supertaster, but I do have the gene that makes aspartame (specifically, phenylalanine) taste especially awful. Since that gene is apparently the dominant gene in most populations, I don’t understand how diet sodas ever became popular.
Then again, my google research tells me that for some people who taste it find it only somewhat bitter rather than the intensely bitter taste that some of us get, so maybe some people are willing to live with somewhat bitter. All I know is that when we did that test in college bio lab, I had the worst bitter taste in my mouth for the rest of the day.
My mom thinks she is a supertaster, but she’s clearly not, and I have had to bite down on my non-supertaster tongue on more than one occasion to keep from saying anything.
This is going to be a really weird comment sans context, but does anyone else here struggle with the strong and terrible smell of ants?
Context: After years of having people tell me I was crazy and asking why I’m going around smelling ants, I did some Googling and discovered that being able to sense the overpowering disturbing smell of those tiny creatures is in fact a real thing that not everyone is privy to / cursed by.
Newfound Goals: Anytime someone tells me they’re a supertaster because of a strong reaction to one particular food, I’m going to pull this card and respond with, “Yeah, I’m a supertaster too—it mainly manifests itself with ants though.”
Please tell me you have seen “Them!”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/
I mean I am not at all bothered by ants as far as I know BUT seeing as ants communicate primarily by pheromone trails and some ants use various chemical sprays to ward off predators the idea that they could be noticeably smelly seems very reasonable.
I can smell mouse/rat infestations.
me too. yuck.
I CAN SMELL ANTS TOO. Worst superpower ever. Also I definitely prefer living in places where the kitchen isn’t on the ground floor; in Portland (OR) it seems like the only foolproof way of not having ants.
Like, I lived in a house with a really bad infestation once, and I didn’t know it, and kept going “what’s that smell???” and nobody in the house knew what I meant. And one day I squished an ant in the kitchen, and it sent up a terrible scent, and I had A Truly Horrifying Realization. And then bought a fuck-ton of those sugar-and-borax ant traps to put in every corner of the house and surrounded it with diatomaceous earth.
I can smell them too! Also other bugs. This is not really fun.
I had a temp job at the Nike HQ once, 7 stories up. We had ants. Not even heights are safe from the Portland ants.
The ants were wearing Nikes and therefore could comfortably walk and climb further? 😉
I am wondering, then, how my current place has never had them. It’s a 70’s-era townhouse. It’s never been kept spotless.
Magic obviously. I’ve had them in just about every house I’ve lived in here, and even had them at the chiropractic clinic I worked at, which was super super gross since they would get into the treatment rooms.
That’s formic acid. Some of my perfume-sniffing buddies can use it to track down an ant entry point. I think this is pretty amazing.
Well! I learned something new about myself today. I can smell formic acid!
I… didn’t know everyone couldn’t do this.
I once confused the shit out of a housemate by discussing the terrible smell of asparagus pee. Turns out she can’t smell it and didn’t know it was a thing.
(I can. Of course I can. Sigh.)
I didn’t know that was optional? It’s like the penance of eating spring asparagus.
I thought everyone COULD smell asparagus pee! I didn’t used to be aware of it, but as soon as I realized it was a thing, it’s ridiculous when you eat even ONE ASPARAGUS SPEAR.
I was later to the party regarding coffee pee. I never linked drinking coffee with pee smelling weird later in the day (not to mention I processed it more as vaguely tuna-smelling?)
PEE ODO[U]RS, OKAY, GOOD CHAT
Its one of those either-or smell genes. I can only smell ants if I squish one and then sniff it real hard, but my sis can tell if they’re in the same room as her
Hey, I’m seeing a super nice new guy who is SUPER NiCE. He will eat anything! He is NiCE! He is positive! He eats meat AND vegetables and doesn’t complain! He asks me how I am and looks me in the eye and LISTENS to me. And he’s a total studmuffin. Sheesh. I really appreciate him after super-psycho Sir Bitchesalot. Sir Bitchesalot required I use the right knife, wash the lids of all canned goods, discuss in advance with him exactly how I was going to layer the ingredients of a lasagna, slice onions exactly *this* thin, berate me for adding salt to something when I knew he had high blood pressure (did I know this? Idk, apparently I was supposed to deduce it by the prescriptions he was on).
I love this thread. And I will now comment on it in a more relevant way. I can knock back some slimy okra, egglplant, raw tomatoes all day long. But runny eggs make me gag. I don’t understand fried eggs overeasy.
I wonder if one can have a more sensitive nose which affects their taste?
I love runny eggs, with caveats. You have to make them so the top whites are cooked—raw white on top of the egg is evil. Or soft boiled for dipping toast in. Also, don’t bother unless the egg is basically still warm from the chicken’s butt, even better if it was a chicken on grass. It tastes like a completely different food.
Eggs must be cooked hard, hard, hard. No runniness at all. And actually, yolks are not that awesome. Whites are preferable.
I have a TERRIBLE sense of smell, which is why texture is so important.
‘Sir Bitchesalot required I use the right knife’
Yeah, sounds like. Did you dump it in the river afterwards?
Sir Bitchesalot sounds like my ex-husband. I wish I had realized that he was in fact bitching and did not instead think “hm, I must be all sorts of fucked up and he is here to fix me and then I will be lovable”
I’m glad we are both in better places now 🙂
Also, I only like runny eggs when eaten on toast. Otherwise, no. Gross gross.
Fix me! Fix me! Teach me to read!
Ok, lesson learned, moving on!
I have deleted the comment from the man that was reported by two different users for “being patronizing” and “this is a tiresome rando,” proving that the system works.
We appreciate our editrices so much.
Between this and Cosmo’s takedown of Gisele and Tom Brady’s diet (here: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/news/a… the Internet is taking a firm line on food cranks this week and I LOVE IT.
So, is this column deliberately written in such a way as to make readers instantly loathe the people profiled in it, or is it just an unfortunate coincidence?
I theorized elsewhere on the web that the author has a running bet on whether various Vows subjects will notice they’ve been lampooned or insulted, or whether they will think they seem marvelous.
I was going to say, I would have married the tongue-testing guy. But then I realized that I would be the tongue-testing person myself. I would totally test all the tongues, if people would let me.
Then I thought of Gloria Steinem’s famous line, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” and I realized that I could become the tongue-tester I wanted to marry.
I want to do the test! I want to test me, I want to test you, I want to test everybody! Datapoints!!
Walrathem, we appear to be strangely compatible. Maybe I should start sending you a steady flow of greeting cards.
Did you see this guy who tracked all his sneezes for five years to try to figure out a way to cure his allergies, and was able to greatly improve his condition? A kindred spirit for us datapoints people.
http://qz.com/507727/a-man-who-recorded-his-every…
That is so cool. On Link Rounup they were talking about fertility tracker apps and on one of them you can choose to allow other users to look at your chats!! It looks like such a time sink. A wonderful, wonderful time sink.
I’m not kidding I want to do a couple weeks strapped into a heart monitor thingy just to see what it says.
walrathem, do you know about Quantified Self? It’s an international movement devoted to self-tracking and self-experimentation. There are meet-ups practically everywhere, but if you can’t get to a meet-up you can at least look at the great content they have online.
http://quantifiedself.com/
I think you mean a steady flow! of greeting cards!!
I am annoyed by the very idea of this person. Is that unkind?
I want to read more about Gloria Steinem.
I sort of feel like a garbage disposal unit after reading all of the comments on here. I eat all things. Even things I dont particularly care for, I don’t like courgette (or zucchini or whatever you people who call coriander ‘cilantro’ call long thin green veges that aren’t cucumber) because it tastes like old swamp water, but I’ll still eat it if someone puts it in front of me.
The only thing I’ve ever physically not been able to eat was natto and that wasn’t the taste it was the phlegm-texture
SAME! I think I’ve just made myself like everything and now I do, but still couldn’t eat natto. Also being calorie obsessed when I was a young teen may have meant I’ve broken my like and dislike associations for foods.
OMG I just looked up what natto is. I think I may lose my breakfast.
I think its one of those things you have to have been eating from birth to enjoy. The marmite of Japan.
I am a stomach with legs, truly. Except that I’m spectacularly allergic to eggs, and a vegetarian. But otherwise!
Natto is a rough one. I had a Japanese roommate for a couple years, and eventually found that it’s ok if mixed into a lot of rice. But really, it’s probably better just to keep not eating it!
I have an issue with most smoked vegetables and some smoked meats and fish. For instance, I absolutely hate hate hate chipotle pepper. Smoked peppers taste like I’ve eaten dirty and evil ashes. I have forced my self to eat miso soup with dashi several times, and really, all I’ve done is waste money on dashi.
I don’t usually have cilantro or cuke issues, but I can sometimes taste the soapy of cilantro or an off taste on the cuke.
Weirdly relieved to learn that someone else doesn’t like chipotle. I thought I was broken.
Is this the thread where we hate on capsicum? Peppers? I HATE CAPSICUM. It is disgusting, remove it from the face of the earth. Or at least stop asking me to eat it. Because no.
Also, mashed potatoes. No. That’s a texture thing though.
Cilantro… Coriander? I love that stuff.
I like capsicum, but I absolutely loathe smoked paprika. But it’s cool that you don’t like peppers. I get it. I don’t really like cooked or raw green bells. But I like red and yellow and orange? And other spicy peppers.
Science terms in the old days: gravitation, stoichiometry, genetics, logarithm.
Science terms today: big bang, super taster, “God” particle.
Screw it, I’m moving to 19th century Vienna.
I hate being an inferior taster. Steak /roasts generally taste like cardboard and all vegetables basically taste like poison. I’m an adult now, I WANT to like these things! But ughhhh so gross
By the way, I LOVE cilantro.
The cilantro thing is a different gene issue from the crucifer out vegetable thing, I believe.
I like capsicum, but I absolutely loathe smoked paprika. But it's cool that you don't like peppers. I get it. I don't really like cooked or raw green bells. But I like red and yellow and orange? And other spicy peppers.
I want a smackdown between Jaya and this complainer: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-picky-eater-at-th…
I want a smackdown between Jaya and this complainer: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-picky-eater-at-th…