I'm a huge fan of the band They Might Be Giants. Their music is smart, inventive, funny, and frequently absurd. Years ago they wrote a children's song called "John Lee Supertaster," which I liked--but it never occurred to me that I should take it seriously. Here's the song (with some fan-made video):
Catchy, eh? But surely not to be taken as fact, right? Well. Last week, while reading coverage of the tragic death of the young hacker Aaron Swartz, I came across a post on boingboing.net describing him as a "Supertaster." It turns out this is a real thing--that there are people who have significantly more tastebuds on their tongues than is usual, and therefore taste foods in a sort of heightened, often unbearable reality. They can also experience flavors that most of us can't. The song makes it sound like a sort of superpower, but in reality it's a bit of a nightmare.
Complicating this is the fact that children have more tastebuds than adults, including groupings on the sides of their tongues and roofs of their mouths that disappear as they grow up. This means that most children are sort of like mini-Supertasters, anyway.
Swartz wrote about his food troubles and about testing himself for the supertaster condition in a blog post about his eating habits. What he describes is quite extreme--for instance limiting himself to a diet solely of Cheerios--and way beyond what most picky children I know go through. Even though he was very young (14 years old) when he realized that he had this condition, it's clear he had troubles beyond normal groupings of childhood tastebuds.
All of this is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, several of you described yourselves as being "picky eaters" on our first day of class, and my own daughter (who is 13) is similarly inclined toward very bland foods. I'm heartened to know that this is probably a matter of early tastebud formations, both for her and for you. But this is also interesting because it means that we don't all experience taste in the same way: just as some people see colors more vibrantly than others, some people taste things more clearly or strongly than others. So what are we talking about, when we describe the taste of something? Will our language translate at all? Or are we indicating a subtlety that is unique to our own palates, unreproduceable for anyone else? Someone clever (maybe Martin Mull? or Elvis Costello?) once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Maybe writing about food is similarly impossible: it's like describing a dream that you're forgetting as you speak.
2 comments:
Kids don't like vegetables, right? Most seem to take this as a given, although many protest that children are just being difficult for no good reason. Others would even say that children tend to be pickier in their food choices than adults, opting for the yummy (yet unhealthy) comfort foods rather than the nutritious alternatives.
When I was young, I identified as a picky eater. In fact in a way, I still am. You see, though I am a vegan, I do not particularly like vegetables. You may ask, how can this be? Well, according to my high school biology teacher, this recent blog post about Supertasters, and this article: http://www.foodnavigator.com/Science-Nutrition/Sensitive-taste-buds-turn-kids-off-veggies-says-study, the majority of children are more sensitive to bitter foods than adults. As vegetables tend to be very bitter, it is no wonder that most kids tend to fight their parents when forced to eat the offending healthy plants. But who knew that this was linked to genetics? While it is wonderful to know that my perspective on what food tastes like is not abnormally skewed, this study does make me feel a little too justified not liking most vegetables.
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