Sweet Vindication for Supertasters (but not too sweet)

Posted on February 1st, 2003 in Engineerboy by EngineerBoy

Taste Like Dirt!

I am not a freak.  I am not picky.  I am not hard to please, inflexible, or timid.  I am…a supertaster.  The scientific validation of what I have always known has set me free.  Foods like coffee and mustard literally make me gag.  Raw tomato tastes like acidic dirt (or what I imagine acidic dirt would taste like) to me.  Almost all beans, with the exception of green beans, are un-choke-down-able.  Peanuts are disgusting.

I am not a timid or picky eater.  I am always willing to try new foods, and I eat all sorts of strange things (snails, calamari, oysters, pop tarts, kipper snacks).  I love different ethnic foods (Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, Greece-y) and am not a restaurant snob.  However, there have always been certain foods that I cannot eat.  Not ‘will not’ eat…cannot eat, at least not without having to control the gag reflex.  And all my life I have been referred to as picky and/or inflexible with regards to food, when I knew that I wasn’t.  I didn’t know what I was, but I knew that I wasn’t picky.  I didn’t have a choice.  I was born this way.

Supertasters
I was born a supertaster.  Supertasters (25% of the population) have a higher concentration of taste buds on their tongue, and experience tastes at three to five times the level of normal tasters.  The scientists involved say that supertasters live in a neon taste world, while normal tasters (50% of the population) live in a pastel world.  The remaining 25% are the non-tasters, who are nearly impervious to bitter and spicy foods.  The non-tasters are the folks who eat any and everything, regardless of taste, texture, bitterness, or spiciness.  Supertasters, on the other hand, are particularly sensitive to bitter tastes, which are prevalent in things like coffee and vegetables.

When I first read about the concept of supertasters, I immediately knew they were describing me.  As a kid my mother adapted our household meals so that there was always stuff I could eat.  I know that it was probably difficult for her, and troublesome, and she did always try to get me to eat my vegetables and to try new things.  As a kid I was horrified at the thought of new foods, because I knew that a) it was impolite to not eat the food on one’s plate and b) everyone figured that a child who resisted a certain food was ‘just being picky’, and they pressured the child to ‘just try it without thinking you’ll hate it’ and it would be okay.  So I avoided, to the extent a child can, any circumstances where I would be forced (FORCED) to choke down food that was making me gag.  Not by evil people, but by people who just did not understand.

As I got older I got much more open to new foods, because everyone respects the food choices made by adults, and if I didn’t want to eat something I didn’t eat it.  This opened up a whole gastronomic world to me that I had avoided because of the minefield of forced ingestion.  I love trying new foods, and I will willingly try anything once.  But there is a list of foods that I cannot eat.  I regularly revisit this list, just to see if things have changed, and they never do.

Coffee Clash
Example number one is coffee.  I *love* the smell of coffee brewing.  It smells like heaven.  But I cannot drink coffee in any form.  I don’t care how much sugar, cream, foam, or flavoring you put in it, it still tastes horrible to me.  HORRIBLE.  I don’t care if you chill it, decaffeinate it, latte it, french press it, freeze dry it, or slow roast it.  I hate it.  I love my wife, but I won’t even kiss her after she drinks it.  DisGUSTing.  And I *want* to like coffee.  Not drinking coffee puts one in a very strange social no-man’s-land that not many people know about.  I don’t “go out for coffee”.  I don’t “take it black or with cream”.  At least Starbucks serves some pretty delicious hot chocolate, so I don’t end up sitting there like a dope with a coke in the coffee shop.  When people learn that I don’t drink coffee, it brings them up short, as if I said I didn’t really believe in gravity.  Not that they don’t understand what I’m saying, but it’s just the whole concept is foreign…I mean, gravity is a natural law, and one’s beliefs have nothing to do with it.  Believe me, in American society today there is a natural law that all socialization must eventually revolve around coffee.

Yellow Journalism
Did you know that many, many menus do not specify the presence of mustard on hamburgers and hot dogs? “A delicious, 1/3 pound burger, cooked to order, with lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles…” says the menu.  And you order it, you get it, and guess what’s smeared on the bread? Clotted yellow crap, that’s what.  Mustard.  You can pick off the pickles and onions, if you like, but you can’t unabsorb the nasty  mustardiness from the bread.  If you ask about it, the waitron will look confused, because “well….hamburgers just come with mustard….it’s assumed, you know?” If I don’t know the condiment standards of a particular establishment, I now always order “and NO mustard”, regardless of what the menu says.  That ensures that I (usually) don’t get mustard, but many times it also generates a condescending reference to how their burgers don’t come with mustard, and a feigned look at the menu to verify that I, as the consumer, was just too stupid to have read that for myself.

The One Reason I Like Lawyers
Thankfully (for me) there are many, many people who are seriously allergic to peanuts.  As in life-threatening.  This means that if you order something with no peanuts, people usually take you seriously, as a potential opponent in civil litigation.  Nothing prompts a restaurant to get an order right like the threat of a lawsuit.  They also always know which dishes have peanuts in them, specifically to service their allergic clientele.  I gleefully and unashamedly take advantage of this situation, because I love many foods that traditionally come with peanuts, but I HATE PEANUTS, IN ALL FORMS.  Even if “there’s just a little bit” and “you can’t even taste it”, trust me, I can.  I’m actually shuddering with repulsion thinking of the times I’ve accidentally eaten things that were peanut-ridden.

Parents, Please Listen to Your Children
I know that there are bratty little kids who claim to hate every single food.  They are just being ornery.  But parents, you KNOW if that’s what your child is like, because they do it with other stuff, too.  If you have a kid who will sit without television for hours while you wait for them to choke down a dozen peas, you may have a supertaster for a child.  You may also just have a stubborn brat, but, as a parent, I know that you’ll know the difference, at least eventually.  If you have always been able to eat everything that was put in front of you, then bully for you.  But don’t bully your kid once you’ve realized that they really do HATE what they’re eating, and it does TASTE LIKE DIRT, and it is MAKING THEM GAG.

There have to be realistic limits, but please don’t automatically assume that your child is faking.  I was that child once, and although we did have some conflict over it, my Mom really did a remarkable job of putting food on the table that the whole family could eat, including me.  And supertasters really don’t like vegetables.  That’s a sad fact, but as a kid virtually all vegetables tasted like dirt to me…and nasty dirt, at that.  And if you force your kids to eat foods that are, quite literally, disgusting to them, you may be laying the groundwork for future eating disorders.

Also, this is not junk science.  Go to your favorite web/news sources and search for ‘supertaster’.  This is very real.  It’s also very real vindication for all of the others like me who have been persecuted over the years.  And it turns out that,  not only were we not picky, the actual issue is that only we were able to  experience all the flavor of foods, and that some of them are just disgusting.  Everyone thinks they have taste.  But only the few, the proud, the supertasters, have been scientifically proven to have three to five times the taste of rest of  you.

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8 Responses to 'Sweet Vindication for Supertasters (but not too sweet)'

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  1. Susanh said,

    on July 31st, 2008 at 6:56 am

    Hello,
    We have discovered recently that my daughter is a supertaster, hands down! As her mom, I am so very worried about her health. What do supertasters eat besides peanut butter, white bread, strawberry jam, Grape Nuts, milk, grape tomatoes, grapes, and cheese pizza? Any thoughts you have on the topic would be very much appreciated. Thank you! Susan

    Reply

  2. EngineerBoy said,

    on July 31st, 2008 at 7:46 am

    Susanh,

    Well, when I was a kid I had a similarly limited diet, although not exactly the same. The only vegetables I liked were green beans (cut, canned, not fresh), corn (canned or on the cob), celery, and iceberg lettuce (but no other types of greens). I liked all manner of processed junk food, of course, and in retrospect one of the reasons for this is that they were consistent. A Twinkie always tastes like a Twinkie, so once I knew I liked Twinkies I could always eat them. There is no such consistency in freshly prepared food. This also meant that I ate a lot of fast foods – not because I liked them so much better, but because wherever we were in America, a Big Mac tastes like a Big Mac, and if I ordered it without the vile pickles I knew I could eat it.

    My own daughter is a supertaster and it was difficult finding anything reasonably healthy for her to eat. She liked bread (or toast) with butter, certain cereals, roast beef with au jus, pop’n fresh biscuits, pop tarts, iceberg lettuce (plain, no dressing), canned corn, canned green beans, mac and cheese, and a few other things. I made a deal with her – we would always have “safe” foods available in the house, but when the family meal was served she had to at least try a small taste of the dishes and she could choose to eat only the ones she liked. If she didn’t like them she could go make herself something safe and reasonably balanced. Similarly, when eating out, she was not forced to eat strange, new things and also had the option of ordering something different (within limits) if the first dish turned out to be too exotically prepared.

    She’s in college now and a vegetarian, and is slowly opening up to new foods – that’s just about when it happened to me, too, my late teens/early 20’s.

    In short (if that’s possible at this point), each supertaster can have very different specific likes, although there are some universal dislikes (fresh vegetables, fishy fish, etc). What worked best for me, and then with my daughter, was to a) never force (or threaten to force) the child to eat anything they are refusing, b) don’t simply let the child eat what they want, c) within the limits of what the child will eat, try to maintain as much nutritional balance as possible, and d) have some type of deal in place where you give your flexibility on making sure “safe” foods are available, and the child gives their agreement to at least try small tastes of new foods regularly.

    That last one seems to be the important one, because eventually, and to their own surprise, the child will discover a new food that they like. Once that happens the deal gets easier to enforce, because as children get older they realize that their life will be easier if there are more things they can eat.

    None of the above actually answered your question – sorry about that. But only your daughter and you working together will be able to find out what else she can eat.

    Good luck!

    Scott (aka EngineerBoy)

    Reply

  3. Susanh said,

    on August 4th, 2008 at 6:06 am

    Hi Scott,
    Actually, you did answer my question in a round about way. :)

    I appreciate all that you mentioned. We are trying to gather information about this phenomenon. It seems as though it is relatively new to the public. No one I’ve talked to has ever heard of it and think I’m a bit nutty. That’s ok. I live with my daughter and know that we are right on track with this. I like your thoughts on how to handle food and eating. Dinner has always been a royal battlefield and I am tired of fighting. She is too. Now, I try to give her at least one or two things I know she can eat, and then one bite of something she might like. No matter what she does or doesn’t eat, nothing is mentioned about food. However, sweets are not even an option during the week unless she eats very well. Sigh…it is hard! But, you are right, all we can do as a family is continue to make headway slowly each day.

    Thank you kindly for your encouragement, one parent to another. :)

    Susan

    Reply

  4. Didi said,

    on April 3rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    Hello!

    I also recently realized that my problems with bitter things are justified and real, when I saw an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science dedicated especially to us, supertasters :-)

    I think I’m a partial supertaster, though, because even though I have serious problems with things like coffee and alcohol, I love vegetables and have not found any that are unpleasant…

    By the way, do you ever have problems with sweet things? I wonder if this is due to supertaster-ness, but I have a similar response to most artificial sweet things (that is, not found in nature like fruits but prepared by man and crammed with sugar and corn syrup). Desserts, pastries, candy bars, cakes etc. make me sick. They feel WAY too sweet on my tongue, and once they reach my stomach, they seem to want to come back.

    Anyway, I’m glad you have been set free! :-)
    Didi

    Reply

    EngineerBoy Reply:
    April 3rd, 2009 at 9:25 pm

    Well, I don’t have a specific problem with sweet stuff, but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. There are a few sweet foods that I like, but I’m not a dessert/candie/cookie/cake type of person. However, I have to have sweet drinks, either colas, juice, sweet tea, or other – I don’t like plain water or unsweet drinks with meals, so I guess that’s where I get my sugar fix!

    Reply

  5. Emily said,

    on July 19th, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    Hey,
    I’am a Supertaster. When I was younger my mother used to battle me every night over such things as tomatoes, beans, peas, etc… Sure, it was torture and I was terrified of the yearly ‘tomatoe tasting’ she made me do at least once a year (she thought I would magically grow a love for it through this process) as if it was a shot. I don’t blame her, and it made for some pretty funny memories (or terrifying, however you want to look at it). While I go crazy over bread and rice, I love it and probably would starve without these two things.

    Contrary to most Supertasters who hate veggies, I love broccoli. It has to be covered in cheese, tromping any health benefits, but still broccoli.

    I like sweets, but if I touch them to the tip of my tongue it starts on fire. That part of your tongue perceives sweet and I wish I could chop it right off! Where as I love sweet things towards the back and sides of my tongue, that perceives the bitter (and maybe sour). It makes sense, but I don’t see why I would want to taste sweet things on the bitter tasting area. I’m thinking it may be because that’s the only place on my tongue with no fire hazards?

    Anyway, just wanted to share!

    Reply

  6. Cesar said,

    on October 15th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    Well, I don’t have reactions like the author, but one food item I can’t eat at all is broccoli (although I don’t have a problem with cauliflower). Also, I don’t care for candy, sodas, and most beverages because they are cloyingly sweet to my taste. In fact, even O.J., grape juice, and the like must be watered down before I drink them. However, I’m a coffee drinker (I’m from Puerto Rico, after all) and find no offense with a cup of good coffee. So, perhaps, there are gradients in the continuum from non-tasters to supertasters. It should be, I don’t see why it would be that you have a bunch of taste buds, just enough, or not that many.

    Reply

    EngineerBoy Reply:
    October 19th, 2009 at 8:36 pm

    Cesar,

    I think the three classifications (supertaster, normal taster, non-taster) are meant to describe the broad categories, and there is still a lot of granularity along the spectrum.

    Also, there are many people in all categories that have very strong and specific likes and dislikes that don’t have anything to do with the density of fungiform papillae on the tongue. In fact, not even all supertasters have similar likes, dislikes, or reactions.

    My point in writing the article was to relate my personal epiphany when learning something new that I knew described me, as it was quite enlightening and a relief to know that there were many other people with the same condition, and that it had a logical and rational explanation other than just being “picky”.

    More information can be found here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertasters

    Thanks for posting.

    Reply

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