I got the “cilantro tastes like soap” gene personally. Would much rather have gotten the, “Always remember where I left my car keys” gene, or maybe the, “Come up with witty retorts on the spot instead of two hours later in the shower” one.
At least you don’t have my “sky-high cholesterol no matter what you eat” gene.
Also artificial sweeteners have an unpleasant chemical aftertaste that lingers for a long time. Apparently that’s generic too…
TIL about the artificial sweetener thing, this explains a lot. I have never been able to understand people enjoying diet soda.
My grandfather had low cholesterol no matter what. It was always perfect. This man ate more bacon and had more buttermilk and cornbread than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.
I have to watch mine pretty closely. Well, I should, but I’ll just die horribly and early I guess. The alcohol will get me first anyway.
Hah, my grandfather had heart problems and very high cholesterol so we gave him such a hard time for eating unhealthy food. But now I have been a vegetarian for almost twenty years (I try to avoid eggs and dairy too) and my cholesterol is just as high as his was, unless I take medications. So we should have just let him eat whatever he wanted to…
I love cilantro, but I got the celery tastes bitter and spicy gene. So many people tell me it’s tasteless but it has a strong, terrible taste to me.
Celery tastes like that too me as well, but no allergy. I can eat it with no negative effects, other than the fact that I’ve had to taste celery.
Celery man. Everyone tells me it has no taste, but to me it tastes like an entire lawn’s worth of grass clippings compressed into a stick. Extremely pungent.
Same with cucumbers. They taste awfully strong and bitter to me.
Look up the “TAS2R bitter taste receptor gene family”. It’s a fun little group of genes that control how well bitterness is detected.
I am a moderate bitter taster. So I do not like celery (mildly unpleasant flavor) and prefer cucumbers that contain the recessive bi gene that stops the production of cucubitacin in the plant. The ones that contain the bt gene, the skin gets too bitter for me. This gene mostly stops the cucubitacin production in the fruit but not the plant.
Cilantro tasted like soap to me until my wife described it as lemony, and it suddenly tasted different and now I like cilantro. Senses are weird
Cognitive Modulation of Olfactory Processing: Neuron
We showed how cognitive, semantic information modulates olfactory representations in the brain by providing a visual word descriptor, “cheddar cheese” or “body odor,” during the delivery of a test odor (isovaleric acid with cheddar cheese flavor) and also during the delivery of clean air. Clean air labeled “air” was used as a control. Subjects rated the affective value of the test odor as significantly more unpleasant when labeled “body odor” than when labeled “cheddar cheese.” In an event-related fMRI design, we showed that the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)/medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was significantly more activated by the test stimulus and by clean air when labeled “cheddar cheese” than when labeled “body odor,” and the activations were correlated with the pleasantness ratings. This cognitive modulation was also found for the test odor (but not for the clean air) in the amygdala bilaterally.
I love cilantro but one time I tasted the soap flavor. I had done a stir fry with cilantro and left the spoon in the still hot pot and there had been some cilantro stuck to the bottom of the spoon that sat there and cooked for as long as it took for the big pot to cool down. Then when I was doing dishes I picked up the spoon and I saw big bunch of cilantro so I ate it and it was horribly nasty and tasted like straight up hand soap. I thought for sure that some soap fell or splashed onto it but no it was just the cilantro. Never happened again either.
The Frech have this good phrase, L’esprit de l’escalier
