"TasteBuds" news and stories

Imagine that you are considering dining at a restaurant you have never been to before. If all your friends like it and the professional critics like it, chances are reasonably good that so will you. When it comes down to it, though, your friends are not professional food critics. Whose advice do you place more weight on -- the friend's or the word of the person who gets paid to eat?

It is a difficult decision, because most people are inclined to trust the professional, the expert. As Sarah alluded to earlier, Jeffrey Steingarten said that he felt obligated to let go of his personal food preferences and hang-ups when he became a food critic. In order to see things from his perspective, to take from his reviews what he does, do we have to let go of our food preferences? Of course not. Everyone likes different things. The question is really why you would choose to take the "professional" recommendation. Their palate is likely to be different from your own, so why should it be a reliable source of advice for you?

Scientists who research the sense of taste divide people into three categories: nontasters, medium tasters and supertasters. These classifications are based on the perception of a compound known as 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP, for short), which has a bitter taste that is perceptable to some, but not all, people. 25% of people, the nontasters, will register nothing when they taste the compound. To 50% of the population, the medium tasters, PROP will taste bitter, but not overly so. The remaining 25% of people are classified as supertasters and to them, the compound will taste intensely bitter. The classification of "super taster" does not mean that one's sense of taste is superior to another's, but that there is an increased level of sensitivity to various tastes on the tongue.

Supertasters have a much higher density of papillae, the small mushroom-like structures on the tongue that house taste buds, than medium and nontasters. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men are.