I Leik Fewd

(by Ali, Block 1)

So you like food right? You like mashed potatoes? I hate them. You like peas? I absolutely love them. You like the taste of monster? I strongly dislike it and feel like it tastes like medicine. Why do we differ so much? You might think that’s its just because everyone’s preference is difference, in which you are basically correct, but it also has to do with many outside factors and how many taste buds you have.

            Taste is one of you five senses and it is basically the ability to detect the flavor of substances such as food, certain minerals, poisons, and many other things. Your five basic tastes are sweet, bitterness, sour, salty, umami and you taste using your taste buds. A person’s taste buds are found mostly on the tongue, but are also found in many of the passageways your food goes through. Food comes in contact with taste receptors on the taste receptor cells by small openings in the tongue, and then your cells send huge clusters of information to your brain. A normal person will have between two thousand to eight thousand taste buds.

            Now that we have got the boring stuff out of the way, let’s get moving on to the fun stuff. Did you know what besides basic taste buds, your nose is also a very important part of what foods you like and don’t like? You know when you smell something really good, like turkey, and your mouth begins to salivate? That’s because of your nose smelling the food that you body already thinks your eating something you like, so its sends out saliva to break it down. And did you know that you also smell your food while eating? That’s right, because while your chewing and smushing the food in your mouth it sends an aroma of the food outside of your mouth where your nose picks it up. From there on your nose send the aroma up a way more sensitive brain channel then you would normally smell.

            Another factor in what you like and don’t like is what you ate as a kid. If on very happy days your mom made your family rice and beans, then as an adult your brain will recognize the smell of taste of the rice and beans and send out those happy brain cells and that meal will taste great. Then again on the other hand let’s say if you were poor and on the bad months you had to eat peas and potatoes, then as an adult your brain will recognize those foods and it will trigger the unhappy cells, making those foods taste a lot worse than they actually are.

            When everyone is talking about how the food tastes and how it was just a bit sweet but not to much, do you find yourself thinking “are they crazy, that was extremely sweet!” Or if they are talking about an “okay” meal they might say “it was a tad bitter, but just barely eatable” and you find yourself thinking “a bit!?!? That had to be one of the bitterest meals I ever ate, I just threw mine away” then you might just be a supertaster. Supertasters are people with extra taste buds, and that makes them basically live in a crazy world of neon tastes. A lot of the foods they eat will taste extreme to them, so they tend to be very picky. These are the people that will only eat a certain type of taste like spicy, and they cannot eat anything like sweet because it turns out way to sweet for them. Being a supertaster might sound cool, but it may also not let you eat some food that you would otherwise enjoy.

            Have your parents ever made you eat something at the dinner table that you hated? Well you can actually trick your brain into temporarily thinking it’s actually good! If you eat something that you love your brain will spark up a bunch of brain cells that will make you taste everything better than it actually is. So bottom line is, if you something like a little cake before the Brussels sprouts, you might actually enjoy those Brussels sprouts!

Any Questions J?