Celebrate Your Taste Buds

Celebrate Your Taste Buds

            Flavors have been broadly categorized as sweet, sour, salty, bitter and savory or sometimes called meaty or umami. It has also been known for more than a century that humans differ in their individual sensitivity to bitter, such as the bitter flavor in cabbage or Brussels sprouts. With the information from the Human Genome Project an entire field of scientific research has now identified a multiplicity of genes responsible for producing the sensors (receptors) on your taste bud cells.  

Not only do we now know that there are several sensors that detect the sweetness in a cookie, saltiness in a pickle, sourness of a lime, bitterness of beer and meatiness (umami) in your 4^th of July hamburger, but also how specific mo Each time you sit down to a delicious meal or pick up a tasty snack your mouth goes to work overtime.  Your teeth may do the chewing, but thousands of cells in your onion shaped taste buds on your tongue do most of the work by eagerly extending their sensors to sort out the flavors that make food one of the joys of life.

lecules from these foods react with these sensors to relay a further message to your brain. If you hated Brussels sprouts as a child and your sister or brother found them inoffensive, you apparently inherited a different combination of genes for that particular receptor to bitterness.

            Extending the taste receptor survey to animals, scientists have come up with fascinating findings.  I was amazed to find that our two cats for instance would have no taste for anything sweet, since they have no sweet receptors on their very pink tongues. Neither apparently do most of a group of non feline species of the order Carnivora, including sea lions, otters and hyenas. The proffered explanation is that dietary preferences had allowed their genes to be mutated to a non-functional form with time. What was claimed as a surprise was that bears have well functioning sweet receptors on their tongues. Which of course should have been no surprise to anyone at all who has read of Winnie the Pooh’s great love of honey!

            Such technicalities aside, I am searching for a variety of ways to challenge our taste buds with different servings of the abundant lettuce and green’s crops from the garden these days.  The rains have vastly out-produced what the slugs could not eat and daily harvests include several types of lettuce, curly endive, escarole, beet greens and arugula.

My favorite vinaigrette is: ¼ cup olive oil, 3 Tblsp. wine vinegar, 1 tsp. Dijon mustard, ½ tsp. soy sauce, ¼ tsp dried thyme, a pinch of  pepper and a shake of garlic powder. This dressing goes well with a mix of greens and thinly sliced scallions. Tasty variations have come from addition of crumbled Feta or thinly sliced Assiago or Parmeggiana Regano cheeses.

            My curry dressing is spicy and a bit lighter, but pairs well with chopped peanuts or pecans and the variety of greens from the garden. Curry dressing: ¼ cup olive oil, 3 Tblp. fresh lemon or lime juice, 1 tsp. cider vinegar, ½ tsp. sugar, ½ tsp. soy sauce, ½ tsp.  Madras curry powder, ¾ tsp. dry mustard and ½ tsp. hot mustard.

            As with all scientific discoveries, our taste buds/receptors are now in line for potential manipulation by the food industry and some fancy chefs are already experimenting with “molecular gastronomy”. However, the combinations of summer fresh flavors in delectable salads next to meat and vegetables from the grill, still remain unbeatable for pleasing anyone’s taste buds.

(I. Winicov Harrington lives in Waldoboro and is the author of “How to Eat Healthy and Well for Less than $5.00 a Day: the Smart-Frugal Food Plan”; website: www.winicov-harrington.com)