It's always been interesting to me that some people enjoy eating foods so spicy they'd burn my mouth out. Wine, olives, and other things taste extremely bitter to me, but other people love those things. I like sweet things better, but anyone who knows Leen knows there is no such thing as too sweet for her, and yet other people don't even really like sweet things at all.

Research seems to indicate that taste isn't all a matter of personal preference but is genetic and physical. I linked to an article about supertasters below. (A google search for "supertasters" yields more.) Some people have six times the density of taste buds that others do, and so a certain bitter or spicy food might taste just fine to one person but yet cause actual physical pain to another.

That's the background. The actual purpose of this post is to speculate on the ramifications of this information. This information concludes that taste isn't (entirely) a personal preference but (at least partially) the result of significantly *different* sensory signals being sent to the brain. Two people that eat the same foods are not necessarily perceiving the same taste. No wonder some people can eat mushrooms and horseradish when I think they are the grossest things ever. The signals *my* brain gets when I eat those things truly IS awful, and if those who like mushrooms and horseradish got the sensory input *I* get, they wouldn't like them either.

And that makes me think, gosh, what am I missing out on? Now, I don't mean to say that I miss mushrooms or horseradish, because I don't, and if I don't know what I'm missing, I don't care. But I wonder about other things. How do other people taste spices I find strong? I have a bag of Doritos Extreme here. I can eat them, but I won't buy them again. They are about the hottest food I can tolerate without physical pain. My mouth burns, and drinking water afterward feels just like how I would imagine it would feel if a bucket of water extinguished an actual fire on my body. What do less sensitive tasters than me taste when they eat those? I want to experience that taste, but I never will.

So this thought leads to others. If taste sensitivity is genetic, is that why the cuisines of different parts of the world have a different average level of spiciness? Is southwestern food and Indian food so spicy because there are not so many supertasters in the southwest and in India? Is British food boring bland because there are a majority of supertasters there, and is Indian food popular in Britain because the minority of non-tasters there are desperate for something they can taste at all?

But wait. The article I linked to (or maybe a different article on supertasting; I forget) says that gender and race can make a difference. Something like 35% of women are supertasters, while only 10% of men are. Asians are more likely to be supertasters than Caucasians. Well, I get the gender statistic, because it's always been my general impression that, as a vague generalization, women tend to crave sweets more than men do, and men tend to crave spices more than women do. But how can there be more Asian supertasters? Most Asian cuisines I've had involve more hot spices than I would prefer.

And here's another thing. The article suggests that supertasters not only find hot spices unpalatable but also rich desserts. Something seems to be amiss. All the people I know that have relentless sweet teeth (Leen included) have an extremely low tolerance for hot spices. What's up with that?

Oh, but I do wonder about the food tasting experiences I'll never be able to have because my tongue doesn't work like others. It's a similar sort of thing to hearing accents in speech. I perceive British, Southern, Australian, etc accents by the differences with my own. I hear no accent in my own speech. But if I go to New Zealand or England or Texas, they all hear an accent in me and not in themselves. I would *love* to be able to hear my own accent as *they* do, because surely it must sound cool and unusual as I find theirs. Moreover, a New Zealander and a Texan would perceive each other's accent, but they must perceive it in an *entirely* different way than *I* do. I would *love* to hear what a Texas accent sounds like from a New Zealand accent frame of reference, or vice versa, but there again, that's an experience I'll never have, because I must escape myself to experience it.

So many experiences and sensations are not just inseparable from the person having the experience but *defined* by the person having the experience. So by being me, I am privy to all kinds of experiences others cannot share, but, at the same time, I'm missing out!