It’s a gourmand! It’s a foodie! No! It’s the supertaster
CAN PEOPLE WITH AN ACUTE SENSE OF TASTE HELP FROM BEING A PAIN AT RESTAURANTS?
She swishes a gulp of wine around her mouth like it’s Listerine. Front to back, side to side. Her cheeks puff and deflate with every visceral motion for what feels like hours, eyes narrowing, focusing on the remaining red liquid in her cup. Finally, she grabs the plastic jug beside her and spits.
“Lots of black pepper and licorice in that one,” she says confidently, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth before shoving her nose into the wineglass for a long inhale. “Some coffee- cured bacon. And there’s some funk, too. I’m getting a wet shoelace.”
I roll my eyes and throw my wineglass down on the table, waiting for someone to initiate laugher before I can chime in. But the room of professional sommeliers and food writers nod gravely; thrusting their noses into their glasses for a series of long inhales like they’re huffing glue.
Frankly, the wine tastes like wine. Red wine that is sweet, peppery and full- bodied. Even my own description would solicit eye rolls from the average beer drinker.
Despite a cultural obsession with food and drink, we still haven’t figured out how to talk about our palates in an accessible way. Measuring what you taste against someone else’s flavour experience is a surprisingly threatening task. You can have bad eyesight, bad hearing and even a bad sense of smell, but no one thinks of him or herself as a lacklustre taster. Any yet, many people are. “There’s a distribution in how all of us experience taste,” says University of Florida psychologist and taste researcher Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, who coined the term “supertaster” in 1991. “A supertaster is a person who experiences the most intense taste sensations. One of the factors that contributes to being a supertaster is how many tastebuds you have.”
Tastebuds are found on structures of the tongue called papillae, which are located at the front of the tongue and resemble little bumps. Each papillae has an average of six microscopic tastebuds buried inside its surface tissue. Supertasters have at least 35 papillae.
“If you want to know if you’re a supertaster, you can start by putting blue food colouring on your tongue. You’ll see that the papillae don’t stain as well. They stain pink, or light blue. You can see them in a magnifying mirror,” says Bartoshuk.
Those with fewer than 15 papillae are considered non- tasters, and those with 15 to 35 papillae are average. Approximately 25 to 30 per cent of people are thought to be supertasters, 40 to 50 per cent average tasters, and 25 to 30 per cent non- tasters, reports Scientific American. In her research, Dr. Bartoshuk has found that women are more likely to be supertasters, at around 35 per cent of the population compared with 15 per cent of men.
A predisposition to experiencing flavour offers an explanation for those who live to eat versus those who eat to live. While some of us can’t help but structure our lives around our next meal, others see food as nothing more than routine necessary nourishment.
But being a supertaster isn’t just about a series of profound flavour experiences. Those with an increased volume of tastebuds also possess a sensitivity to bitter foods. If you have to add cream to your coffee, or find broccoli and grapefruit unnecessarily bitter, you might be a supertaster. Alternatively, nontasters can struggle to identify complex flavour profiles or get excited about meal time. For example, it’s safe to assume a nontaster invented Soylent.
Yet having a sensitive palate doesn’t necessarily lead to more gastronomic enjoyment. “Many people think that ‘super’ means it’s better. It isn’t better; it’s just different,” says Bartoshuk.
Those who want the benefits of an unrestrained palate can train their tastebuds to pick up on different flavour profiles by exposing them to a wide array of foods, but you can’t increase the amount of tastebuds containing papillae in your mouth.
While certain activities like smoking or drinking hot liquids can damage tastebuds, they naturally regenerate every 10- 14 days, meaning those who have impaired their sense of taste can repair it if they stop the damaging activity for a short period of time. This is why a heightened sense of taste is one of the most commonly reported side effects in those who quit smoking.
Bartoshuk notes that supertasters experience flavour two to three times more than regular people, and that professional chefs are far more likely to be supertasters than one would expect. I wonder if the same is true for professional foodies, and whether or not being a supertaster is the reason I am often enamoured with food in a way that bores the average person to tears.
But the term was not created as a bragging right for the modern gourmand. “We study supertasters because their food preferences are different, which makes their diets different, and that has impacts on risk factors for disease,” says Bartoshuk.
Outside of Bartoshuk’s research, it’s difficult to see an everyday scenario where the word “supertaster” isn’t used as a foodie humble brag. Those who possess an acute sense of taste often indulge an uncanny knack for being annoying in public restaurant settings. The offer to write these behaviours off as the curse of the supertaster is an appealing one, although it isn’t always necessary.
A booming foodie culture continues to legitimize behaviours that are all probable side effects of supertasting. So, next time you encounter someone announcing that they taste wet shoelaces and coffee-cured bacon in a sip of wine, know that they can’t help it. Well, sort of.