Calzaer

I'm one of those people with the strong reaction to bitter taste. I can't drink coffee unless there's salt in it (salt cancels out bitter just like sweet cancels out sour), and I don't touch beer at all. I can't finish a bottle of ANY brand/type of beer in less than half an hour, and have yet to finish a bottle of any brand of IPA. Those wussy malt beverages, however, are just fine. Particularly Bacardi O3.

I also put salt on just about everything non-sweet, because it's all just a little too bitter without it. Tomatos, chicken (even if the skin is still on it), fish, ham, potatos, lettuce, carrots, celery... there are very few things that don't taste better with salt added.

Coragyps

Another factoid unsupported by any memory of where I saw it: People in general like the foods that their mothers ate in late pregnancy and while nursing. I guess some flavor/odor chemical pass the placenta and/or mammary glands(?)

I've seen this sort of thing in action with my children - a couple of them would NOT nurse after mama ate sweet potatoes - which she likes, but eats only rarely. And there are some pretty strong hormone-like chemicals in some relatives of sweet potatoes - the first birth-control pills, IIRC, were based on some wild yam from Mexico. And the only way anyone could cheerfully eat those little fish-flavored crackers from Japan would be intrauterine conditioning, surely.

Mad Kally

OK, you asked for it. Next time you're getting a giant metacrock type post with no paragraph breaks. You'll ask me to go back to my short posts. lol

Kally

echidna

And I in turn will dissect it line by line.

Indeed I salivate in delicious anticipation.

Corona688

Actually, I belive I saw a study once in the 'Science News' weekly newsmag, where it outlines a hypothesis that the 'bitter' taste receptors lose their sensitivity with age, like, adults in the 20+ range commonly having significantly less sensitive bitter taste buds than those of young children. So it's possible that people grow to like certain foods they disliked before, not because they've learned to like it, but because it no longer tastes like poison to them.

The article also described that some people were 'supertasters', having extraordinarily sensitve bitter taste buds; researchers were able to tell them apart through having subjects taste a harmless chemical that generated little to no taste sensation in most people but supertasters found far too bitter to drink.

Mad Kally

And I will talk in circles and copy and paste like Meatcrock until you fall asleep. I used to read the Meta/Gurdur formal debate as a cure for insomnia.

==>Kally