Originally Posted by Cathy A
Some people are "supertasters".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster

They actually have more tastebuds and taste bitter flavors more strongly. Many green vegetables taste bitter to supertasters.

Me. I cannot stand coffee (love the smell) and olives taste weird to me. I can tell when food is starting to spoil by smell or taste when no one else can. I cannot handle sour candy at all. Alcohol in small amounts if at all - love the buzz, but after a few sips, it turns me off. I can taste very small amounts of impurities in food such as detergent or bleach left over from cleaning or other contaminants like oil that no one else can. Moldy smells, smoke, urine - all jump out at me.

Originally Posted by ebeth
Kriston is right in that I read the book over a year ago and was quoting from memory. It is not an pro-environmental, anti-pesticide, organic-hugging book at all. I was merely trying to point out the level of care and detail that the author goes to in researching the ingredients. It is hard to imagine that one could write an entire chapter on "wheat flour". You grow it, you harvest it, you mill it... what else is there to say? Just wait until he gets to the polysorbate 20 chapter. (*note* I am also remembering this from over a year ago, so take the last sentence with a grain of salt, please!)

I found the book fascinating from a food allergy point of view, since we have major food allergies. He shows you how a soy or corn product will come down a manufacturing line and split into food and non-food production items.

I am very anti-pesticide myself. I studied the use of chemical weapons in the Army and hate them and most pesticides are the same thing as are most herbicides.

Food is VERY interesting stuff. Most industries will give tours. I got a tour of a cheese plant once. They make hundreds of tons of it a day in giant vats. You see all the care that goes into making it and then get to taste it at the end - and its quite good!

OTOH, I love the dairy ads where they show cows on grass, when most dairies are using prepared rations now. Nothing wrong with that and its probably better for the cows, but still - its misleading.

Soy is an interesting substance. A good friend's son was a vegetarian and ate a lot of soy. He ended up with issues related to the hormone mimics in soy and had to go off it onto grass-fed beef and fish and is now OK.

I wonder if some people are "super receptors" for some things??