Taste

So ... how much do you know about how food becomes acceptable?

Seth Roberts points us at this diagram:

I'm personally awful close to a super-taster, as is my mom, and I think my youngest.  And otherwise a complete wimp on food selection.

Coffee, Alcohol, and the 20-years-ago before-they-were-bred-for-sweetness grapefruits are intolerable for their bitterness, at least without mountains of sugar/milk/etc.  Sweetnesses are addictive.  Sour is nice, but can easily be overdone (superstrong yogurt, for instance).  Usually I want more sugar on my sour.  I salt almost nothing while cooking, and find a lot of restaurant food and most pre-cooked cookies too salty.  Umami is good stuff, though my mom has an MSG allergy. 

I have a pretty high spice tolerance, asking (for me and wifey) Indian restaurants for Desi hot, and Thai places for "how you eat it".  Until you get to thai red peppers or habeneros, my spice tolerance holds up pretty well.  And my wife's is well past mine. 

Past tastes, I think fullness/thickness is a massively underappreciated aspect of food, and I address it in my cooking, and 20+ years of respiratory allergies (until I largely stopped drinking milk) means that my sense of smell is (a) weak, and (b) unused to strong scents also -- I hate most perfumes....but it means that most smell-altering aspects of cooking food don't move me much.

Also, bad textures in food make my stomach jump...and meat fat is a bad texture for me.  Putting meat fat in my mouth (at all) makes my stomach do that 6-inch leap from normal position towards my throat, starting the gag reflex.  runny egg whites do the same thing.  Watching me cut ALL the fat off a cut of meat I'm going to cook is usually pretty entertaining.  My primary concern in what meat I eat is that it has NO chunks of fat in it (fish, hamburger, carefully trimmed filet or pork loin, turkey breast, pre-sliced lunchmeat [though salami scares me] )

I'm also highly sensitive to food temperature.  I am pretty sure I drink my hot drinks about 10-20 degrees cooler than other folks I know....because I simply can't drink them at the temperatures I see other folks sipping at. 

And I'm sufficiently spergy to largely not notice the rest of it, when food is involved.