The Nuance
Are Picky Eaters Born or Made?
Genes play a role in taste perception. But there’s a lot more to the story.
Roughly a century ago, two researchers were working together in a DuPont chemical lab when one of them, Arthur L. Fox, spilled a bit of harmless phenylthiocarbamide dust. His colleague complained of the bitter taste in the air, but Fox tasted nothing — even after dabbing a bit of the dust onto his own tongue.
This experience inspired Fox to dig deeper into the science of taste, and his later work led to the discovery that, due to the presence or absence of certain genes, not everyone tastes bitter flavor compounds in the same way. Taste researchers working today use small squares of paper — coated with the same class of bitter compound that Fox let loose in his lab — to assess a person’s sensitivity to bitter flavor.
“When tasting bitter, 25% to 30% of us experience it in neon,” says Diane Catanzaro, a taste researcher and associate professor of psychology at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. By “in neon,” she means very intensely; these people are known as “supertasters.” On the flip side, about the same percentage of people are categorized as “non-tasters” because, Catanzaro says, “they’re basically taste-blind to bitter compounds.” The rest fall somewhere in…
