Food, Genes, and Culture by Gary Paul Nabhan

Author:Gary Paul Nabhan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

~ Until recently, I believed that several dinners as disastrous as this one had all been caused by my own loss of capacity to accurately sense the pungency of chiles. I believed chef Julia Childs, who once intimated that chile lovers literally burn out their taste buds, leaving them unable to sense subtle flavors. But as I have learned more about chiles, it seems as though there is no solid evidence that this taste bud “burn-out” actually occurs.

More likely, my companion was a supertaster by her genetic profile, and I am a nontaster (with minimal reactions to strong flavors) by mine. These labels are now standard in the study of chemical perception, and I will describe their origins a bit later. In addition, my taste buds might have gradually been desensitized over the course of sampling chiles in doses far greater than most Americans would care to do, during my two decades of fieldwork on the ecology and ethnobotany of peppers. If I am correct, my partner’s aversion to chiles and my own capacity to tolerate pungent foods are perfect examples of the fascinating interplay between genes, habitat, culture, and individual experience. Not one of these factors in isolation can account for why some like it hot, and others not; all factors thread their way into a weaving made by the warp of nature and the weft of nurture.

I have been heartened to learn that the reasons behind that dinner’s culinary dissonance were far more complex than I could have imagined at the time, as indicated by some recent discoveries about the genetics of taste. I learned of them through correspondence with Dr. Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at Yale University’s School of Medicine, who has long shared with me a research interest in a vanilloid compound in chiles, capsaicin. Capsaicin, as you may already know, is somewhat of a chemical paradox, for it can both generate and relieve pain.

As Bartoshuk explained to me, “We have been working on connections between taste and oral pain that have health implications. We have come to suspect that the taste system not only serves as sensory [cues] but also serves to inhibit activities incompatible with eating. Oral pain was the first such activity we studied. Taste input appears to inhibit oral pain in the brain. When taste is damaged, that inhibition is abolished and pain phantoms—sensations in the absence of normal stimulation—are produced in supertasters. The people who suffer from this—it’s called burning mouth syndrome—tend to be hypersensitive to chiles.”

Although I had read her work on chiles for years, I did not know until we began our recent correspondence that Bartoshuk’s lab team had elucidated key features of a polymorphism for the ability to taste chiles as well as other compounds. Her lab had discovered the existence of populations genetically predisposed to so-called supertasting just a few years ago, even though the initial discovery of nontasting dates back to 1931. That is when chemist A. L. Fox was in his lab trying to synthesize

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