In nutrition as in everything else, each person is unique and has his or her own tastes!
TASTES ARE IN NATURE
Tastes are in nature”, as they say, which explains why for one person, blueberries of Lac Saint-Jean taste like heaven and for another they are just blueberries, no more and no less. To cultivate a sense of taste, it is essential to dare to taste new products. Adding an unusual fruit or vegetable to your grocery cart is a great way to test your taste.
TWELVE TIMES RATHER THAN ONE
Did you know that it can take up to a dozen tries before you like a new food? The taste buds of children and adults are sensitive and can help us appreciate a new food right away, but they can also require us to keep testing it repeatedly, one bite at a time. As Jean de La Fontaine said so well, “Patience and length of time are more important than strength or rage”. You don’t have to force yourself to like a food, you just need to taste it and not be afraid to mix it with an ingredient you particularly like. For example, a salad of legumes and tomatoes accompanied by small pieces of yellow mango. The mango adds a slightly peppery touch to this colorful salad.
BUT WHAT MAKES EACH PERSON PERCEIVE TASTE IN A DIFFERENT WAY?
It’s all about the taste buds! To understand the chemistry of the taste buds, I invite you to choose a food you like and plug your nose just before tasting it. What happens? The taste you experience is, thanks to the taste buds and their specialized receptors that work hard, to make you savor one or more of the 4 basic tastes. These tastes that you know well are sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. What about umami or its common name “delicious taste”? It seems that you can never have too much of this taste. It comes from the presence of glutamate in food. The beautiful red tomato and grapes would naturally contain glutamate.
TASTES CHANGE WITH AGE
Tastes are not static and can develop over a lifetime, just because a person didn’t like fish as a child doesn’t mean they won’t appreciate it as an adult.
With that, I hope you take the time to taste and enjoy your favorite foods.
Here’s to your health!
