Our taste preferences must originate in genetics
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 9, 2021
- 919
The DNA ancestry-tracing services are getting to be pretty commonplace, and I can’t be the only person of a certain age who finds living in the future to be pretty fascinating. I’ve not sent one off yet, but my wife’s results have come back and we’ve been poring over them since.
Even just a single generation ago, being able to specifically nail down your familial composition and ancestral makeup with a little saliva would have been unthinkable. We now know she is almost entirely Irish with dashes of a few other mixtures thrown in for interest including a sliver of Japanese.
The Irish part was expected, just not such a heavy proportion. There were no real surprises here. The level of information you get with these kits is quite deep, predicting things like how likely you are to sneeze at bright sunlight or to have dimples.
A couple of thoughts came up in reading all this information: How much of our palate comes from where our relatives hailed? These DNA kits also must be ripping the covers off a great many family secrets.
Once upon a time, a family could conceal an oopsie-daisy child with a good story, but the secrets great-grandmother thought she took to her grave are now pulled out into the white hot light of the chemist’s lab.
My wife cooks Italian food like a nonna, and she has traces of Italian, French, German and Greek blood. Do we get our taste for food from our genetics?
If you adopted a Sicilian kid to Finland as an infant, would he grow up with a taste for olive oil and tomato sauces? In my wife’s case, the answer is no. Irish as she is, she’s just not a fan of corned beef or meat pastries, or even beer for that matter.
Our taste preferences as adults must originate in our genetics somehow, and how those genetics make it into what we like to eat and drink makes for some interesting reading. What we like to eat also is influenced by our health and environment and by our eating experiences. If you get a bad clam, that’s gong to color your opinion of clams for a very long time.
How we perceive certain flavors comes from our genetic code. Some people like black licorice while others do not. Same goes for cilantro, which some describe as tasting like soap.
Each of us lives in our own, singular world of tastes and smells. We vary quite a bit in how things taste and smell to us. It’s a wonder any restaurant can survive given this variety in perception among customers. Each of us has receptors for sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami and fattiness.
Our brains take over the work of combining and interpreting these impressions to form the way things taste to us, and there are variations in families. I love cilantro while my sister was in the “this tastes like soap” camp.
We are coming into the time when foods can be matched quite specifically to our genetics and certainly a time when diets can be tightly tailored to our genetic requirements, helping to maintain a healthy weight and choose foods well-suited to our palate.
But the questions remain for me: Does a great-great-great-grandparent from Armenia dictate the kinds of food we like today? Or is it less tied to region, more to overall taste impressions?
There’s one genetic ancestry that’s easy to spot in restaurants, however: the guy who orders a filet mignon well done and puts ketchup on it is mostly Neanderthal.