The wise man once said, there's no accounting for taste

Why does sushi taste like Unicorn? How many tastes can our tongue perceive?

Saying "Sushi" to my dad 20 years ago, and he would have no idea of what the heck you were talking about. And he couldn't goolge it. Some days later he would show up with a bag of some-sort-of-rice and a black sheet of something that smelled like a seal that didnt wash in decades, among other intercontinental items.

He was a fan of gastronomy, and this time he was exploring Japanese food. I am not sure if it was his lack of practice or my teenager palate, but the experience resulted somehow traumatic for me, not trying Sushi again until a year ago.

Yes, you can speculate about why would I try something that in the beginning resulted in a repulsive situation. Darwin would understand with no doubt. The thing is that she was gorgeous, mellow voice, progresist, studied cinematic arts and like most of the movies I liked. I've to clarify that, at the places I studied one, I learned how to use a lot of tools that hold no inherent usage at the moment of courtship; so, reaching that point with her and those little Asian "things" in a nice, private corner of a somehow classy restaurant was no small feat for me. But, there we were, and this time Sushi didn't taste that bad.

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How can the sense of taste become such a turncoat?

The sense of taste is the one that allows us to, along with the smell, perceive the food we will/may eat; that perception is, flavor. We like eating so much that, it holds one of the -if not THE- largest bibliographies in humankind.

Lets start with the basics: Fruit. We all have in our heads that "map" of the tongue with defined regions capable of perceiving four tastes: bitter in the back, acid(acrid) and salty in the sides and sweet in the tip. Now, even when it is truth that certain areas are more sensible to certain particular flavors, the taste buds for each one of the flavors are distributed along the whole tongue. This is, there's no specific "zones" for a flavor, there's zones with different concentration of certain staste buds; sensitivity. The myth was born out of a misenterpretation Edwin Boring had over a paper written in German back around the 1900s. Either that, or perhaps it was that trend we've of wanting to simplify the complex things and complicate the simple things... just like I'm doing now.

Until the beginning of the past century 4 "flavors" were defined. Around then, Kikunae Ikeda isolated a new flavor out of a traditional Japanese broth (soup) that had algae as main ingredient. The new flavor was named umami ("pleasant savory taste" in Japanese) and it is conformed mainly by glutamate, besides of inosinate and guanylate. Leaving the chemistry out of this, we can find this this particular flavor in the Mediterranean foods: Parmesan cheese, ham, champignons (mushroooms, for you people that think that an Amanite and a Champignon are "the same", so you name them under the same word), ham... they are all rich in umami flavoring. But orientals, as most things that they do, take the things to the extreme of perfection/exploitation. They have hundreds of recipes for algae, fish, shellfish and mushrooms that exploit the umami.

Everything is very yummy, but the pop in the umami, has nothing to do with a simple broth, it is a result of rolling up rice, fish and shellfish in an algae and then top that with soy sauce. This sauce is, preciselly, a ferment of soy beans: that gives as a result an excessive amount of glutamate. This is: umami overdose.

But not all fish is glutamate, it also, deppending on the time it has withoutswimming, has other substances of which we are not usually very fans of. Perhaps that was it, or maybe it didn't have enough soy sauce, or perhaps it was because my dad was not nearly as hot as this chick I ate sushi with: the reason why I did not like it back then.

I could have avoided vomiting if I had a cold. We have to add that the sense of taste is not as powerful as the sense of smell. As a matter of fact, most of the perceptions we interpret as flavor do not come from the taste, but from the aroma. Some candies, for example have the exact same composition except the aromatizer (here again, sorry anglospeakers but the "food flavoring" you see at the ingredients is actually "food aromatizer"), that, makes us perceive a different taste.

Back to Darwin, but not under reproductive terms but under survival ones, the sense of taste has a very important role evolutivelly speaking. We can link the capacity of perceiving a sweet taste with the acquisition of sugars and carbohydrates, the salty flavor with ions like sodium and, finally, the umami with proteins (formed by aminoacids, like glutamate).

Bitter is a whole different kind. This one protects us, for example, from toxic alkaloids in some plants and mushrooms. Acid, is usually related with the fermentation present in food that is being decomposed (rotting). I need to make another remark, individuals that cultivate a taste for these last two flavors, and instead of repelling them, they embrace them!.

Aside from the speculations that we can make about the adaptive value of the sense of taste, the truth us that our perception of flavors -and of everything- does not only have a genetic preset, it also is influenced by the context (environment). To be fair, to my first encounter with Sushi I've to add the factor that I was a despicable rebel teen that disproved any novelty that came from his parents.

Lucky, not all of it was rejection. Beyond Sushi, my family found a way to transmit one or two tricks about cooking, computers and the life that would come in my future.

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