Out of Pod Experience

I've never tasted paint thinner before, honest.

Lol, does that mean paint thinner tastes better than cherry flavour?

Your local paint thinner manufacturers must hate small children.

But you have smelled it. That's what it tastes like. Derp.

'merica

We love our artificial sugar, flavorings and colorings.

While I don't know for sure I've been told in the past most candies and softdrinks made in other countries like ones in Europe use all natural ingredients.

Is this true?

Yeah, but the paint thiner we have here smells like petrol or some other highly flamable and very toxic stuff.

While our artificial cherry flavour tastes nothing like cherry OR paint thinner...

On second thought, maybe your local cherry flavoured candy manufacturers just love little children and want to protect them by making their candy taste like petrol so they don't eat to much sugary stuff...

Lol, that's what I call commitment to a product by it's manufacturer. One would think they could have improved it at least by some degree in those 48 years.

I imagine it like this:

"Sir, weve menaged to improve our recipe for cherry flavoured candy."
"NO! Our cherry flavoured candy has tasted horrible for the last thirty years and it'll continue to be so for thirty more years!"

Not a chance. The truth is that some of the poorer and less technologically advanced countries are forced to make candies with what they have available and are unable to fund the factories that would make the artificial sweeteners. All of them want to be using artificial sweeteners. Most European countries have access to these. You may find novelty and tourist shops that sell candies made with real fruit juice, but that is not to say there aren't just as many large factories nearby making huge quantities of artificial flavoring for the cheaper mass-produced candies at the local grocery.

I don't think I am a super taster. I like green vegetables and while they don't always have the most desirable texture (especially when coked), I do not taste any strong flavors in most of them. That is one reason I like them. I do not like strong flavors most of the time. I also like fatty meats when I have an apetite for fats--it has nothing to do with the taste. To me, fats do not have much taste at all. They taste more bland to me than most purified waters, I'm not kidding. I was surprised to find that some people actually like the taste of fats. "What taste?" was my reaction.

I don't think I am a non-taster. I taste many things and can distinguish differences between many differen tastes, even small differences sometimes, though my sense of taste isn't what I would call strong compared to other animals. My sense of taste isn't a lot more sensitive than my sense of smell.

I find the texture of detergents to be particularly distasteful, both literally and figuratively, in that not only do detergents reduce my ability to taste, they also have a texture-reducing effect that I particularly dislike. On top of that, they have a bit of their own flavor which I find thoroughly disgusting even though I can barely detect it. I have recently become able to notice the presence of detergents in several foods that I used to eat without problem, and I seem to be unique in my ability to detect these detergents. I know they are there, for in the greatest of concentrations the rainbow-colored persisting bubbles can clearly be seen, and suds can easily be generated by stirring the food. Careful cleaning of the dishes and handling of the ingredients, along with careful temperature controls has on numerous occasions demonstrated that there are chemical processes within the foods that cause the detergents to be created during the cooking process, primarily at high temperatures close to boiling and with large amounts of starches and relatively low amounts of water. It is most prevalent in home-cooking, or perhaps the seasonings in professional cooking mask its presence to me.

In any case, I know my tastes are unique in some ways, but I find it surprising that it is somehow established as fact that a person cannot taste anything they can't smell, when my own tastes are almost completely unaffected by my ability to smell. It's not as if tastes and smells are much different to me; on the contrary, while I sense them with different receptors, they evoke strikingly similar responses. Smelling a lot of things is like tasting the air with my nose. Often I know what something will taste like without ever tasting it because I have smelled it (that doesn't stop me from putting it on my tongue, though).

So I'm pretty sure I'm a "normal taster", though that is barely scratching the surface when it comes to outlining the ways my tastes are similar to or different from other humans.

I did it in a double-blind, peer-reviwed study that I didn't publish, but only once. I used 5 substances that were all approximately the same color and texture (was fresh-cooked pumpkin, canned pumpkin, fresh-cooked sweet potato, canned yam, and baby food yam IIRC) and I was blindfolded and had my nose covered. My brother administered the test to me with containers I had labeled in a way he wouldn't be able to read. I must admit that the textures did give them away slightly, but the tastes were very distinct. I could taste that ever so common aluminum oxide from the canned ones, the pumpkin had a flavor like summer squash and was less sweet than the sweet potato or canned yam (which I have a hunch were actually sweet potatoes). The canned sweet potatoes had molasses in them, but we had not added it to the freshly cooked. The baby food had some ingredients that Gerber adds to all baby food products-I don't know what it is but I can taste it. I'm guessing it's a preservative because it is reminiscent of what's in jams and preserves that isn't in the fresh fruit. Maybe it's pectin--in higher concentrations than is naturally-occuring.

Anyway, I could taste all that stuff clearly while blindfolded and with my nose plugged. The aluminum oxide is perhaps the strongest of the distinctions. I don't mind the taste much, but it does beg the question why everone is so okay with galvanized aluminum cans for food storage. Am I the only person who realizes that acidic foods take the oxide off and we end up eating it? Isn't that stuff poisonous?

I taste more than just salty, sweet, sour, and bitter that's for certain. Those are the most prominent tastes, and all others could perhaps be considered a variant of these, but they are still unique in themselves regardless of texture, color, and smell. I can taste probably at least nearly a hundred unique and distinct tastes.

Me thinks you need to submit your tongue to the closet top University for study. Your abilities may be the key to helping people that can not eat many foods due to a myriad of reasons.


Fake Edit: Part of me is not kidding lol