Out of Pod Experience

or whatever you call someone who studies taste.

So a supertaster is one of three basic types of people (as I understand it), defined by three distinct bell curves or peaks in the number of fungiform papillae on the tongue across any given population distribution of humans. People with a large number of these are said to be supertasters. The middle group are normal tasters and are the most common, and the lower group are called the non-tasters.

There are many more factors that go into taste than just this one, but it is an interesting one that has a variety of effects. I don't fit the description of any of the three basic taste groups, and if anything I'm probably closest to the middle group, at least going by taste preference, given what I've read about them. But my taste preferences are rather unique anyway, and I have known this most of my life.

So I want to share with you what taste is like to me, and I'm hoping some of you will be able to tell me if I'm likely to be a supertaster, normal taster, or nontaster (unlikely):

I enjoy eating almost anything that is food-like. The common foods and food additives I most dislike are spicy peppers, vinegar, and alcohols. I like many green vegetables including several of which seem to have a bad flavor to me; they have other properties I like. I'm mostly indifferent to legumes: I find them rather bland and not particularly desirable--on the other hand many bland foods are favorites of mine.

I like to eat foods with gentle flavors. I dislike foods with too much seasoning. Spicy foods just make my mouth hurt. I also like to pick apart my meals and eat each type of thing separately, for instance when eating a stir-fry, I may pick out only green beans for a while, then only zucchini for a while, then go to only picking out the beef, etc. Other times I eat it all mixed together, and I kind of trade off on this cycle of eating.

Fats don't have flavor to me. I can taste the flavor of meats they have come into contact with, but the fat itself has pretty much no flavor. I have been told most people find fats to have a good flavor. Is this really true?

I like sweets and things that taste sweet, especially when I am craving high-energy foods. My food choices are generally driven by a sense for what I need nutritionally, regardless of the taste. I'll hungrily gobble up things that taste bad if they seem to fill a nutritional vacuum. I enjoy tasting certain things just because of their flavor, but I don't like to eat very much of them most of the time. Some of these are licorice or anise (they taste the same to me), cinnamon, whatever they use for artificial wintergreen (tastes absolutely nothing like wintergreen to me), and more recently, ginger. I like these best in candies or teas, and mixed with sugar.

I'm not a fan of bacon or most other pork products. I don't like salt-cured meats and I prefer beef or chicken over pork. I don't like black pepper, peppercorns, carroway, or pretty much anything else they use to season pastrami. I'm not opposed to eating pastrami, but I would much prefer a plain slice of cooked pork.

I love seafoods. Seafood in general just has a very wide array of options to choose from. I like to eat something new every day. The stranger or more alien a food is, the more eager I am to try it. I like to sample the giblets bag from the thanksgiving turkey, and I find it more interesting and appetizing than the rest of the turkey. I never understood why people keep the most boring part of an animal and throw out so many other exciting things. I like liver sometimes, and often it feels to me that it has a very positive nutritional impact. A good substitute for liver is peanut butter. I think hearts and kidneys are delicious, both in taste and texture.

Squid and octopus I find have one of the most wonderful rubbery textures. I like to eat rubbery foods. I like gummy candies and other chewy candies. When I chew gum, I most like a firm gum that I can really bite into. Swedish fish and jujubes are too firm for my tastes, but I'll often eat them anyway because they taunt me and I enjoy defeating them. When I was young, I would chew on rubber bands. I got tired of the aftertaste of rubber, and that is the only reason I stopped. The normal taste of that specific rubber is rather nice. Sometimes I feel like eating rubber bands.

I like most dairy products. All my life I have liked tender and light-flavored cheeses. In more recent years, I am developing a taste for stronger, sharper cheeses. I am leaving the mozzerella behind and going for sharp cheddar or romano. But swiss has always been my favorite. I like yogurts. Fruit on the bottom style cups are the most fun because I can eat the yogurt and fruit separately. I never mix them together. I used to love ice cream. Nowadays something else in my diet seems to be filling my cravings for it, but it's still delicious and I'm more than willing to eat it now and then.

I love cold foods. I like mints in general, partly because they make my mouth feel cold and partly because they just taste neat. As I said before, artificial wintergreen is my favorite. I also like peppermint, but I dislike spearmint. Real wintergreen is nice, too. It's kind of like peppermint to me. Neither one has much flavor to me, both are just a strong mintiness--sort of an opposite to spiciness. I can't handle strong spicy peppers but I've never met anyone who could take mint like I can, and I've never met a mint I didn't easily endure. I once bought several discounted Altoid tins, and ate them over the course of a few days. I won a couple of bets over those.

The spicy component of peppers doesn't provide a flavor to me. It only yields pain to my tongue. I can't enjoy peppers like most people because of this. Some peppers have other interesting flavors, however. I like the taste of chili pepper, and I find that paprika is a much milder way to get a similar taste.

I brought up super taster in your last thread, here, so I will stick to my guns and say there is a good chance you are a super taster

EDIT: The pinching the nose thing never worked much for me to be honest, but to be honest there were not many things that I needed to plug my nose to stomach; I like lots of food stuffs. But, what about those things like hard candy, ice cream, popcicles.....which typically have little to no smell what so ever, yet have very potent and distinguishable flavors. Me thinks the science on noseolog/tasteology needs some heavy funding lol

EDIT 2: I do not have the time to get into the description of my tastes like you did but I will say that at a very early age I ate all my food separately. Then my dad explained to me that mixing the foods together brought out different flavors because different foods complemented each other. SO to this day I do both depending on the foods. Some I find do have different flavors when eaten with either foods, but I have decided that certain foods I do not want to taste any other way then what they taste like on their own. Others I prefer to eat with their primary complimented food/s. That being said I have not really thought about how I eat stuff too much. I just decide as I eat and sometimes food stuffs are mixed and eaten separately in the same meal.