SpiceLines

This organic Altura coffee from Veracruz is bright and acidic, with hints of caramel
or burned sugar, almonds and possibly molasses.

“They sniffed and slurped. Then came the tricky part: finding the mot juste to describe the flavors….’I tasted nuts and bark in the Guatemalan,’ said Katsu Tanaka…’And basil and jasmine in the Sumatra.’ A hush fell over the room; perhaps the others were intimidated by Mr. Tanaka’s sophisticated palate.”

--From “Do I Detect a Hint of… Joe?” Hannah Wallace, The New York Times, May 29, 2006, p. E6

It’s an experience we’ve all had. If not with coffee, then with chocolate or olive oil. Certainly with wine.

Someone with an insufferably sensitive palate tastes leather, green bananas, and other quirky ingredients while I’m stumbling around, trying to articulate something a little more specific than, “Umm, this dark chocolate tastes really good.”

Soon scientists--and chefs--may be able to manipulate the flavor of asparagus,
blocking its natural sulphur compounds, so that it tastes even sweeter. But will
we like it?

“It takes more than the passage of time for new theories to thrive. The old structures have to be toppling around us.” From “Impolitic Thoughts,” Letters from The Global Province, June 25, 2008.

Since everything else is crumbling—the old politics, the old economy, old science and medicine—it figures that everything we thought we knew about taste and flavor is just “wrong, wrong, wrong.” In “The Corrections” (Gourmet, July 2008, pp. 46-48), Bruce Feiler writes: “Staggering breakthroughs in scientific research, many accelerated by the decoding of the human genome in 2003, have completely rewritten our understanding of taste.”