Read Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good for Free Online

bitter things that they cannot taste. I prefer to use different terminology to describe the difference in human taste perception.
    The Distribution of Taster Types
    The area under the curve contains the entire human population. Tolerant Tasters make up about 25 percent of the population. Tasters make up the majority, and HyperTasters make up about 25 percent.

Taster Types
    I call the groupings of tasters HyperTasters (in lieu of Supertasters), Tasters , and Tolerant Tasters (in lieu of Nontasters). HyperTasters are on the far right end of Bartoshuk’s bell curve because they have the highest number of taste buds. They are like really ticklish kids. You can excite their buds without much stimulation, the same way you can make a supersensitive kid start giggling hysterically before you even touch her, much less tickle her. These people are very sensitive to the tastes on their tongue. A small amount of something will tickle their taste buds powerfully. They usually have very strong likes and dislikes because they taste so much intensity, things can often be overwhelming, in both good and bad ways. They are often focused, maniacally, on food. Others, ostensibly those at the sensitive end of the Hyper-Taster grouping, may eat a bland diet, having been burned too many times by the strong bitter or sour tastes they’ve experienced. Roger says this is why he eats mostly “safe” foods.
    The opposite of HyperTasters are Tolerant Tasters, who are at the other end of the spectrum. These Tolerant Tasters may barely notice the taste of a food at all. They’re usually tolerant of a broad range of flavors and foods. Tolerant Tasters are at the far left end of the distribution curve with the smallest number of taste buds. They don’t sense a lot of strong tastes, so they don’t usually have a lot of strong dislikes. They may drink their coffee black because they don’t taste black coffee as bitter. They may choose intense, bitter red wines because to them, these wines don’t taste so intensely bitter. They’re much less likely to be obsessed with food than people like me. Tolerant Tasters are the most fun to cook for—they complain the least.
    Linda Bartoshuk herself falls into my Tolerant Taster grouping. She describes herself as “an extremely insensitive nontaster,” as I probably would have guessed after eating two meals with her, had she not told me. She’s picky, but this is driven almost entirely by her food allergies. She needs to avoid all dairy products, eggs, and gluten, which, she says, “Really kills breakfast.” Then she reminds herself, thankfully, “I can eat hash browns and bacon!”
    If anyone ever tries to tell you that you don’t have a palate that’s discriminating enough to know much about taste, you can always tell them that one of the (if not the ) world’s leading taste experts is a Tolerant Taster. You don’t have to be a HyperTaster to be an expert on taste.
    Tasters make up the largest percentage of all tasters. They fall in the centerof Bartoshuk’s distribution. Keep in mind that, although the majority of the population (40 to 50 percent) falls into this category, Tasters can run the gamut. People who are Tasters can have almost no taste buds on their tongue, meaning that they don’t experience much intensity (these Tasters border on being Tolerant Tasters). But other Tasters can have almost as many taste buds as Hyper-Tasters, so they, too, can be excessively sensitive. It just depends where Tasters fall within their grouping: in other words, where they fall within the largest, middle group of tasters.
    I have often met a married couple or a pair of siblings, one of whom would eat just about anything while the other one had a laundry list of things he or she wouldn’t eat. We might assume that the ones with the limited diets are not very “good” at tasting or that they are less open-minded than people with a larger repertoire of food. Both of these assumptions are far from