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

childhood ear problems gifted him with a love of foie gras, burgers, cheese, and ice cream.
    Accidents, especially head injuries, can also result in loss of some taste (and smell) function. For this reason, if you value your sense of taste, always buckle your seat belt; wear a helmet when you bike, ski, or skate; and forgo head-banging sports like American football and boxing.
    Wisdom tooth extraction, a common surgery, occurs precariously close to the chorda tympani taste nerve. If wisdom tooth extraction surgery goes wrong, it can damage taste irreparably, even though that may not be the dentist’s fault.
    Another perpetrator of crime against taste buds is disease. Parkinson’s disease, for example, may result in the loss of the sense of smell. And decreased ability to smell is one of the harbingers of Alzheimer’s disease. If you have any of these conditions, you may not be able to taste certain things even if you have a heavy concentration of taste buds on your tongue. In other words, being an anatomical HyperTaster doesn’t mean you can taste more than Tasters or Tolerant Tasters. It’s not so black and white.
    Surgery and dental work might explain the bald spots on my tongue. When I was a child, I had a benign cyst on the underside of my tongue. It was removed during outpatient surgery and I rarely think much about it, except when it’s about to rain. One of the strange results of this surgery is that I can detect changes in barometric pressure with my tongue. When the clouds are about to burst, my tongue starts to throb—my own, internal barometric pressure gauge.
    One of the other results of my surgery, Bartoshuk and her colleagues think, was damage to the taste buds on my tongue. The location and existence of my bald spots seem to indicate damage to my trigeminal nerve, the nerve that carries pain information from my mouth to my brain. The phenomenon I mentioned earlier, the release of inhibition, means that when this nerve was injured, its ties to the taste buds in a certain area of my tongue were clipped. These abandoned buds eventually withered and faded away, leaving behind bald spots. This allowed other areas on my tongue the freedom to scream a little bit louder, without inhibition.
    Roger’s tongue showed some damage too, probably due to oral surgery he had to remove his uvula to widen his airway. His uvula surgery did two things that directly benefit me. First, it relieved his most bed-shaking snoring. Second, it resulted in the loss of some of his taste buds, thereby giving him a bit of humility when it comes to our taste rivalry.
    It turns out that Roger and I are both HyperTasters, as proclaimed by Bartoshuk’s graduate student Jennifer Stamps after eight hours of thorough evaluation of our tongues. Was she sure about me, I asked, given my bald spots?
    She responded, “Your intensity rating to the PROP test paper was definitely a HyperTaster rating: a 90. I know you have trigeminal damage because when the nerve endings degenerate, they take out the taste buds they once surrounded and leave behind holes and bare spots. Your ratings for taste on the tip of your tongue may be lower than before your loss of taste buds but they were decent for the ones you have left, which indicates your chorda tympani taste nerve is working fine.”
    Whew. This was a great, huge, relief. Thankfully , I thought to myself, I have absolutely nothing to hide with regard to my professional fitness. Roger and I flew back to California together, radiating relief from having been anointed HyperTasters.
    It wasn’t until about a week later, after a glass of wine or four, that Roger again brought up the trip to Florida. Perhaps I deserved it, having doubted his tasting ability in some capacity. Or perhaps it was just his competitive side flaring up again. Regardless, he mischievously hinted at a truth he was concealing for my own benefit.
    “Are you sure you want to know?” he asked me of this mysterious fact he