WILTIMS #127: Om nom nom!

TIL: Apparently part of Pixar's Ratatouille is more lifelike than I had originally believed. Supposedly rat colonies actually have "taster rats" that have extra-sensitive taste receptors to detect poison. If the taster rat hesitates or gets sick, the rest of the colony will avoid the food stash. I love this anecdote and it did come from an expert on taste, but I can't find any reputable source on the internet, so take it with a grain of salt. See what I did there?

When you eat something spicy, you tear-up in an effort to dilute the food in your stomach. As you may remember from Anatomy, tears are produced in glands in the upper outside corner of each eye and drain in a canal by the nose into the nasal cavity. If you sniff rather than blow your nose, the tears will flow back down your throat into your stomach. Along with increased salivation and mucous secretion this dilutes the spicy food, lessening any damage to the rest of the digestive tract.

Babies can taste what the mother eats in her milk and have been shown to prefer those foods later in life. But babies also have more taste receptors than adults, so it is nice to scale down the extreme tastes or the baby may have trouble breastfeeding. Perhaps when nursing, go for a spiciness of 2 for your Thai curry instead of the sinus-clearing 4.

How to eat chocolate (I learned it in a med school lecture, so it's legit):

1. Make sure it's dark.
2. Make sure it is brittle.
3. Appreciate the smell.
4. Enjoy the feel in your mouth
5. Enjoy the tastes and flavor.

Taste and flavor are not the same thing. A taste is one of the five qualities discerned through our sense of gustation (...taste). Flavor is the complex integration of taste, smell and memory that your brain associates with the ingestion of a food or drink.

A middle ear infection can cause a temporary loss of taste because some of the taste information from the tongue shares a cranial nerve with the middle ear en route to the brain.