This came up in a post I made last month too but it seems like there’s a “celery gene” just like there’s a “cilantro gene” and nobody knew it until very recently. Celery for most people (including me) tastes and smells deliciously cool and fresh, like a cucumber. For other people it apparently tastes and smells like pure ass, like rancid smelly vegetable fart poison.
Let me be unhinged for one moment because I’ve been sitting on this for years. I’m a dr of molecular genetics and I dare not utter this heresy at work lest I be torn asunder and subjected to The Horrors (mildly disapproving look from my boss’s boss at lab meeting).
I love cilantro (or coriander, since I’m Scottish and we don’t say cilantro) but sometimes it tastes like the gift of the gods and other times it tastes like soap. And I know the distinction is meant to be binary: you have the SNP that makes it taste one way or the other. But I contest that it’s not a human thing, it’s a coriander thing. I think it’s a cross-species gene x gene interaction whereby some coriander plants have the allele that makes them taste a bit funky and some humans have an allele that makes it taste a bit funky BUT ONLY if they’re eating a coriander plant that also has the corresponding funky allele.
You need both is what I’m saying. Which is why sometimes coriander tastes fine and other times it tastes awful. If it was a purely human thing then more than just coriander would taste bad, there isn’t a specific coriander taste receptor, it’s multi-purpose so a whole range of things would taste like soap. Both you and the corriander you’re monching on needs to have the variant (whatever it may be) to produce the bad taste.
I rest my case.
I could probably just search this up in pubmed but I refuse. Every scientist needs one unhinged pet theory they’ll go off about at a moment’s notice.
No this sounds highly believable, especially if most of the *commercial* cilantro is coming from only a couple sources all descended from a particular cultivar!
ok.
@spacecowboy116
veggie science man! say veggie science things!
I never did much taste testing ,besides eating my own experiment rejects, but from what I remember a big part of taste in plants is secondary metabolites and other such things. For example, high levels of phenolics and flavonoids make a plant taste bitter. In corianders case it has a higher level of specific Aldehydes in it which makes it taste like soap to some people because it’s the same aldehydes that are in soap. So it could be that some species have more of the aldehydes present in the plant which is why they taste bad and then others have a lesser amount which is why they taste fine. I agree you’d need both a plant high in aldehydes and the taste gene to really notice it though as I’m guessing the gene just makes you more sensitive to the taste of the aldehydes
