The Importance Of Bitterness
It's one of the five basic tastes, along with salty, sweet, sour and umami. It's also the least popular and the most mysterious. "That tastes bitter" is not usually a compliment, and yet scientists are increasingly concerned that by banishing bitter from our diets, we're affecting our health in ways we don't fully understand. In this episode, we get to know bitter a little better, finding good reasons and new ways to appreciate its complex charms.
The prevailing evolutionary explanation for the ability to taste bitter is that it is a warning signal for toxins—a prompt to our foraging ancestors to spit out the offending leaf or fruit immediately. But, as it turns out, bitter-tasting compounds not only add a delicious complexity to some of our favorite foods and drinks—chocolate, coffee, and beer, to name just a few—but are often quite good for us.
And yet, while our chocolate and beer have become more bitter in recent years (consider the rise of aggressively hoppy IPAs and sharp, rich 80 percent dark chocolate bars), our fruit and vegetables have taken a dramatic dive in the opposite direction. Plant breeders have responded to humanity's innate love of sugar by developing ever sweeter versions of our favorite produce. Traditional Brussels sprouts, for example, have increasingly been replaced by modern, "super-sweet" varieties. White grapefruit are significantly more bitter than the sweeter pink and red ones, but white grapefruit have nearly vanished from supermarket shelves. The chemicals being bred out of our produce, however, might be some of the most healthful ones of all.
Bitter fruits and vegetables already make up less than five percent of the average American's daily diet. Now, as our produce becomes sweeter, bitter-tasting foods have become almost an endangered species. In this episode of Gastropod, we speak with researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center to explore the unexpected side-effects of reducing bitter, looking beyond flavor to explore the latest research into the role that bitter plays in our immune system, digestion, and perhaps even fertility. We also attempt to unravel some of the mysteries of bitter taste perception, traveling to Africa with evolutionary biologist Sarah Tishkoff to learn why some of us have evolved to tolerate it better than others.
And we speak with Jennifer McLagan, author of the new cookbook Bitter: The World's Most Dangerous Flavor, who shares some of the long and fascinating history of the use of bitter foods, as well her top tips to help us learn to love it again. Encouraged by McLagan, Gastropod co-hosts Cynthia and Nicky experiment with cooking the most bitter vegetable of all—and even end up (kind of) enjoying it. Listen in to learn bitter's secrets, and then reintroduce your palate to this most sophisticated and powerful of tastes.
