Sour and bitter tastes
This is proabably the aspect of my taste system over which I have least control of all. You might argue that, with suitable introductions or better-cooked examples as my first encounters with them, I might not dislike some of the categories that I do so vehemently. You cannot say that of sour tastes because there are many different ones, or many different food and drink items that the vast majority of the adult populations of most cultures seem to relish, which I find so utterly repellant that I cannot bear the slightest hint of them on anything I eat or drink.
Has beer got anything in common with tomatoes? I don't know. I am not a chemist, and I don't know what the sour taste elements in other things like “sour cream” are; but I know this:
- they are all called either “sour” or “bitter” in English,
- “sour” and “bitter” are two of the real, basic tastes — detected by the tongue, as opposed to many other so-called flavours, which are really (as the French recognizes) parfums, detected by the olfactory department in the nose
- I find that entire palate area yeeeugh!!!!!!!
How people can find the taste of tomatoes, or beer, pleasant remains (and always will) a mystery to me; how they find “sour cream” or even crème fraîche appealing is even more incomprehensible because they got that way by going rotten.
But then, some people seem to relish food that has gone rotten. Not to mention things that grow on rot (see Fungi).
Sour ... bitter. Theoretically they are different. To me they are all the same area: nasty, extremely sharp tastes. Unpleasant just like eating broken glass or razor blades. Now, I know there are freaks who do that, too; but they are in circuses or side shows.
The impact on my social life of disliking beer — all of which tastes bitter (or sour) to me, whether it's “mild” or “bitter”, “lager” or “stout”; again, they all just taste horrible to me — has obviously been considerable. I share nothing at all with most other men; there was little enough even before that age in one's teens when lads start to go to pubs or to gather to drink beer and fool around; the fact that I didn't like the taste of any beer and even dislike the smell meant that I was never going to start going out wth the lads, and I never have.
So I think I must have a taste system quite different from those of all “normal” people. My tongue, or at least (and more likely) my brain's reaction to the signals it gets from my tongue, must just be different. All those tastes are just unmitigated unpleasantness, and how the vast majority of the world enjoy them is as much a mystery to me as is why some extreme masochists apparently like pain so much (reportedly; I haven't studied that subject at all).
At the age of 57 (as I write this) it would appear unlikely that my extreme dislike for that “palate” could ever change now. I am resigned to the fact that I live in a different taste world from all those people, and possibly from almost everybody else. It isn't even a matter of men growing to like bitter beer as they reach adulthood; apparently many small chidlren like ketchup, other vinegar-based foods and indeed vinegar itself on potato chips etc.; I couldn't understand this when I was young and don't understand it now. How can small children like this ghastly taste? I'll never know.