A while back I went to something called “Sensory Training for the Betty Crocker Kitchens.” I had no idea what to expect.
What I found was a room filled with several long tables. At each “place setting” (for lack of a better word), there were numerous little plastic cups and glass bottles. Some of the cups had labels identifying what they were: “Sweet,” “Sour,” “Salty,” “Bitter,” Umami.”* The rest were labeled with a three-digit number.
First we tasted the contents of each of the labeled cups. Despite the fact that I knew what each one was, most of the tastes didn’t register. The only one that really hit the mark for me was salty. Then we tasted the liquid in the numbered cups and were asked to identify the same five flavors without knowing what they were. As you might imagine, I was not very good at this. (I did get salty.)
After that, we moved on to the numbered glass bottles with cotton balls inside. Turns out, my nose is much more reliable than my taste buds. I correctly guessed four of the five aromas. I got anise/licorice, almond, butter and spearmint, but missed grape. A bell went off when someone said the word “Dimetapp.”
The next little “experiment” absolutely blew me away. You’ve got to try this.
Holding our noses shut with our fingers, we all popped what was very obviously a Starburst candy in our mouth. Judging by the color, it was cherry or strawberry. Weird thing was, with my nose pinched shut, I tasted nothing at all. Seriously. Nothing. At. All. But the moment I allowed myself to smell, the flavor hit me all at once: Strawberry. We did the same with a lemon-mint cough drop. I was able to detect the coolness of menthol, but not the lemon. At this point in the training I decided I was either born with defective taste buds or mine were seriously broken.
We went on to learn how to describe different levels of crispness by tasting three different kinds of cornflakes, and better words to describe food by tasting different salsas. (“Good” and “eww” were not among them.)
While the training did wonders to improve my vocabulary (and explained why I salt everything), it left me questioning even how it is that I have a job here.
*This needs a whole post of its own to explain.