Child weighed in. âBroccoli has to be peeled.â At a state dinner, Bush was overheard jokingly complaining about the ruckus to the Polish prime minister. âThe broccoli growers of America are up in arms against me,â he said. âJust as Poland had a rebellion against totalitarianism, I am rebelling against broccoli.â
Pressed for an explanation at a press conference, Bush made a now famous denunciation: âI do not like broccoli, and I havenât liked it since I was a little kid and my mother mademe eat it. And Iâm president of the United States, and Iâm not going to eat any more broccoli!
âThere are truckloads of broccoli at this very minute descending on Washington. My family is divided. For the broccoli vote out there: Barbara loves broccoli. She has tried to make me eat it. She eats it all the time herself.â
âCauliflower? Lima beans? Brussels sprouts?â shouted members of the press corps. Bush gave another thumbs-down to brussels sprouts.
George W. Bush shared his fatherâs distaste. On his first trip abroad as president in 2001, he visited his Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox, a broccoli farmer. When his motorcade arrived at Foxâs ranch in the low rolling hills of Guanajuato state, Bush got out and found himself standing against the backdrop of a vast field of broccoli stalks. The tangy scent of the cruciferous vegetable enveloped everything. Reporters asked him to comment. He hesitated for a second, then flashed a thumbs-down. âMake it cauliflower,â he said.
Barbara Bush liked broccoli; her husband and son did not. Such stark differences are a basic feature of the sense of taste. Taste perceptions are genetic, programmed by DNA, traits passed down over millions of years that boosted the odds of survival in our evolutionary past. While both environment and life experience play a role in taste and flavor, the variety in human DNA is one of the main reasons why, like snowflakes, no two flavor senses are the same.
The great range in human taste perception makes it unique among the senses. The sensitivities of vision, hearing, touch, and smell vary only modestly from person to person. To survive, after all, our ancestors needed to live in more or less the same sensory world. Fragile, warm-blooded bodies function only within certain thresholds of heat and cold, sohumans have similar tolerances for those. The rods and cones of our retinas tend to detect the same color wavelengths and play of light and shadow. The cochlea, the snail-shell-shaped organ in the inner ear, picks up common levels of noise and a range of pitch. And the olfactory epithelium in our noses discerns a similar array of incoming smells.
But the sense of taste is a sentinel, chemically testing everything that enters the mouth, so it has been molded by everything our ancestors ate and drank over the eons. It never occupied a single sensory world, but many. This is especially true of the taste we call bitter.
Bitterness originated as a biological warning system to keep toxins out of the body. Jellyfish, fruit flies, and even bacteria can sense bitter compounds, indicating this basic aversion can be traced back to the dawn of multicellular life. Sea anemones, for instance, which first appeared 500 million years ago, can sense and vomit up bitter substances that enter their digestive tracts. More recently, this taste has evolved in animals in tandem with plants, which produce most of the worldâs bitter substances. Plants developed toxic defenses to kill infectious microbes and to protect themselves from being eaten. There are many thousands of plants, and bitter compounds are seemingly uncountable. Our taste for bitterness is a product of this diversityâand of the boldness of our ancestors, who, after departing Africa a hundred thousand years ago, lived in and sampled the plant life of every habitat on earth.
A bitter substance on the tongue triggers an electrochemical
Pressed for an explanation at a press conference, Bush made a now famous denunciation: âI do not like broccoli, and I havenât liked it since I was a little kid and my mother mademe eat it. And Iâm president of the United States, and Iâm not going to eat any more broccoli!
âThere are truckloads of broccoli at this very minute descending on Washington. My family is divided. For the broccoli vote out there: Barbara loves broccoli. She has tried to make me eat it. She eats it all the time herself.â
âCauliflower? Lima beans? Brussels sprouts?â shouted members of the press corps. Bush gave another thumbs-down to brussels sprouts.
George W. Bush shared his fatherâs distaste. On his first trip abroad as president in 2001, he visited his Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox, a broccoli farmer. When his motorcade arrived at Foxâs ranch in the low rolling hills of Guanajuato state, Bush got out and found himself standing against the backdrop of a vast field of broccoli stalks. The tangy scent of the cruciferous vegetable enveloped everything. Reporters asked him to comment. He hesitated for a second, then flashed a thumbs-down. âMake it cauliflower,â he said.
Barbara Bush liked broccoli; her husband and son did not. Such stark differences are a basic feature of the sense of taste. Taste perceptions are genetic, programmed by DNA, traits passed down over millions of years that boosted the odds of survival in our evolutionary past. While both environment and life experience play a role in taste and flavor, the variety in human DNA is one of the main reasons why, like snowflakes, no two flavor senses are the same.
The great range in human taste perception makes it unique among the senses. The sensitivities of vision, hearing, touch, and smell vary only modestly from person to person. To survive, after all, our ancestors needed to live in more or less the same sensory world. Fragile, warm-blooded bodies function only within certain thresholds of heat and cold, sohumans have similar tolerances for those. The rods and cones of our retinas tend to detect the same color wavelengths and play of light and shadow. The cochlea, the snail-shell-shaped organ in the inner ear, picks up common levels of noise and a range of pitch. And the olfactory epithelium in our noses discerns a similar array of incoming smells.
But the sense of taste is a sentinel, chemically testing everything that enters the mouth, so it has been molded by everything our ancestors ate and drank over the eons. It never occupied a single sensory world, but many. This is especially true of the taste we call bitter.
Bitterness originated as a biological warning system to keep toxins out of the body. Jellyfish, fruit flies, and even bacteria can sense bitter compounds, indicating this basic aversion can be traced back to the dawn of multicellular life. Sea anemones, for instance, which first appeared 500 million years ago, can sense and vomit up bitter substances that enter their digestive tracts. More recently, this taste has evolved in animals in tandem with plants, which produce most of the worldâs bitter substances. Plants developed toxic defenses to kill infectious microbes and to protect themselves from being eaten. There are many thousands of plants, and bitter compounds are seemingly uncountable. Our taste for bitterness is a product of this diversityâand of the boldness of our ancestors, who, after departing Africa a hundred thousand years ago, lived in and sampled the plant life of every habitat on earth.
A bitter substance on the tongue triggers an electrochemical
Similar Books
