Taste

The first time that I thinned out my baby Rainbow Chard seedlings this spring, I rinsed off the micro-greens and sprinkled them on my salad along with sprouts from the Arugula and Pak Choi patches. After a couple bites, I started wondering why my salad tasted like beets. My parents used to force me eat beets from their garden when I was growing up, and I never liked them. I’ve only rarely had them since, but the flavor is quite distinct (I’ve even been nervous about eating radishes because they kind of look like beets). I quickly figured out that the flavor in my salad was coming from the Chard. I’d never tasted Chard before and didn’t know much about it other than people saying that it is delicious and I should plant it in my garden. I don’t think I knew at that time that it was related. Sometime after that salad, I looked up Swiss Chard on Wiki to see if it is in the same family as beets. It turns out that not only is Chard related to common Beets, it is the same species! Not just the same species, but even the same subspecies! It is just bred for vigorous leaf growth rather than for a big root.

Fast-forward to this past weekend when Jaime and I were talking to a couple friends about vegetables and Chard came up. I mentioned something about tasting like beets, and I was shocked to find out that our friends didn’t think that it tasted like beets(though one of their grandmothers thought it did). I just assumed everybody thought it tasted like beets. The next day, Jaime and I had my parents over to the house for a dinner. Since Jaime has discovered that she doesn’t like Chard, and I’m not sure that I do either, we decided to cook a bunch of the chard so we could get rid of it. It also happens to be prime Chard season. I felt certain that my parents would really like the Chard since they like beets. I just sautéed it with some butter and salt. Somehow, they didn’t think it tasted like beets at all! My Mom thought it tasted like Spinach. Spinach?!?

After thinking about it, I was starting to doubt myself just a little bit. Perhaps my palette is just not refined enough. Yesterday I had some of the leftover Chard for lunch. Totally beets! This is not a subtle thing. It was like somebody smacked me across the mouth with a Beet. Absolutely no mistaking it. The only explanation I can come up with is that there is a specific chemical in beet plants (and therefore Chard also) that I can detect while some other people can’t. I’m not the only one, either. A quick internet search seems to show that some people think Chard tastes like beets, and some people think it tastes like a regular leafy green like Spinach. There also seems to be a pretty polarized community online about liking or hating Beets.

There is another “edible” plant that produces even more polarizing opinions amongst foodies. Cilantro has been in the news a lot lately because of its growing popularity, and with it an increasingly vocal anti-Cilantro crowd. Jaime and I fall into the group of people who feel that Cilantro tastes bitter and a kind of like dirty socks or soap (or plastic covered in dish soap in my case). Sure, I get a bit of the citrusy-herby flavor that people rave about, but its overwhelmed by the bitter soapy flavor. A small amount of it easily infects large quantities of otherwise tasty foods. There have been several articles recently suggesting that there is a genetic component to the Cilantro taste debate. The only real experiment I’ve read about relating to this was a pretty flimsy sounding twin-study, but the theoretical idea behind it seems entirely reasonable. In fact, there has been some hard science showing that there are some chemicals that some people can taste while other people cannot. This is also related to the idea of supertasters. I really wonder if Jaime and I are just able to taste a compound in the Chard that some people can't.

I’d be very interested to see a study that asks people who don’t like Cilantro whether they like Beets or Chard. I suspect a large percentage of those who don’t like Cilantro or Beets won’t like the other two. Isn’t there some federal stimulus money laying around that hasn’t been used yet? I may have to start an informal survey of my own.