Good reads: A Man of Taste

I read this article the other night. The first person it reminded me of was Rob, since he lives nearby Lincoln Park, but I thought I’d share it with all of you because I found it incredibly fascinating.

It’s a profile of a hot (in the ‘up and coming’ way, although he is handsome), young chef named Grant Achatz in Chicago who had tongue cancer. His cancer went undiagnosed for a long time, and then finally got to Stage IV before a doctor realized what it was. The diagnosis was to amputate 2/3 of his tongue, which Achatz rejected. Finally he found another treatment: Someone was willing to do radiation to kill the cancer, but of course, along with it, killed his taste buds.

The most interesting part, I thought, was the story of how he lost his taste, and is currently regaining it. You don’t just wake up one day and taste nothing. Taste buds die off bit by bit — and actually, taste by taste. As he’s gaining them back one by one, he’s learning how tastes combine to make a dish.

Another interesting point was that sweet was the first taste to come back (and, I believe, the last one to die). I was discussing this with my friend Kurt, who pointed out that rotting things oftentimes smell sweet, so we can guess they might taste sweet too. Perhaps this is a hard-coded survival tactic? Even if you lost most of your sense of taste, you would be able to sense if something is toxic?

Anyway, I found the article online if you want to read it:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_max

Read the whole thing if you’ve got the time, but I’ve also picked out some excerpts here. They help illustrate the parts about the sense of taste that I found so interesting:

It is only in the past decade that the redoubtable “map of the tongue” has begun to fall out of circulation…In fact, all the regions of the tongue are capable of recognizing sweet, salty, bitter, and sour flavors, as well as savory tastes, which had been left off the original map altogether. There is now speculation that there are receptors on the tongue’s surface for other kinds of tastes. “There may be one for the metallic taste, the water taste, and the fat taste, and there may be other tastes as well,” Leslie Stein, another researcher at Monell, told me.

According to Paul Breslin, a Monell researcher who studies the effect of radiation therapy on taste, people who cannot taste at all often have to be coaxed or fed by tube, because they lose their desire for nutrition. As Breslin and a co-author note in a chapter for a recent textbook, “Taste is arguably the only external sensory system required for life.”

There are some other pretty good quotes in there, but I’ll let you find them.