Tasty (27 page)

 
45
 
Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest
: M. Royhan Gani and Nahid D. S. Gani, “Tectonic hypotheses of human evolution,”
Geotimes
(January 2008),
http://www.geotimes.org/jan08/article.html?id=feature_evolution.html
.

Chapter 3: The Bitter Gene

 
48
 
thumbs-down to brussels sprouts
: David Lauter, “Bush Says It's Broccoli, and He Says . . . With It,”
Los Angeles Times
, March 23, 1990,
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-03-23/news/mn-705_1_barbara-bush
.

 
48
 
“Make it cauliflower,” he said
: “Bush forced to face green nemesis in Mexico,” Reuters, February 16, 2001,
http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/bush-forced-to-face-green-nemesis-in-mexico-1.61185?ot=inmsa.ArticlePrintPageLayout.ot
.

 
49
 
enter their digestive tracts
: Hanah A. Chapman and Adam K. Anderson, “Understanding disgust,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1251 (2012): 62–76, doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06369.x.

 
51
 
making darker roasts more bitter
: Thomas Hofmann, “Identification of the key bitter compounds in our daily diet is a prerequisite for the understanding of the hTAS2R gene polymorphisms affecting food choice,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
1170 (July 2009): 116–25, doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.03914.x.

 
53
 
into his mouth and winced
: Arthur L. Fox, “The relationship between chemical constitution and taste,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
18 (1932): 115–20.

 
54
 
Fox told an interviewer
: J. D. Ratcliff, “It's All a Matter of Taste,”
The Herald of Health
(May 1963): 16–17, 25.

 
55
 
three would be purple, one white
: Mendel University in Brno website,
http://www.mendelu.cz/en/o_univerzite/historie/j_g_mendel
.

 
55
 
in a seminal scientific paper
: Fox, “The relationship between chemical constitution and taste,” 115.

 
55
 
detected other qualities
: Linda M. Bartoshuk, Katharine Fast, and Derek J. Snyder, “Genetic Differences in Human Oral Perception,” in
Genetic Variation in Taste Sensitivity
, eds. John Prescott and Beverly Tepper (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2004), 1.

 
56
 
the men made themselves scarce
: Nathaniel Comfort, “ ‘Polyhybrid heterogeneous bastards': promoting medical genetics in 1930s America,”
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
61, no. 4 (2006): 415–55.

 
56
 
investigators from the University of Toronto
: Norma Ford and Arnold D. Mason, “Taste reactions of the Dionne quintuplets,”
The Journal of Heredity
32, no. 10 (1941): 365–68.

 
57
 
one-way screens
: Dennis Gaffney, “The Story of the Dionne Quintuplets,”
Antiques Roadshow
, March 23, 2009,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/fts/wichita_200803A12.html
.

 
59
 
“the world of neglected dimensions”
: C. W. W. Ostwald,
An Introduction to Theoretical and Applied Colloid Chemistry: The World of Neglected Dimensions
(New York: John Wiley, 1917).

 
60
 
thousands of different substances
: Francisco López-Muñoz and Cecilio Alamo, “Historical evolution of the neurotransmission concept,”
Journal of Neural Transmission
116 (2009): 515–33.

 
60
 
Taste receptors
: Receptors are special proteins that first emerged at least 1.5 billion years ago, long before organisms had mouths or brains, as an ingenious solution to a basic problem: microbes needed to tell what was going on around them—to detect nutrients or light, and to avoid toxins. Then, when multicellular life
emerged a billion years later, receptors evolved further. On the outside, the body confronted the flux of the world. But on the inside, systems for digestion, respiration, and other bodily functions had to communicate within and among themselves and the brain. Each new task pushed the humble receptor in new directions, molding chemical structures that do thousands of different things.

 
60
 
pore-like opening at its tip
: Chandrashekar, Hoon, Ryba, and Zuker, “The receptors and cells for mammalian taste,” 288; Monell Chemical Senses Center website, Monell Taste Primer,
http://www.monell.org/news/fact_sheets/monell_taste_primer
.

 
61
 
They dubbed it T2R1
: Jayaram Chandrashekar, Ken L. Mueller, Mark A. Hoon, Elliot Adler, Luxin Feng, Wei Guo, Charles S. Zuker, and Nicholas J. P. Ryba, “T2Rs function as bitter taste receptors,”
Cell
100 (2000): 703–11.

 
61
 
Arthur Fox's bitter gene
: Dennis Drayna, Hilary Coon, Un-Kyung Kim, Tami Elsner, Kevin Cromer, Brith Otterud, Lisa Baird, Andy P. Peiffer, and Mark Leppert, “Genetic analysis of a complex trait in the Utah Genetic Reference Project: A major locus for PTC taste ability on chromosome 7q and a secondary locus on chromosome 16p,”
Human Genetics
112 (2003): 567–72.

 
62
 
man's closest relative, the chimpanzee
: Stephen Wooding, “Phenyl­thiocarbamide: A 75-year adventure in genetics and natural selection,”
Genetics
172 (2006): 2015–23.

 
62
 
produced identical taste experiences
: Stephen Wooding, Bernd Bufe, Christina Grassi, Michael T. Howard, Anne C. Stone, Maribel Vazquez, Diane M. Dunn, Wolfgang Meyerhof, Robert B. Weiss, and Michael J. Bamshad, “Independent evolution of bitter-taste sensitivity in humans and chimpanzees,”
Nature
440 (2006): 930–34, doi:10.1038/nature04655.

 
63
 
turned out to be a taster
: Carles Lalueza-Fox, Elena Gigli, Marco de la Rasilla, Javier Fortea, and Antonio Rosas, “Bitter taste perception in Neanderthals through the analysis of the TAS2R38 gene,”
Biology Letters
5, no. 6 (2009): 809–11, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.0532.

 
63
 
one hundred thousand years ago
: Qiaomei Fu, Alissa Mittnik, Philip L. F. Johnson, Kirsten Bos, Martina Lari, Ruth Bollongino, Chengkai Sun, Liane Giemsch, Ralf Schmitz, Joachim Burger, Anna Maria Ronchitelli, Fabio Martini, Renata G. Cremonesi, Jiri
Svoboda, Peter Bauer, David Caramelli, Sergi Castellano, David Reich, Svante Paabo, and Johannes Krause, “A revised timescale for human evolution based on ancient mitochondrial genomes,”
Current Biology
23, no. 7 (2013): 553–59, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.02.044; Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin, “Revising the human mutation rate: Implications for understanding human evolution,”
Nature Reviews: Genetics
13, no. 10 (2012): 745–53, doi:10.1038/nrg3295.

 
64
 
started making earth ovens
: Richard Wrangham, “Cooking as a biological trait,”
Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology—Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology
136, no. 1 (2003): 35–46, doi:10.1016/S1095-6433(03)00020-5.

 
64
 
in a single exodus
: Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Noah A. Rosenberg, and Marcus W. Feldman, “Features of evolution and expansion of modern humans, inferred from genomewide microsatellite markers,”
American Journal of Human Genetics
72 (2003): 1171–86.

 
64
 
crossed at Bab el-Mandeb
: Marta Melé, Asif Javed, Marc Pybus, Pierre Zalloua, Marc Haber, David Comas, Mihai G. Netea, Oleg Balanovsky, Elena Balanovska, Li Jin, Yajun Yang, R. M. Pitchappan, G. Arunkumar, Laxmi Parida, Francesc Calafell, Jaume Bertranpetit, and The Genographic Consortium, “Recombination gives a new insight in the effective population size and the history of the Old World human populations,”
Molecular Biology and Evolution
29 (2011): 25–40.

 
66
 
least bitter-sensitive of early American peoples
: Sun-Wei Guo and Danielle R. Reed, “The genetics of phenylthiocarbamide perception,”
Annals of Human Biolog
y 28, no. 2 (2012): 111–42.

 
66
 
90 percent of non-Africans have it
: Nicole Soranzo, Bernd Bufe, Pardis C. Sabeti, James F. Wilson, Michael E. Weale, Richard Marguerie, Wolfgang Meyerhof, and David B. Goldstein, “Positive selection on a high-sensitivity allele of the human bitter-taste receptor TAS2R16,”
Current Biology
15, no. 14 (2005): 1257–65, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2005.06.042. For a more recent study, see Hui Li, Andrew J. Pakstis, Judith R. Kidd, Kenneth K. Kidd, “Selection on the human bitter taste gene, TAS2R16, in Eurasian populations,”
Human Biology
83, no. 3 (2011): 363–77, doi:10.3378/027.083.0303.

 
68
 
neon colors rather than gentle pastels
: Bartoshuk, “The biological basis of food perception and acceptance,” 28–29.

 
70
 
bitter receptors might be in the nose
: Robert J. Lee, Guoxiang Xiong, Jennifer M. Kofonow, Bei Chen, Anna Lysenko, Peihua Jiang, Valsamma Abraham, Laurel Doghramji, Nithin D. Adappa, James N. Palmer, David W. Kennedy, Gary K. Beauchamp, Paschalis-Thomas Doulias, Harry Ischiropoulos, James L. Kreindler, Danielle R. Reed, and Noam A. Cohen, “T2R38 taste receptor polymorphisms underlie susceptibility to upper respiratory infection,”
The Journal of Clinical Investigations
122, no. 11 (2012): 4145–59, doi:10.1172/JCI64240DS1.

 
72
 
where they became toxic
: Timothy Johns and Susan L. Keen, “Taste evaluation of potato glycoalkaloids by the Aymara: A case study in human chemical ecology,”
Human Ecology
14, no. 4 (1986): 437–52.

Chapter 4: Flavor Cultures

 
76
 
illegal in the United States until 2007
: Phil Baker,
The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History
(New York: Grove Press, Kindle Edition, 2007), Kindle location 187–90; Jesse Hicks, “The Devil in a Little Green Bottle: A History of Absinthe,”
Chemical Heritage Magazine
(Fall 2010),
http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/media/magazine/articles/28-3-devil-in-a-little-green-bottle.aspx?page=1
.

 
76
 
trace amounts of thujone
: Dirk W. Lachenmeier, David Nathan-­Maister, Theodore A. Breaux, Eva-Maria Sohnius, Kerstin Schoeberl, and Thomas Kuballa, “Chemical composition of vintage preban absinthe with special reference to thujone, fenchone, pinocamphone, methanol, copper, and antimony concentrations,”
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
56, no. 9 (2008): 3073–81, doi:10.1021/jf703568f.

 
77
 
upper classes a century later
: Harold McGee,
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen
(New York: Scribner, 2004), 759.

 
80
 
kill off other yeasts
: Patrick McGovern,
Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer and Other Alcoholic Beverages
(Berkeley: University of California Press, Kindle Edition, 2009), Kindle location 300.

 
80
 
tens of millions of years old
: P. Veiga-Crespo, M. Poza, M. Prieto-­Alcedo, and T. G. Villa, “Ancient genes of
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
,”
Microbiology
150, pt. 7 (2004): 2221–27, doi:10.1099/mic.0.27000-0.

 
80
 
ubiquity of baker's yeast: wasps
: Irene Stefaninia, Leonardo Dapporto, Jean-Luc Legras, Antonio Calabretta, Monica Di Paola,
Carlotta De Filippo, Roberto Viola, Paolo Capretti, Mario Polsinelli, Stefano Turillazzi, and Duccio Cavalieri, “Role of social wasps in
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
ecology and evolution,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
109, no. 33 (2012): 13398–403, doi:10.1073/pnas.1208362109/-/DCSupplemental.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1208362109
.

 
81
 
tracked these monkey benders
: Dustin Stephens and Robert Dudley, “The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis,”
Natural History
(December 2004–January 2005): 40–44.

 
81
 
Dudley suggested
: Robert Dudley, “Ethanol, fruit ripening, and the historical origins of human alcoholism in primate frugivory,”
Integrative and Comparative Biology
44, no. 4 (2004): 315–23, doi:10.1093/icb/44.4.315.

 
82
 
such accidents became recipes
: McGovern,
Uncorking the Past
, Kindle location 449–85. I am indebted to McGovern's fascinating account of primate drinking and the earliest alcoholic beverages.

 
83
 
two, eight, and ten
: Laura Anne Tedesco, “Jiahu (ca. 7000–5700
BC
)” in
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000),
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jiah/hd_jiah.htm
.

 
83
 
herbs also appeared
: Patrick E. McGovern, Juzhong Zhang, Jigen Tang, Zhiqing Zhang, Gretchen R. Hall, Robert A. Moreau, Alberto Nunez, Eric D. Butrym, Michael P. Richards, Chen-shan Wang, Guangsheng Cheng, Zhijun Zhao, and Changsui Wang, “Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic China,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
101, no. 51 (2004): 17593–98, doi:10.1073/pnas.0407921102.