North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

>From another list.  Considering how important taste is in fruit, it seemed fitting for the NAFEX list.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003.


Hello,
I was just having a discussion with a family member about grape taste.  The 
member
cannot stand to eat grape seeds when sampling fresh grapes in the vineyard.  
On the
other hand, I can with little problem.  She claims that the taste of the 
crushed seed is
just too powerful.

There has been an hour long radio program about a scientist studying taste 
buds on
humans.  The program is somewhere on the Minnesota Public Radio Archive 
within
the last two months.  The program gave advice about how to do an 
unscientific survey
at home to tell where you fall for # of tastebuds- the more you have the 
more you taste.
You take either a green or blue food dye and place it on your tongue.  They 
said that
the tastebuds will reject the color, so you should be able to see them.  The 
less color the
front of your tongue has, the more tastebuds you have.  You will need to 
compare your
tongue to a few other people's using the same test.  Within a small 
population you should
be able to tell where you fall among tasters: super tasters, normal, or 
non-tasters.
Finding equally crazy people to go through with the test could be hardest 
part.