#228 This Bud’s For You

So I’m reading this article the other day. And it’s about taste buds. Old folks like me may remember from your school years that there are four main taste buds; sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. I always thought sweet got kind of short shrift there. No wonder we try to get more. We just want to balance out all the sour, bitter, and salt. But tongues are a reflection of life I guess. You gotta take the tons of bitter, sour, and salt with the tiny bit of the sweet. Well a few years back tongue researchers, taste-ologists, or whatever they’re called, found out we actually have another taste bud. And, I assume because it was discovered by a Japanese, um, linguist, the name for this taste bud is umami. As in: Ooh mommy, what’s that savory flavor? And, in fact, that’s what taste this taste bud craves: Savory. Oh boy, the BBQ taste bud, the charbroiled burger taste bud, the ketchup and salty French fries taste bud, the tomato sauce-laced chili Fritos taste bud. Hey Cletus, they got them a taste bud for spicy curly fries. Now everyone could understand how we could seriously appreciate the mellow flavor of oak cask-aged bourbon and hickory-smoked ham. Not to mention jerky. It wasn’t just salt. There was a savory flavor.
Well just when you thought things couldn’t get any better science has come up with an even newer taste bud. The fat bud. Yeah, that’s right, we got a special taste bud for fat. This explains a lot. Because no matter how cleverly fat-free foods are prepared, they never seem satisfying. In mice, fat buds apparently trigger the release of enzymes in the digestive system that prepare it to absorb the nutrients from fat when it makes it down the line. A similar mechanism in humans makes sense. Hunter/scavengers need high-calorie food to survive. And though it was rare for cave men to encounter Doritos in the wild, they nonetheless would have found it a nice food to help them stave of the cold of winter. Just because their equivalent of a Barcolounger was actually made out of bark doesn’t mean that enjoying a nice strip of bacon wasn’t in their evolutionary interest. If our tongues help us crave, consume, digest, and store high calorie fatty foods for times of starvation we’re ahead of the game. Of course, if the closest we come to starving is when we run out of Ben and Jerry’s before our midnight snack, chances are our society will go from the “spare tire” to the “whole Michelin man” body type in less than a generation. Still it explains a lot. I’ve long maintained that bacon is nature’s perfect food. Now I got the science to back me up. It’s got sweet, sour, salty, and a tech of bitter. And it sure as heck has savory and loads of fat as well. So I guess when people say they’re fat because of their glands it ain’t because they’re lying. Around or otherwise. It’s their tongue glands.
America, ya gotta love it.