In the world of picky eating, the “supertaster” is a hero.

“No spinach for me. I have a recessive genetic combination and a superhuman tongue that allows me to exist in a world more intense than most mortals.”

Much, much classier than: “Spinach is gross.”

Decades of peer-reviewed studies have shown supertasters experience tastes two to three times as intensely than others.

Not all picky eaters are supertasters, but most of us, if we’re being honest, would like to be.

When I started my quest to grow my palate (I ate raw salmon last week!) many picky eaters emailed me about this field of study. Derek Jackson, who is completing a PhD in chemistry at University of Toronto, was one of them.

He doesn’t like the term “picky eater”

“It implies I could eat certain foods and I just don’t want to,” he says.

Jackson doesn’t like bitter foods such as coffee, beer, olives and dark chocolate. He think he fits the classification of a supertaster.

Linda Bartoshuk, a reknowned University of Florida taste researcher, has been studying taste since the ’60s. She coined the “supertaster” term and regularly takes photos of the tongues of her family members.

Through decades of research, Bartoshuk and her colleagues discovered that people inhabit different taste worlds. For supertasters, every food is more intense, and bitter foods, (including lots of vegetables) “are differentially worse.”

All humans are wired to reject extremely bitter substances because the brain receives “poison” signals. For supertaster, the threshold is much lower.

“Take the poor supertaster, give them a bitter substance, it’s two to three times as intense. They really hate it, where as someone like me can’t taste it,” she said.

In the U.S., 25 per cent of people are low tasters (much less sensitive to bitter tastes) and 25 per cent are supertasters. The rest fall in the middle.

Bartoshuk discovered, many years ago, that people with a recessive genetic variation found PROP, a compound used in thyroid medicine, extremely bitter, while others didn’t taste it at all.

She and her team later discovered that supertasters had an excessive amount of fungiform papillae (these projections on the tongue’s surface house taste buds). A regular joe can replicate that test at home with some blue food colouring and a magnifying glass.

If you count 5 to15 mushroom shaped dots you’re a low-taster. (“People in the low end are tasting just fine,” says Bartoshuk, who fits into this category.) If you count 20-35, you’re a medium taster, the kind of person the world is built for. Above 45, you’re in supertaster town.

Supertasters have more extreme likes and dislikes. A medium taster might rate their worst taste at -40. A supertaster is at -80.

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But even Bartoshuk cautions that it’s no excuse for picky eating:

“Fact is, a lot of food preferences depend on learning and what you’re exposed to. The brain loves high fat, so if you eat food mixed with fat, you like it,” she said, as if she knew about the bag of sour cream and onion chips I ate for dinner the other day.

The other day, Derek Jackson put some blue food colouring on his tongue and counted the papillae near the tip. He counted at least 20, but then the ring started disintegrating.

I did the test, too.

“Prepare yourself for a non-scientific explanation for your culinary shortcomings,” said my boyfriend.

Never.

I counted 38, just shy of supertaster category, but enough to keep scraping the spinach out of my lasagna, on a scientific basis.

Supertaster test

Using a cotton swab, put some blue food colouring on either side of the tip of your tongue.

Take a piece of paper with a hole in it the size of a standard hole punch (a sheet of loose-leaf paper works fine) and place that over the food colouring.

The blue food colouring will not affect the fungiform papillae. Count the pink dots to determine how many you have in that radius.