For many people, coriander is an essential herb. Innumerable regional cuisines rely on it as a basic ingredient. Then there are those who think it tastes like soap. Until now it has been largely assumed that this was just down to those people not being exposed to coriander as kids, as with other foodstuffs people tend to dislike, but it now emerges that there could be a genetic influence at work.

In a paper published on 10 September, and as noted by Nature News, statistical geneticist Nicholas Eriksson and colleagues worked through a genetic comparison of two separate samples of over 10,000 people, one a full range of people of European ancestry who said coriander tasted like soap, the other one of people of all genetic backgrounds who had declared their like or dislike of coriander. The result was a correlation between disliking coriander and two genes -- one associated with enjoying smells, and another associated with linking smells to taste.

This isn't the first time that coriander preference has been linked to genetics, and there was even a study in May that found that there was a distinctive divide between those cultures where coriander where a common herb and those where it was less common -- dislike among South Asians, Hispanic and Middle Eastern participants ranged between three and seven percent, whereas among those of South Asian, Caucasian or African descent the range was between 14 to 21 percent.


The new study does, however, offer a hint as to what mechanism might be at play -- a large part of what we experience as taste is actually smell, so if coriander smells of soap it will override the taste of the herb in the mouth. It's similar to the study previously reported on Wired.co.uk which found a similar gene-smell link to explain why some people find the whiff of meat utterly appalling.

Hatred of coriander is a common thing -- it doesn't take much effort to find groups of people online who detest the herb. But now it looks like it's OK -- they're not misguided.

They just can't help themselves. Poor souls.

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