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Emily comments on LessWrong experience on Alcohol - Less Wrong
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I was actually just thinking about it some more. About 20 minutes ago I was eating a strawberry thinking, "is this called bitter or sour?"
The hypothesis I arrived at is that I hardly eat many bitter foods and so I don't have a great label for what bitter is and so I wonder whether the sour things I eat are actually bitter.
But I think I understated my ability to distinguish them. I had some omelet for lunch today with kale and collards, neither of which I think I've had before. I didn't enjoy it. I think it's because those things are bitter. Is that true? Is kale and/or collards considered to be bitter?
Another interesting thing I was thinking about... so I've been trying to learn a bit about cooking and blending different flavors together. I was thinking about the fact that there really only exist a handful of fundamental flavors. And so since a few weeks ago, every so often I try to think about what I'm eating as a blend of those fundamental flavors. And when I do that... I stop being to recognize the "higher level flavor". Like when I was doing it with my strawberries, it tasted like a blend of sour and sugar, and then I tried to think about where the "strawberriness" fits in to that, and I couldn't fit it in - it just tasted like sour and sugar!
This is interesting, because it's almost crazy to me that you'd call a strawberry sour - almost as crazy as calling it bitter! Strawberries are really really sweet in my experience. (Unless it was a very unripe one, I suppose?) Although, I'm not hugely keen on them because of texture issues, so possibly I just haven't picked up on sourness...? Sometimes I think I don't taste foods as well when I'm nervous about potential texture variations (for some reason I can get a strong "yuck" reaction from this).
It's almost crazy to me that you wouldn't call strawberries sour. Strawberries taste quite sour to me, and quite sweet as well. I've always thought of sourness as relating to acidity (strawberries and grapefruits actually have pretty similar pH's). I perceive bitterness to be entirely different (strawberries are not bitter, grapefruits are slightly to moderately bitter, depending on the grapefruit, kale is very bitter to me but not at all sour).
Interesting. I get grapefruit (which I like better than strawberries) to be quite sour, but not bitter at all.
There are varieties of strawberries that are not sour at all, so I suppose it's possible that you simply have limited experience with strawberries. (Well, you probably must, since you don't like them, but maybe that's the reason you don't think they're sour, as opposed to some fundamental difference in how you taste things.)
I actually don't like the taste of purely-sweet strawberries; the slightly-sour ones are better. A very unripe strawberry would taste very sour, but not at all sweet, and its flesh would also be very hard.
Hm, that is interesting. I've always thought that berries were known to be a bit sour, but I also suspect that you're right in saying that they're mostly sweet. To me it seems like a more even balance. It wasn't unripe as far as I could tell, and I got it at the supermarket 3 days ago.