Are chefs more sensitive tasters?

The other day a friend  of mine asked whether chefs were more sensitive to flavors than other people. While I don't have a direct answer to this question, I can tell you what my students and I found among chefs attending the National Restaurant Association meetings in Chicago several years back.

We chose the National Restaurant Association meetings because the attendees work in all aspects of the food service business, from chefs to line cooks, to dietitians to restaurant managers, to people selling food and equipment to restaurateurs, to all other food service-related people.

The meetings were (and still are) held in Chicago because the McCormick Center is the one venue that can accommodate the more than 6 miles of booths. As you can easily imagine, walking past all those booths can be pretty tiring, so a booth that offered a seat was enticing! Our booth had several seats.

In exchange for the opportunity to rest their feet, we asked participants to fill out a questionnaire and to carry out a taste test using a LifeSaver(TM) mint. In the questionnaire we asked (among many other things) what the participants did for a living. The taste test involved rating the intensity of the mint flavor and of its cooling effect.

We were fascinated to observe that chefs and cooks got a much stronger cooling effect from the mint than did people who worked the front of the house, or other people in the food service industry, except perhaps sales people. It was this observation that started me on the road to looking at the trigeminal aspect of flavor more deeply.

It is becoming clear that trigeminal nerve function is critical to experiencing flavors. As I mentioned in one of my Facebook posts, the trigeminal response acts like a volume dial, turning up or down the ability to sense flavors. I'll be blogging about this question in greater detail in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Here I am with my two students, Nneka Ole Chukwueke and Kalisa Marie Martin at our booth at the 2007 NRA meeting. Participants stuck a star on the board behind us after they completed the questionnaire and taste test. The board said "Help Us Reach 300!"...we went over 360 participants! 

People were intrigued by the brain model, another reason they stopped at our booth. We used the model to explain how flavor is assembled in the brain.