Sanet Post, Robert Kluson
Food Quality and Soil Health - Reponse
March 22, 1997

I wanted to contribute a common observation which may relate to your hypotheses on the human physiology of taste in response to Chris Alenson's post of 3/20 re"Food Quality -- A Matter of Taste!" When I considered your suggestion that taste depends on a healthy body, I remembered a well-known example of how folks who give up smoking cigarettes always experience a real return of their capacity to taste foods. Yes indeed, it can be argued that taste is a 2 way interaction between the consumer and the food.

It would be interesting to require "positive" controls in taste studies with human participants in order to first assess their health and overall capacity for discriminating taste. This may eliminate a confounding variable which reduces an experiment's ability to detect taste difference. Then make taste comparisons of food grown under different production regimes, as well as control for other important variables such as variety effects.

Rob Kluson