It’s not good taste, it’s what tastes good

“One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.” So wrote German playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Goethe had a point. To a child, every taste is a new, exhilarating experience, made more so by the fact that kids actually taste better than adults do (depending on how they’re cooked). Kidding. What I mean is, kids have the ability – due to their greater number of taste buds – to taste things adults simply cannot.

As we age, our taste receptors diminish, until at last we’re left with the ability to detect only the strongest flavors; sweet, sour, bitter. The degree to which this occurs differs with each individual, but take my word for it, if you’re over 40, things don’t taste as wonderful to you as they once did.

In my case, this “detastification” (a scientific term I just made up) has rendered my food all but flavorless. I see proof of this every day, as evinced by my dining choices.

When I was a kid, a hot dog with ketchup virtually exploded on my palate, producing a cornucopia of flavors and sending me into paroxysms of gastronomical ecstasy. These days I add onions, jalapenos, brown mustard and horseradish to my dogs, just so I can taste ‘em.

In fact, I add onions, jalapenos, brown mustard and horseradish to just about everything I eat. (I’m keeping the people who manufacture Listerine in business.)

But it’s not just this excessive use of condiments that’s telling me my taste buds are on their last legs. It’s also those foods – previously considered repulsive – that suddenly taste good to me.

Liver. There was time I couldn’t be in the same room with a liver, not one that was cooking, anyway. Now … well, pass the pate, baby! Add some onions and jalapenos to it, you’ve got a meal!

Then there are sardines; those little fishies packed together in a tin, soaking in a gelatinous goo reminiscent of something you might find leaking from your Volvo’s loose head gasket. Sardines are disgusting. I know this, and not just because The Lovely Mrs. Taylor tells me they are. I mean, let’s be real – sardines are bait, man, not food!

Yet every so often, I’ll sit down in front of the television with a box of Saltines and eat a whole can of them, sometimes sharing with the cat, who at these times miraculously discovers he can tolerate my presence after all.

In recent months I’ve also eaten pickled eggs, like you find floating in big jars in the sort of West side taverns that still serve boilermakers. I’ve eaten pickled herring, smoked herring, tripe (which is made from a cow’s – gack! – stomach), and deep-fried pigskin.

Any of these things would have sent my ten-year-old self screaming from the dining room in horror. Yet now, they all taste darn good.

And it’s only getting worse. Last week at the grocery, I caught myself seriously considering a jar full of pickled pig’s feet. I’ve seen what pigs walk in and it ain’t good. But those feet looked pretty tasty.

Where will it end? I get older every day and the taste buds keep dying. Will I one day be walking along a beach and suddenly decide to snack on the decomposing carcass of a grounded mackerel? Will I catch myself slowing down when passing week-old road kill along county route 91?

Can cannibalism be far behind?

I think I’d better settle down and treat myself to a pint of “Chubby Hubby” or “Moose Tracks.” Ice cream doesn’t taste as good as it used to, but it’s not bad. Especially if you add onions and jalapenos.

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or road kill recipes, e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429.