THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 18, 1997 TAG: 9702180301
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 54 lines
Scientists have come up with an ironclad alibi for children or others who don't want to eat spinach.
Or broccoli. Or carrots. Or collards. Or oysters. Or buttermilk. Or cabbage. Or carrot-raisin-mayonnaise salad. Or anything they don't happen to like.
``It ain't in my genes to eat it!'' they can cry. You have to hand it to science.
That excuse, aimed at a parent, carries a measure of reproach that mom or dad failed in not having supplied the missing gene. They're to blame.
NOW scientists find it!
What were they doing 70 years or so ago when it would have helped repel kale?
Or doodlebugs from under a brick. Of course, your mother would screech if you ate them.
Then one could have turned the alibi around: ``It's in my genes to eat doodlebugs.''
I bring up doodlebugs only because a friend, when we were 4, liked `em. The only girl I ever met who'd eat a doodlebug. Now and then, when she was hungry.
I never ate `em. Well, one maybe, to be polite. Didn't mother tell you to eat whatever was offered so as not to hurt people's feelings? Mothers were all mixed up.
These scientists, so-called - and it's ludicrous, really - categorizepeople by how they react to a thyroid medicine called 6-n-propylthiouracil. Thank goodness, fourth grade teachers hadn't heard about it or it would have popped up on a spelling test. It's called PROP for short.
People who couldn't eat PROP, about 25 percent, are known as nontasters, who'd be more likely to eat their spinach because it wouldn't taste so bitter. Half are considered tasters because they found it mildly bitter. Another 25 percent, the supertasters, found it grossly bitter.
Women, the scientists say, are more likely than men to be supertasters, and Asians and blacks are more apt than are whites to have that trait, scientists say.
My experience, which guides me more than scientists, is that nobody cares much for foods that are bitter or sour or hot or just plain nauseating to taste.
You're lucky if your parents coaxed or bribed or commanded you to eat those nasty things if you expected to have dessert or a dime to go to the movies Saturday.
They taught you to eat them because those viands were good for you and because their parents made them eat them.
I'm thankful mine did. Those foods now are among those I most enjoy. It pains me to think that fewer and fewer people are drinking buttermilk and you can appreciate how it must hurt the feelings of conscientious cows.
Been a long time though, years really, since I ate a doodlebug.