Cilantro Vindication

When people ask me what foods I don't like, the one rising to the top is invariably cilantro.  I don't like the smell or the taste, even though I make dishes with it during the summer for others.  Heck, I might even grow it this year just to please my family and friends who think my cilantro aversion is nutty.

Today I read an article in the New York Times about people like me.  Here are a few excerpts:

In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”


“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

The authoritative Oxford Companion to Food notes that the word “coriander” is said to derive from the Greek word for bedbug, that cilantro aroma “has been compared with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes” and that “Europeans often have difficulty in overcoming their initial aversion to this smell.”

Flavor chemists have found that cilantro aroma is created by a half-dozen or so substances, and most of these are modified fragments of fat molecules called aldehydes. The same or similar aldehydes are also found in soaps and lotions and the bug family of insects.



The senses of smell and taste evolved to evoke strong emotions because they were critical to finding food and mates and avoiding poisons and predators. When we taste a food, the brain searches its memory to find a pattern from past experience that the flavor belongs to. Then it uses that pattern to create a perception of flavor, including an evaluation of its desirability.


If the flavor doesn’t fit a familiar food experience, and instead fits into a pattern that involves chemical cleaning agents and dirt, or crawly insects, then the brain highlights the mismatch and the potential threat to our safety. We react strongly and throw the offending ingredient on the floor where it belongs.

So I'm not crazy.  I just have strong genetic memory.

Community Supported Agriculture

In my last post I mentioned that I've been craving fresh produce.  So here's what I did about it.

From  Local Harvest, here are the basics of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA): a farmer offers a certain number of "shares" to the public. Typically the share consists of a box of vegetables, but other farm products may be included. Interested consumers purchase a share (aka a "membership" or a "subscription") and in return receive a box (bag, basket) of seasonal produce each week throughout the farming season.

Lida Farm offers CSA shares to people in the surrounding area, and I've signed up for their every-other-week option.  Starting mid-June, I should start getting fresh fruits and vegetables harvested that day and shipped to me cross-county, not cross-country.

I'll let you know how it goes.  I'm excited about the opportunity to support a local business and satisfy my cravings at the same time!