At a restaurant with my girlfriend recently, and she was brought a glass of water with a lemon wedge. She took a sip, made a face, and said “the knife that sliced this lemon was also used to cut an onion.”
Seriously? Who can taste that?
She’s always doing stuff like that, like identifying each spice and herb used in a dish. Her sense of smell is similarly acute – she’s always telling me to take out the trash. But then, my sense of smell is sub-normal (chronic post-nasal drip).
I think she’s either crazy, or has some super-powers bordering on the mutant-level. Does anyone else have experience with this?
That’s pretty plausible. The last time I ordered a pizza from pizza hut I could tell that they didn’t wash the rocker blade or pizza cutter or whatever after cutting up some cinnamon sticks.
I’m like your girlfriend. Especially with stuff like onions, garlic and green bell peppers. I bet I would have known if the lemon knife had cut raw onion, though I’ve never encountered it. I totally know if the pizza that was cut before mine had bell peppers on it.
I’m like that too, and it’s more curse than blessing, since there are more unpleasant odors than enjoyable ones (think about your last airplane trip; and imagine that everyone near you was unwashed, flatulent and halitotic. That’s my reality).
The upside is that I have an edge in social situations: some (not all) people throw off an odor like a tomcat when they get angry, even if they try to be passive aggressive. And although many, many women are attractive to me (naturally many more than are attracted to me on return) the ones who did find theselves reciprocating my attraction initially had aromas that really struck me on first meeting.
On a good sound system the difference between the three is very obvious. Mp3s typically have a much more compressed dynamic range than CD’s. CDs sound much cleaner than records, but that’s not everybody’s preference.
You would hard pressed to tell the difference between mp3s and CDs on some limited fidelity playback systems like car stereos or computer speakers or cheap home systems.
Man, I wish I had super taste like that. It would make it easier to duplicate a good recipe.
I have a stronger sense of smell than my husband even though I have more sinus issues than he does. I’m very sensitive to bad smells in particular. I smell the litter box quicker than my husband does. Every time.
I don’t so much any more, but I used to hate capsicum peppers with a mortal hatred- I remember gagging while eating a roast dinner at someone else’s house as a teen, because, though I didn’t have any of the actual vegetables, water used in cooking them was used to make the gravy, and that was all I could taste.
Women supposedly have a more acute sense of taste than men, in general.
My sense of smell should have been killed by all my years of smoking, but I still notice when there is an odd odor in the air. I can tell by scent when someone has been close to my desk.
A couple of years ago, I walked into the warehouse and smelled that rotten egg smell that comes from a gas leak. I walked back out and called my boss. She called Facilities and they came out to sniff around. They said they couldn’t smell anything, so I called my boss and called in scared to work.
I wasn’t there when the gas heater went up in flames, I do understand it was very exciting.
I can also hear things that most people can’t. I don’t think its age related because once I point out the sound, everyone can suddenly hear it.
Your girlfriend’s sense of taste seems perfectly reasonable to me. I love the taste of raw onion but only where I want and expect it to be like in a salad or on a burger. A good chef/cook knows never to use an unrinsed knife or cutting board after slicing onions.
I’ve tasted fruit salad before which was tainted with onion - assumed it was chopped on the same board or something, so it doesn’t seem that implausible.
I was a guinea pig for the US Navy’s sonar group one summer, listening for sounds embedded in pink and white noise. I stopped the project for 4 hours to find an annoying sound that was interfering. It turns out that they were generating the tones with a PC instead of the tone generator because the tone generator went toes up. I was hearing the 60 cycle hum filtered through the PC into the primary white noise generator :smack: The reason that they normally used 2 tone generators [one for the pink or white noise and one for the embedded tones] was to eliminate any other line noise.
I am missing a fair amount of hearing in midrange from working as a machinist for many years … but my extreme ranges is just ducky
I am also a supertaster, as is mrAru. We love playing name the spices at restaurants
Seriously? Who can’t taste/smell raw onion when there’s traces of it right next to your face? That shit is stout.
As for the ingredient thing, my husband and I do that all the time. I’m much, much better at it than I used to be. Not because my sense of taste has sharpened any at all, but because I’ve gotten used enough to what different things taste like on their own that I can pick them out of a mixture of flavors. It’s no different from being able to pick out various instruments/parts from a piece of music–if you’re not used to what the different things sound like, it’s all just a hopelessly tangled wad of sounds, but if you’re more experienced it’s all pretty distinct.
I don’t know if this counts, but I have a really great sense of direction.
If I have ever been somewhere once (walking or driving), I can find my way there again without any help.
Went to a small hotel that was difficult to find in the daytime (lots of unmarked street names, long roads and turn at the big tree, etc.) but ten years later, when trying to go back there, in the dark and raining, I found it without a single problem. Same for finding little cafes and restaurants in towns and cities I have not been to in decades - I can just walk right to them without missing a beat. I went with a group of people to Disneyland and parked in the middle of that huge lot - not one of us thought to remember where we parked (Goofy lot, Mickey lot, etc.), but when we came out after a 10 hour stint in the park, I led the group to the car in a beeline. They were all amazed that I just felt where we parked and I can’t really explain it either.
Taste - well, it has to be pretty strong for me. I am amazed when someone can figure out that 1/4 teaspoon of white pepper was added to a four gallon pot of chili. Then again, having lived in Germany, they have a keen sense of taste and smell for certain things they don’t like - for instance, garlic. Germans are really weird with garlic. I once had a pizza on Friday night with friends - and it had a bit of garlic, but hardly a fist full. Yes, I brush my teeth and shower regularly. Sure enough, at work on Monday, the German woman I worked with said hello and then said, “Oh, you had garlic over the weekend.” Wow…
I’m pretty sure I’m a super-taster (I did that bitter paper test in high school, and I could barely touch the paper to my tongue, where other people were chewing it up because it had no flavour to them) and possibly a super-smeller. I didn’t realize I was until I moved in with my husband; I kept smelling and tasting things that he wasn’t tasting and smelling; we finally figured out what was going on.
I used to wonder what was up with people; they’d bring some baked stuff into work and everyone would be gushing over how great it tasted, and it tasted like there was way too much baking powder in it to me, for example.
So, to answer the OP, I probably would have tasted that, too. Bars are the worst for mixing flavours; they aren’t careful with the celery salt, for example, and I get tastes of celery salt in with my soft drink (blecch).
