#im not here to judge anyone’s headcannons or interpretations

[so--many-fandoms]

Enhanced Senses - Taste

There’s a real thing called being a supertaster, which is when a person has more taste buds then normal, resulting in being more sensitive to tastes in general (and especially bitter tastes apparently, which does fit with my experience).

Now, there are a lot of characters out there who are described as having enhanced senses, and while most writing/discussion/etc focuses on the effects on their sense of small, hearing, and/or sight, most of these characters are also at some point said to have enhanced taste (and even if it’s not explicitly stated, the strong link between smell and taste means that an enhancement on either sense likely strengthens the other as well). While these characters’ sense of taste is almost definitely much stronger in comparison to the baseline than a supertaster’s, they’d have more taste experiences in common with the characters than most people, and the characters would probably experience the same things but to a more exaggerated degree. As a supertaster myself (though I don’t like the term because it makes it sound like a super power and honestly it’s useless except for making me a really picky eater), there are some things I see often in fics of these characters that really bug me as incorrect. Here’s a list of some common things to consider (based off my own experiences, though feel free to add on your own thoughts) if you’re writing a character with stronger-than-the-average-human smell/taste:

Chocolate: this is a big one. Chocolate is really bitter, guys. “Oh, you mean dark chocolate?” No. All chocolate, though dark chocolate is worse than most. Every single type of chocolate I’ve tried, which is more or less all of them, has been far more bitter than anything else, except for white chocolate which is barely even chocolate at all and is too cloyingly sweet to eat more than a few small bites at a time. Your character will not enjoy anything chocolate or chocolate-flavored, and even if they somehow do, they won’t think it tastes warm and sweet or whatever most people think it tastes like.

Coffee: how the fuck anyone can stand to drink it long enough to ‘acquire the taste’ or whatever, I will never understand. It’s a terrible blend of pure bitterness and what I imagine dark dirt tastes like. Even the scent is miserable. No amount of milk, sugar, or other flavoring can hide the bitter. If I need caffeine, a very strong black tea is generally the best option, although if it oversteeps it can also get very bitter very quickly.

Smoke & burning: smoke is not a good flavor in food when you can taste it as strongly as I can. Barbecue is gross, flame grilled burgers are okay once I drown them in condiments and cheese so the meat is less edible, and wood oven pizzas are fairly intolerable. Similarly, anything “charred” or blackened just tastes burnt, and I’m generally a lot more sensitive to over cooking than most people. Underdone is far preferable to overdone. Anything cooked past “medium” is inedible and “medium-rare” is typically preferable.

Complexity: as a general rule, complex dishes with a lot of flavors and components are going to be overwhelming. One of the reasons kids menus have simpler/plainer options is because the older you get, the more your taste buds die (you know how old people like really spicy food sometimes?); feeding your enhanced-senses character is kind of like feeding a kid, in this way.

Flavors are clingy: food absorbs the flavors touching it. If you give me chocolate covered strawberries, it doesn’t matter if we wipe off all the chocolate and the strawberry looks good as new; I’ll still be able to taste the chocolate on it. Also, as I said before, scent and flavor are pretty tied up in eachother, so if food was stored/prepared in a room with anything particularly pungent (food or otherwise), the character can almost definitely taste those things in their food.

This definitely isn’t a complete list, but I don’t want to make this post any longer until I figure out how to make reading cuts. Also I might be wrong about some things because I’m really not an expert and this is mostly based on my own experiences, but I hope this can be a little helpful to someone.