The Broccoli Gene

My daughter, who is now twenty-two years old and a strict vegetarian, wanted to know if her dislike of ‘cruciferous vegetables’[1] was just her being a baby or if there was something behind it. My dad, who lived to the ripe old age of 79 without voluntarily ever eating a vegetable, she decided, was her genetic forebearer behind the I-hate-vegetables gene.

Enter science.

Turns out you can buy these little test kits for around five bucks and they will tell you if you are genetically pre-disposed to hate broccoli and/or IPA. Seriously.

So when she was home for spring break[2] she came with a little test kit[3] and tested us. The test consists of four small rectangles of paper. One is just a small rectangle of paper. The other three are infused with different chemicals which test your sensitivity to certain proteins that are found in foods.

I’ve never been a picky eater. The only food I can say that I truly don’t like the taste of is asparagus. Everything else I don’t like is primarily a texture or psychological thing. I don’t like rubbery foods, or things that look like gobs of snot like oysters. I’d also rather not eat things that might be smarter than me, like octopus. So it wasn’t surprising that two of the four strips tasted like nothing at all to me. One of them tasted like a hint of aspirin[4] but it was just barely. Another one tasted similar, but it was so faint that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it wasn’t just the residue left over from the one before it.

I’m just not that sensitive to bad tasting things.

My daughter, however, in a blind taste test, got the one that tasted like aspirin to me near her tongue and immediately started gagging. She agreed with the “it tastes like I’ve chewed up a pill” description, but to her it was powerful and disgusting. The other one even more so.

So granted my front porch is not entirely laboratory conditions, but this test is designed to see how sensitive you are to these flavors, which is apparently a genetic thing, and she was much more sensitive than I was. We then went to my husband and made him try. He had the same reactions as my daughter.

According to the literature, which I can’t vouch for or even, for that matter, entirely understand, my daughter and husband are genetically wired to dislike things like broccoli and black coffee and dark chocolate[5]. Bitter things.

Which got me to thinking. How many arguments have parents had over the years with toddlers about broccoli and brussels sprouts? Thou shalt quit acting up and thou shalt eat that which is good for you. Or thou shalt receive a punishment. And maybe we should expect someone in their 20s to choke it down for the nutritional value. But is it really fair to expect a three-year-old to put something awful in their mouths and chew and swallow? Nature, as a rule, makes poisons taste bad. We are hard wired to avoid bad tasting things because they might kill us. As parents, should we really over-ride that instinct in a crying child because we want them to have a little more Vitamin K?

It’s too late for my littles, who are now big. I apologized to my daughter for the food fights we had.

“It wasn’t fun for either of us,” she said.

That much is true.

Mother does know best, most of the time. But mother doesn’t know everything. There’s always something we can learn if we’re willing to listen.

[1] This is the problem with raising smart children and sending them out into the world to take science classes and whatnot. They say things like “cruciferous vegetables.”

[2] NB: she did not come home to visit us. I’m not completely convinced she would ever come home to visit us. She came home because it is cold in Philadelphia where she lives, and it is warm in the Atlanta area where we live, and she got tired of the cold.

[3] Purchased, I’m sure, with my money.

[4] And not the orangey, baby chewable kind. The unflavored Goody’s powder yuck.

[5] And me?

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