Last week something strange happened to me. After eating loads of Wasabi and Chili, I woke up the next day without any taste from my tongue.
I realized while having my breakfast because the chocolate syrup didn't taste as sweet as usual. It still took some time until I fully recognized my loss of taste.
So if you ever wondered how chocolate tastes when you can't taste, I can tell you it's boring. And because I lost all my other taste senses, it didn't taste bitter either, just like an tasteless paste.
The good part about chocolate is that it has a very good smell, so smelling it makes you remember what it tastes like, so you imagine the taste. This does not work with salt for example. I tried a little bit with the tip of my tongue. Normally it's quite intense when tasted pure, but for me it had less taste than a few grains of sand.
For lunch I had salad with many ingredients. Again, I know what most things taste like, so I imagined the taste and really thought I had little bit of my sensuality back. But I rather blame my memory for that, again.
The evening was even worse. I had potato wedges with tomato ketchup. If I didn't know ketchup before, I would be wondering why people love this viscid cream so much. At least it had a slightly sour taste when swallowing. And that taste came from my palate. I didn't know you can taste with the roof of your mouth... but it's true.
I better skip the part about how beer tastes without a taste, and even water tastes horrible without any sense of taste. Yeah, not tasting has some kind of anti-taste. Probably water has some taste that cancels out this anti-taste to taste neutral... who knows.
Luckily, the next day I slowly regained all my senses and now this temporal disability has vanished. But it left some great impressions on me and I want to summarize those for you:
- You judge a lot about food by it's smell and your imagination about how it could taste.
- You only fully realize how wonderful the sense of taste can be when you lose it
- Never eat too much of Wasabi unless you intend to have the same experience I had :-)
