Taste, Food Poisoning

I’d like to share another experience from Brazil. This experience involves my sense of taste. In the week or so that I was there, being my first time ever in Brazil, I was willing to try as many new things as possible to fully immerse myself in the culture. One of the hosts advised me to try tasting something called ‘palmitos’. It’s the heart of palm, which is harvested from the inner core and growing bud of certain palm trees. It is typically diced up and tossed in salads or other dishes of some sort. My experience was actually biting right into one of the sticks that was offered to me. It was potentially the most atrocious and repulsive tasting thing that I had ever tasted. I didn’t want to be rude so I finished the stick that was offered to me. It was very difficult to swallow and I even tried to get rid of the taste in my mouth by eating some cashews that I had but then I just had the taste of palm heart and cashews mixed together.

I immediately felt sick to my stomach and I didn’t eat for a few days. My guess was that I had food poisoning. Its incredible how even thinking about the taste now makes me sick. Some say that if you try foods that you had a bad experience with in the past, in a new place, you may have a different experience with it taste wise. Researchers say that the part of the brain that remembers certain tastes (the taste cortex) and the area of the brain responsible for forming a memory of the place and time (the hippocampus) are linked. A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience revealed that the two parts of the brain are linked and work together to foster taste experiences. Therefore, trying the palmitos in a different setting might provoke a different experience with taste. Will I try it, probably not since I am still traumatized from my last experience.