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I think you may have falsely pattern matched this particular reference. I love the taste and smell of cilantro and eat it all the time, but the first time I encountered a stink bug I thought "oh, it smells like cilantro".

It doesn't taste like soap to me. I think the stink bug-smell has no relation to the soap-taste, which is indeed caused by that gene. I think stink bugs' scent probably smells similar to cilantro for everyone without that gene.

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I know how stink bugs smell and I know how cilantro smells. Never once did I think that they smelled like each other. Could it be a difference in stink bugs? Also, never has it ever tasted like soap to me.

There are several types of stink bugs, and they don't all smell the same. It's the brown marmorated stink bug that smells like cilantro.

To be specific, it has some of the exact same chemical compounds in it, trans-2-decenal and trans-2-octenal.

Where I live there are a lot of brown marmorated stink bugs. I also have never thought they smell like cilantro.

I would tend to agree. Cilantro does not smell like bugs to me. It does however taste like soap. So I always tell restaurants no cilantro and often end up having to pick it out of dishes that I didn't expect to contain it.

For me, when I first tried cilantro, it tasted like soap also. This was when my wife and I discovered street tacos several years ago. As time went by and I used hot sauce to mask the cilantro, I developed a taste for it and now I don't mind it at all. I no longer taste soap, but a kind of sweetness.

Oh, that's interesting. I recall reading something years ago about how humans typically don't like brassicas because the bitterness is overwhelming. But through regular introduction the tastebuds have a form of plasticity (I forget the actual term) to them and they'll eventually overcome the bitterness.

I wonder if the "cilantro tastes like soap" is a similar phenomenon.

Modern cultivars produce less of the glucosinolates that give brussel sprouts their bitterness. I'm not sure whether there has been a similar change in other brassicas, but sprouts were the most notoriously bitter and now actually are less bitter than they were in the 70s.

Here's one version of that backstory:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/30/773457637/fr...

Sounds like childhood taste preference against bitterness changes with susceptibility to alkaloids [1].

I disliked cilantro for the same reason as a child, and I still have an aversion to cruciferous vegetables because of the saliva compound that makes them taste objectionable (they're also being bred to contain less sulfur, so Brussels sprouts today probably are better than you might remember them being). I can detect a very low threshold of even the mildest cabbage in anything, which has made me a target for Korean women throughout my life.

Tasting like soap doesn't mean you can't enjoy cilantro, though, and while I still don't favor the fresh leaves plain, I use them liberally as an ingredient and dry fry them with the stems for my Sichuan and Mexican cooking.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4654709/

I had something like this with potatoes but with texture not taste. I was in a situation where I had to eat potatoes, I powered through ate them slowly and that aversion evaporated for me after that. I'd feel a gag reflex from mashed potatoes, baked wasnt easy either. I'm insulin dependent and in the 1980's I took my whole insulin dose first thing in the morning. This made skipping meals, let alone delaying them difficult. But maybe that from a gene that causes it by a reflex. My mom didn't like beans her entire life, same issue different starchy food, she was fine with potatoes.

Harold McGee (the food scientist) seems to think so:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/dining/14curious.html

It tastes like soap due to genetics, but one of the times this came up on reddit someone commented that they think it tastes like soap but they enjoy it anyway, so clearly there are at least a few people who taste soap and still enjoy it.

>It does however taste like soap. So I always tell restaurants no cilantro and often end up having to pick it out of dishes that I didn't expect to contain it.

Same. I don't I've ever actually smelled cilantro, I just taste it in stuff and it tastes like soap. I'll have to make a point of smelling it next time we have some in the house I guess. So many restaurants now think throwing cilantro in everything is some cheat code for making dishes taste fresh and original that they add it to all sorts of stuff. Long before I knew about the cilantro tastes like soap thing, I assumed some restaurants just weren't good about washing the soap off their plates and cups. I knew I was tasting soap but had no idea where it was coming from.

Stink bug scent does not smell similar to cilantro to me, and I happen to be a person for which cilantro tastes like a bar of soap. Stink bug smell is typically closer to a pungent marijuana for me, but different enough to tell the difference. Every year, we get quite a few in the house, so I can recognize the smell quickly. However, my wife reports a different category of scent from stink bugs.

I wonder if the genetics responsible for making me taste soapy cilantro are responsible for altering any other scents/tastes.

I am guessing that stink bug can be categorized with bitter almonds, formaldehyde, and ammonia: Scent analogies that are not as universal as their users imagine!

This is very interesting, thanks for pointing it out! I really dislike cilantro, and to me it always tasted strongly like stink-bugs (not that I ever tried eating one...). I never really understood the dish-soap reference though.

So if this is correct, then the whole point of my original post is completely wrong. I'll have to look into this further.

It definitely some kind of spectrum of response, rather than just either or.

Cilantro to me isn’t something I would generally describe as soapy. If it’s real heavy there can be a slight soap aftertaste that comes through, though at that point the cilantro essence itself is just too much.

I do find the comparison of the essence of cilantro as similar to stinkbugs a bit more apt. There’s this hard to describe chemical smell that some insects give off that isn’t cilantro exactly, but is in some sort of similar class. Kind of how we group sour things together.

I can tolerate some cilantro without noticing much, but if it’s heavy in a dish it’ll become repulsive and ruin it. For me it’s fine when treated like a spice, not a salad.

Apparently Methoxypyrazines are found in stinkbugs and cilantro, and are responsible for a lot of “vegetal” smells.

Likewise it seems that stinkbugs can give of “trans-2-dodecenal” [0] which I guess can be written as “(E)-2-dodecenal” (I am not a chemist) which is found in cilantro and has a chemical citrus peel type of smell. [1]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359322168_Expressio...

[1] http://www.thegoodscentscompany.com/data/rw1005071.html

From the first time I was exposed to cilantro I thought it smelled like stink bugs. I don't really get the soap taste but I rarely eat enough to really experience that, either. Oddly, I liked coriander seeds long before I was exposed to the herb. They have a very different taste to me.

Is the stink bug smell thing a different gene than the taste gene? Cilantro just tastes like another leafy vegetable to me. Sure it's unique but zero negative anything. I had a pile of it yesterday at a Mexican restaurant. I've had cilantro salad at several restaurants in Japan as well.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E3%83%91%E3%82%AF%E3%83%81%...

I think MinuteFood settled it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZtPynXsFas

I love coriander. I didn't like it when I first encountered it and if pressed would have probably adopted any negative description of it. I doubt I would have described it as soap-like[herbalessence] or stink buggy without being "primed" though. I don't know where you get your stink bugs from, maybe stink bugs vary around the world[daftpunk]?

I'm not disputing the genetic thing here, by the way. It's just interesting in general and in how knowledge of the fact changes how people talk about taste[sense].

When people like the flavour, they can generally just do so. You can say "I like coriander" without justification, but "I hate coriander" is a statement that requires justification (apparently).

Wikipedia's explanation tells me that the flavour of coriander is actually -- chemically -- like soap in some sense, it's just that there's a genetic variation that determines if you like that or not. Citation needed, of course.

Maybe the flavour of coriander is actually like soap. And the people who like coriander are simply the people who like soap? Anyone who denies the similarity between the two is lying because they don't want to be seen as a soap-muncher.

Soap-muncher.

[herbalessence] Which soap anyway? As I'm sure you know, most "soap" today isn't what people called "soap" decades ago. Maybe some people even have coriander scented soap.

[daftpunk] All the stink bugs I know live along the eastern coast of Australia.

[sense] Taste here means both what food tastes like and general having of preferences with or without reasoning.

On the one hand, I think hate vs like does require some sort of justification. You can like something without really caring, but hate means that you REALLY care.

I can barely tolerate cilantro, because I grew up with it in salsas and sauces. At the same time I can and will pick 1mm specks out of a sauce, if there aren't very many. Many people who "like" cilantro, often don't even notice it's presence, while I will immediately notice even tiny amounts. People confuse it for parsley? Bleagh!

I had never heard the stink bug smell correlation, and though I agree it is similar, the strong soapy stevia like taste is just much worse compared to the smell, which I can tolerate.

Mind if I ask, how did you encounter the taste of a soap?? It boggles my mind, can there be so many people tasting soap?

I don't remember when's the last time I tasted soap, but it's just something you don't forget.

At least in one of my chem classes we where taught bases vs acids and we definitely tasted soap then.

Also, showering.

I do. It was around 1955 when I was 7 years old. I said a bad word and my mother literally took a bar of soap and shoved it in my mouth. I still vividly recall how horrible it tasted and felt.

Ever not rinsed a glass enough after washing it?

Ever had beer?

It tastes like you didn't rinse all the dish soap out of a glass, surely you've experienced that at some point in your life, probably more often if you've ever hand washed dishes.

That's fair enough, I probably should have contrasted 'love' vs. 'hate'. The difference in magnitude wasn't intentional.

I meant to point out that the negative is more often treated as "wrong" or something to fix while the positive is more often simply accepted. I think this is true in general, at least in western/english conversation. But the coriander conversation is notable because apathy or plain dislike for the flavour can be "backed up" with the definitely true genetic explanation. Although in that sense, you actually "can't not like coriander".

As an aside, why add footnotes with misc words/brands rather than numbers?

It's a fun style of writing OP probably grew up reading, Terry Pratchett is a good example. They're asides.

Happy to answer, I hope this quick list will be satisfactory despite its messiness:

- numbers make the order (more) significant, making reordering the text more costly

- compared to numbers, words are often easier to spot and jump to

- compared to numbers, the words have some connection to the point (not saying I do this perfectly!) so you don't have to remember which (number) footnote you were looking for

- ADHD

- herbalessence because coriander is a herb, and Maybe some people even have coriander scented soap

- daftpunk because 'Around the World (around the world)'

> compared to numbers, words are often easier to spot and jump to

Symbols I'd agree with, but words blend together the same way numbers do for me. Words just aren't visually distinctive enough.

Long live *, †, and ‡!

Thank you! I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on with the bracketed words.

I didn't try very hard, because the post was already heavy down voted and I thought maybe there just wasn't much sense to be made of it, but I'm glad someone explained.

Suffice it to say I would rather deal with numbers out of order than random words.

> I doubt I would have described it as soap-like[herbalessence] or stink buggy without being "primed" though.

I thought this way until a few days ago, when I smelled some new soap in the shower and the thought popped unbidden into my head, "Man, this smells like cilantro!"

> Wikipedia's explanation tells me that the flavour of coriander is actually -- chemically -- like soap in some sense [...]

> Maybe the flavour of coriander is actually like soap [...]

What the Wikipedia article says is that coriander contains some aldehydes, which some people find to taste like soap, based on genetics. I tried to find whether the taste of actual soap is also caused by the same aldehydes. As far as I can tell, there's no chemical link. Soap has different chemical compounds, which most people seem to identify as "taste of soap", regardless of their appreciation for coriander.

Also, based on the reported percentages, it's literally abnormal (i.e. not in the norm) to taste soap in coriander. That easily explains why someone would need to justify their distaste for it. Up until 10 years ago, I had never heard of this coriander/soap relation, so the first person I encountered with this predisposition was met with puzzlement. Then I met another, and now before adding coriander to a dish, I make sure that everyone agrees with it.

For me, it tastes like dish soap specifically, like if you swirled a little dish soap into a glass of water. I always assumed the local Mexican food place just had bad dish rinsing practices until I learned that cilantro was responsible for the flavor.

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