What Does Human Taste Like?

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Eating your own boogers is gross, but it might be smart. Assuming you have clean fingers, lung specialist Friedrich Bischinger points out that snot contains antiseptic enzymes that kill or weaken bacteria. Reintroducing those crippled microorganisms may allow your immune system to develop antibodies in relative safety. Now, that is good to know—nose.

But is eating your own snot cannibalism? Self-cannibalism. Just like a cow or chicken or fish or fruit or vegetable, you are made out of a lot of edible things. The meat on an average human body contains 77,000 dietary calories worth of nutritional energy. Yum! If you decide to become a cannibal, just don't show up late for dinner or you'll get the cold shoulder.

Jokes aside, cannibalism is a major taboo. It's off-putting at a visceral level. Humans have dignity; they are more than just skin bags full of organs. They're more than just something to put on a plate. But human meat has been put on plates... and in bellies. There are reports of cannibalism occurring in times of famine as a last resort, and because of curiosity and art.

In the late 1980s, artist Rick Gibson publicly ate human tonsils and other donated human parts in London and Canada. In 2006, artist Marco Evaristti cooked and canned meatballs prepared with his own body fat, removed via liposuction. In 2011, Dutch TV presenters Dennis Storm and Valerio Zeno cooked and ate pieces of each other on a TV show whose title meant "guinea pigs." Because both of them lived, and both consented to the act, they didn't do anything illegal.

One year later, a Japanese man posted this tweet. Five diners took up his offer, and on April 13th, 2012, they were served a $250 per plate meal consisting of his genitals. A darker story occurred in 2001 when Armin Meiwes ate and killed a volunteer he found on the now-defunct Cannibal Cafe. Although his meal ostensibly consented to the menu, Meiwes was convicted of murder and now, serving a life sentence in prison, has become a devout vegetarian.

Disgust aside, one question remains. If you were to use your taste buds to taste your bud, what would it taste like? To be clear, taste is a sensation caused by something in your mouth chemically reacting with receptors in your taste buds. Flavor is the even more complex experience of taste, combined with smell, and information from the trigeminal nerve about things like temperature, texture, pain, and pungency, as far as the cooked but otherwise unadulterated, spice-less, sauce-less flavor of human meat.

The late William Seabrook provided, in my opinion, the best description. While in West Africa, Seabrook interviewed members of the Gear tribe, people who had eaten human flesh, and found their descriptions unsatisfactory. So, when he returned to Paris, he struck a sneaky deal with an intern at the Sorbonne and obtained a chunk of human meat from an otherwise healthy body recently involved in an accident.

He carefully prepared the meat and wrote that, quote, "It was like good, fully developed veal. Not young, but not yet beef. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic tastes, such as, for instance, goat, high game, and pork. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender and in color, texture, smell, as well as taste strengthened my certainty that, of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."

Seabrook never gave us any recipes or complementary flavor recommendations. But that brings us to this video's title's second meaning. What does human taste like? What does the human palate prefer? Interestingly, of all the possible combinations of identified flavors we consume, human cuisine only features a relatively small number of recipes.

A couple of years ago, scientific reports published a great paper on the chemistry and networks behind food pairing. Researchers took 381 ingredients used in five global cuisines and 1,021 molecular compounds known to contribute to their flavors and created a flavor network. The size of the bubble represents the ingredients' prevalence in cooking. The thickness of the lines connecting ingredients reflects the number of flavor-inducing molecules they significantly share.

The researchers' flavor network backbone spans fourteen different food categories and is quite interesting. By comparing this network to tens of thousands of recipes, they found that North American and Western European dishes tend to combine ingredients that share flavor compounds, while East Asian cuisine avoids them. But that trend was caused by a few outliers in each cuisine that, if ignored, caused the difference in amount of sharing to lessen.

Those few ingredients tend to be the most authentic. They tend to be the most responsible for the taste palette of a regional cuisine and contribute to this illuminating visualization. But some flavors don't go together in any cuisine. For instance, orange juice and toothpaste. Why does orange juice taste so disgusting right after brushing?

Well, most toothpastes contain sodium lauryl sulfate—a chemical that helps the paste get sudsy and frothy during use. That action helps pull brushed-off debris away from your teeth, but sodium lauryl sulfate also suppresses sweet receptors in your mouth and destroys phospholipids that inhibit your bitter receptors, making sweet orange juice taste not so sweet and grossly bitter for up to an hour after brushing.

What interests me the most about flavor is the fact that the things that cause it eventually become you! You are what you eat, scientifically. Your body is always losing dead cells, but the elements and molecules you ingest are processed by your body into new body. Here's a fun way to think about it. Under the direction of DNA, a cat is made out of air, water, and cat food. That's it. Cats have less varied diets than humans. We can taste sweetness, but cats lack the gene required to do so.

However, they can taste ATP, a molecule that moves around chemical energy for cells to use in the body, which may be a sign to them that they're tasting meat. The point is, sights and sounds and textures and shapes and smells are the names we give to things that eventually become our memories. But flavor is the name we give to the experience of things that eventually become our bodies.

Contemplating the flavor of human meat is gross. But think of it this way: you're currently tasting human; you're tasting human right now. Your tongue and taste buds are in contact with your mouth almost constantly. Now, granted, it's more of a passive thing—your mouth just happens to contain your tongue. You're not actually eating yourself... but you kind of are. Your body is constantly swallowing your own mucus and digesting pieces of your body like dead cells from your tongue and cheek.

But that's nothing compared to the self-cannibalism of the sea squirt. The sea squirt lives a sort of self-cannibalistic "Flowers for Algernon" life. When born, it resembles a tadpole and has a notochord, putting it in the same phylum as humans. It swims around until it finds a nice place to adhere—a rock, a plant. Once stuck, it begins retrogressive metamorphosis, literally digesting its own nervous system, eating the closest thing it ever had to a brain and lives the rest of its life in a sensile, un-locomoting clump.

It is a bit of a downgrade, but they are prime evidence that the evolution of the brain was spawned by the need to move. As these guys don't need to move around, they eat their brains. That is way more extreme than the self-cannibalism you participate in every day by swallowing. But don't feel bad. About every three months or so, you swallow and digest your own body weight worth of you.

That means that every day you are a little more than one percent of the mythical ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. You are what you eat, but you are also a thing that you eat. And as always, thanks for watching.