Life & Style | Food

Love, hate and the herb

Don't blame your taste buds for how you feel about coriander -- it's all in the genes

  • By Laura Vozzella, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
  • Published: 23:23 June 26, 2009
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  • Image Credit: Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
  • Fresh and green

“I just hate it,'' says Susan Hill, a stay-at-home mum. “Oh, I do.''

The fresh herb Hill detests is also known as Chinese parsley and cilantro. It looks much like Italian flat-leaf parsley.

And a good thing too! Coriander has so many enemies that it could use a couple of aliases and a way to pass for something else in the herb garden.

Once an exotic flavour confined to Mexican, Asian and Indian cooking, coriander turns up today even in the most basic restaurants.

Many people love the herb. Just as many, it seems, hate it. There appears to be no middle ground, and the reason for that just might come down to genetics.

Scientists have yet to isolate the coriander-hating gene, but a Philadelphia researcher who put twins up to sniffing the herb is hot on the trail.

“The twin study we've done implicates genetics to be involved,'' said Charles J. Wysocki, a behavioural neuroscientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Centre who, for what it's worth, is not a coriander-hater.

If human DNA really does account for why some people think the herb has a fresh, citrusy flavour and others think it tastes like soap that could also explain the existence of IHateCoriander.com and its ability to attract 2,809 members.

Strong opinions

Passions run so high that some restaurants will happily hold the coriander meant for many house specialties — even in places with a strict no-substitutions policy that it won't hold the chilli sauce or even serve it on the side because it's “essential to the dishes that include it.''

Customers who make this request might have a genetically based inability to smell certain odours, which the body interprets as flavour when food's involved.

The condition is called specific anosmia, and Wysocki's twin study suggests it's the key to coriander-bashing.

If it's all genetic, those who detect soap could never hope to acquire the taste. But coriander can be an acquired distaste, due not to genetic makeup but culinary malpractice.

Many people probably overdosed on coriander in the 1990s when it started appearing everywhere, a bit like tarragon in the 1980s.

Epicures exist on both sides of the coriander divide. While many chefs celebrate it, no less a foodie than Julia Child told Larry King in 2002 that she thought coriander had “kind of a dead taste.''

The two herbs, she said, were the only foods she hated. Were she served either one, Child said, “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.''

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