Book review: “Taste what you’re missing: the passionate eater’s guide to why good food tastes good” by Barb Stuckey

Stuckey’s approach is much lighter than in any of these other volumes. Her book is packed with personal anecdotes and, along the way, the reader certainly learns an awful lot about her eating habits not to mention those of her husband Roger (about whom, more later). Barb, it turns out, has a thing about tomatoes. The author honestly lays out her position at the start of the book when she states that: “But as someone who had avidly avoided science classes in school, I longed to read a straightforward book written for a layperson that could teach me how to taste food without first having to teach myself science. There wasn’t one, so I decided to write this book.” ([1], p. 7). Consistent with this objective, complex terms that might prove difficult for a lay audience to understand, such as orthonasal and retronasal olfaction, are simplified as ‘nose-smelling’ and ‘mouth-smelling’, respectively. Like the famous North American food critic, Jeffrey Steingarten, when I tested him in the lab here in Oxford some years ago, Barb strenuously objects to the label ‘supertaster’. This is the term, originally coined by Linda Bartoshuk, currently at the University of Florida, in order to describe those individuals (approximately one quarter to one third of the population) who exhibit an increased sensitivity to certain (especially bitter) tastants such as, for example, PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil) [5] as well as to oral-somatosensory textural cues [6]. Stuckey suggests that the putatively-pejorative terms ‘non-taster’ and ‘supertaster’ (which are typically used in the academic literature on the chemical senses) be replaced by the terms ‘tolerant taster’ and ‘hypertaster’, respectively. Barb and Roger are both hypertasters.Stuckey has certainly been speaking to the right people while doing her research for the book. The text includes numerous quotes from the interviews that she conducted with many of the best-known international figures from the world of flavor research: These includ