I’ve been wondering for a while now if I might have that gene or whether Cilantro is just a herb i dislike. I can stomach dishes with cilantro in them, but it just stings through everything. No matter how little was put in, it tastes to me like somebody over-cilantro’d the dish. I’ve never eaten anything where I thought “Mmmh, yes, there’s a subtle hint of cilantro” - it’s always “Oh, there’s the cilantro, and it’s just too strong”.
But whenever I read about this online, people say that it tastes like soap. It’s been a couple of years since I was toddler enough to just put soap in my mouth. But in my mind, the taste of soap is mostly bitter, with an overwhelming tropical/fruity/citrussy flavor of whatever the producers decided to make the soap smell like. I also imagine it having a really unpleasant texture/mouthfeel. I have no urge to try eating soap, just so I can compare it with the taste of a herb. And I assume that most people with the Cilantro-gene also haven’t made an actual taste-comparison. So hence my question: In what way does anything - but cilantro in particular - taste like soap?
I have that version of the gene according to 23 and Me. Note that every human has that gene, but there are slight variations in its sequence (that’s how genes work, common variants are called alleles).
All I knew was that I hated food from Mexican food trucks and restaurants. As many other people in this thread mentioned, the food sometimes tasted like dirty water in the dishwasher, or like a dish sponge. Like soap, mold, overall a dirty and disgusting muddled mess, not a specific taste. I didn’t think the taste was coming from cilantro, I thought the food was prepared with dirty equipment and spoiled ingredients.
I moved from Europe to California as an adult, and I was eating cilantro regularly, including on street tacos from food trucks, and liked the taste. The whole thing only clicked later: when cilantro is mixed in a sauce, like in the guacamole in some burritos, that’s disgusting. I also don’t like chimichurri. Freshly chopped cilantro is delicious.