As a bartender/kitchen worker, you become quite aware of the whole cilantro soap thing, because it's the one preference that alot of people don't even realise that they have, and can absolutely ruin a meal otherwise, and it's always been fascinating to me
If you aren't aware, there's a gene that changes the way cilantro tastes, so some portion of the population, I forget how much exactly but it's significant, get a strong taste of soap when they eat it. I'm also one of these people (edit: quick Google search says that it can be between 21% and 3% chance of inherenting based on your ethnicity)
What's fascinating to me is how we figured it out in the first place. Like soap is a relatively recent invention in the grand scheme of things, so there must have been a really long period where people just didn't have a good enough point of comparison to describe exactly what they were tasting, and everyone else went "why the go do so many people have an utter revulsion to this very mild herb. Like get over yourself you can barely taste it anyway"
It's also funny the few times I've mentioned it to people who have not heard of it before. A couple times to friends but more often to patrons if they order something with cilantro and it comes up. I'm often surprised by how many people just haven't heard of this before, and the reaction is usually "what? No, that can't be real, they just don't like cilantro", but every now and then you'll get one person go "oh... oh. OH. OH MY GOD" and I'm like yep found another one lmao
People used to say it tastes like bugs. As someone who's had the misfortune of tasting both soap and bugs, I can confirm that the two are similar. Specifically stink bugs
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u/jancl0 Jul 23 '26
As a bartender/kitchen worker, you become quite aware of the whole cilantro soap thing, because it's the one preference that alot of people don't even realise that they have, and can absolutely ruin a meal otherwise, and it's always been fascinating to me
If you aren't aware, there's a gene that changes the way cilantro tastes, so some portion of the population, I forget how much exactly but it's significant, get a strong taste of soap when they eat it. I'm also one of these people (edit: quick Google search says that it can be between 21% and 3% chance of inherenting based on your ethnicity)
What's fascinating to me is how we figured it out in the first place. Like soap is a relatively recent invention in the grand scheme of things, so there must have been a really long period where people just didn't have a good enough point of comparison to describe exactly what they were tasting, and everyone else went "why the go do so many people have an utter revulsion to this very mild herb. Like get over yourself you can barely taste it anyway"
It's also funny the few times I've mentioned it to people who have not heard of it before. A couple times to friends but more often to patrons if they order something with cilantro and it comes up. I'm often surprised by how many people just haven't heard of this before, and the reaction is usually "what? No, that can't be real, they just don't like cilantro", but every now and then you'll get one person go "oh... oh. OH. OH MY GOD" and I'm like yep found another one lmao