Shahar Madjar, MD

Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series relating to flavors, smells and tastes.

Lately I have been comparing apples to apples. It started when Sharon asked me to bring apples from the grocery store. “Make sure it’s Honeycrisp,” she said. At Farmer Q’s Market, along U.S. 41 in Marquette, a short drive from my home, I immediately noticed Honeycrisp apples taking central stage. Beside other varieties of apples, I mean, such as Granny Smith, Gala, and Golden Delicious. All the apples seemed equally enticing to me, their colorful, tight skin shining as an invitation to celestial sweetness and heavenly tartness, to a warm apple-pie topped with a hearty scoop of vanilla ice cream. For a swift moment, I felt as if Eve herself was there, at Farmer Q’s Market, handing me an apple, along with a ticket to the Garden of Eden.

Comparing apples to apples, I have learned that apples are like snowflakes: you could mistake one apple for another. But, truly, there are 7,500 varieties of apples. They share similarities like snowflakes do (like people sometimes do).

For example, all apples belong to the species Malus Domestica. They are all edible. They are a good source of energy — a typical store-bought apple is about 100 calories — stored mostly in the form of fructose (fruit sugar). They all contain moderate amount of dietary fiber and only a small amount of proteins and other nutrients. And still, Sharon prefers Honeycrisp.

Susan, the owner of Farmer Q’s Market, pointed at a large chart hanging on the wall. It depicted the different varieties of apples along a scale that ranged from sweet to tart. Honeycrisp was on the sweet end of the spectrum. Another chart that I found on the internet rated apples not only according to their sweetness and tartiness, but also on their crunchiness and juiciness. On both charts, Granny Smith, for example, was on the other end of the spectrum, and very tart.

Whether we are talking about apples or not, flavor is king. Flavor is everywhere. And is at total disconnect from what would seem to have mattered most–nutritional value. Different varieties of apples may have identical nutritional values, yet we can decipher the slightest differences in flavor even among the most similar varieties; a toasted slice of bread has the same nutritional value as it had before toasting (save a minute amount of water lost in the process ), yet toasted bread tastes differently, and the experiences of spreading butter over it and biting into it are different.

In cooking, searing, roasting, frying, and baking processes, we don’t only make food more edible or more digestible, we bring flavors and sensual experiences to levels not recognized in the raw materials. A slice of cheesecake is perhaps nutritionally equal to the eggs, cheese, sugar and flour from which it was made; yet it doesn’t taste like an egg or sugar, nor flour; if prepared right, it tastes and feels like heaven.

I asked myself: if evolution is a process of natural selection, what type of competitive advantage does our ability to sense a great variety of flavors confer?

I thought about creatures, big and small, and about their sense of taste, and their ability to appreciate flavor. Did you know that an animal as small as a fruit fly–with taste receptors amazingly distributed along its mouth, legs, and wings–can discriminate between salty, sweet, and sour foods? A fish, I had thought, would open its mouth to all that is edible and swims past it, but it too, I learned, has tastebuds; I remembered the Dasypeltis scabra (a sub-Saharan snake) whom I once saw, in a videoclip, devouring a whole egg, shell included. I saw a dog enjoying a steak. And on another occasion, I watched a dog eating a bird that fell from a tree, feathers and all. And yet another dog, perhaps in the name of curiosity, eating its own excrement.

Still the fruit fly, the fish, the snake, the dog have all proven their ability to survive, even thrive through the turbulent, tortuous path Mother Nature and evolution took them.

I thought about what it means to be fed and what requirements would an ideal sensory system specializing in taste would have to meet. To live, to propagate its genes, a living creature would have to feel hunger, to be driven to search for food, to decipher the nutritional from the redundant, and to identify the harmful, and the poisonous.

How does our taste sense work? How can we distinguish among the millions of flavors we experience if our taste buds can decipher only 6 basic tastes? Does our sense of taste, and our superb ability to distinguish between millions of different flavor contribute to our survival as a species? Stay tuned.

Editor’s note: Dr. Shahar Madjar is a urologist at Aspirus and the author of “Is Life Too Long? Essays about Life, Death and Other Trivial Matters.” Contact him at smadjar@yahoo.com.