The Good, The Bad, The Cilantro

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You know, my enmity for cilantro runs deep, but it runs right next to my dissatisfaction and frustration with the public's lack of empathy for those of us.

who just can't stand cilantro.

And if you read the articles online, the comments are all filled with people say, but I love cilantro you are wrong we don't say that to people who are dealing with other frustrating physical ailments and it certainly doesn't compare to you know

a handicap that would get in the way of a productive life but on the other hand Mexican food gone Thai food gone waiters staring at you just because you were born in a culture at a time where there wasn't a lot of cilantro.

It's not my fault.

I just hate cilantro.

And I just love it, although I call it coriander because that's what we do in England.

That, by the way, is Seth Godin.

He's a marketing guru type person.

You may well have heard of him.

He is also a best-selling author, and I am with Seth.

I absolutely despise cilantro.

And like the rest of my fellow Americans, I call the leaves cilantro and the seeds coriander.

I do actually really like the seeds.

You are listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this week we are taking on the extremely divisive subject of cilantro and trying to solve some of its many mysteries.

Why is this southern European plant not really used in southern European cooking?

Is there a genetic reason why some people are cilantro haters?

And can they be helped to appreciate its many charms?

Nikki, I'm going to start off by sharing how I discovered just how much I hate cilantro.

It was 1992, I was in college, and I went to lunch in DC with three of my friends.

We were out at a Vietnamese restaurant, and something in the dish tasted really off to me.

I had no idea what it was.

Then my friend Elaine said, You have to try my absolute favorite thing, and she dumped this big green stem onto my soup spoon.

I put it in my mouth, I chewed, and then I promptly spit it out.

I had discovered just what was making the dish taste so bad, and I discovered that I hated cilantro.

I don't remember my first time, but Seth does.

It was on First Street in Kendall Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1979.

It was probably early in the year.

I was in college and I went to a Malaysian restaurant across the street from Lechmere and I said, what is this?

And it literally was stunning.

It was the same year I had sushi for the first time and sushi was fine.

Cilantro not so much.

So what happens when you encounter cilantro?

Can you talk us through your

reaction?

So in a double-blind lab setting, I would probably taste a soapiness, and then I would begin to anticipate what happens after that, which is a headache.

But the headache is now mostly psychosomatic because the soapiness triggers the headache, and so the soapiness triggers the feeling that the headache is coming.

But in the real world, what I feel is frustration because...

It's not in my house.

I'm at a restaurant.

I'm with friends.

I'm about to enjoy something that I'm not going to enjoy anymore.

And I'm frustrated because I had to go through that whole social embarrassment of saying in front of everyone, oh, and by the way, leave this off and leave this off and leave this off because I'm a cranky old guy and I don't want cilantro.

Speaking of that, do you have a technique?

I mean, I, so you know, I travel a lot in South America and I love going to the types of restaurants you talked about.

And, you know, you have to ask the waiters or maybe pick some out.

Do you have a technique for dealing with cilantro in your dishes?

Well, for a long time, I had a card in my wallet in five languages that said,

please, I do not eat meat.

I do not eat cilantro.

Thank you very much.

And I would just hand it to the waiter.

And and that works pretty well.

But most of the time now I just move things around on the plate because it's such a hassle to constantly go through this whole litany of being a picky eater when I see myself as an omnivore.

Are your family also haters?

Not only does my do my kids like cilantro, they like having cilantro near me.

They think that that's a thrilling way to show their independence as young adults.

So they deliberately flaunt their cilantro in front of you?

Sometimes it's in the refrigerator.

And they say, well, I bought it with my own money, Dad.

And it's like, I don't care.

It's my refrigerator.

I don't want any cilantro in my refrigerator.

Cilantro torture.

That is an amazing idea.

Please don't try that out on me.

Oh, just you wait.

Seth and I have plans for you.

But first, let's get to know your enemy.

This plant, which scientists call Coriandrum sativum,

has its origins in southern Europe and the Middle Middle East.

That's Mike Balak.

He's vice president of botanical science at the New York Botanical Garden and author of a 21st century herbal.

In fact, 8 to 10,000 years ago, people were using it, and we have archaeological remains of seeds from an area around the Dead Sea in Israel.

And we know it's been cultivated in Europe for at least 3,000 years.

The earliest recipe with cilantro in it is actually written on a Babylonian clay tablet.

It's used with cumin and a few other spices in a stew.

Cilantro's had a very noble career, actually.

It was placed in the pharaoh's tombs and used to perfume the hanging gardens of Babylon.

And the Romans used to make a pesto out of it.

But wherever cilantro was eaten, it was also used medicinally.

The leaves are used to dispel gas.

They're used to treat indigestion and vomiting and diarrhea, in addition to being a food plant.

In many countries, that pungent smell is thought to be an aphrodisiac.

Of course,

as we say, some people can't stand a taste, so it probably can also impact the opposite direction.

Mike's right.

Cilantro hate is as old as cilantro itself.

It makes its earliest appearance in print in early Renaissance-era books.

The writers compare the smell of cilantro to bedbugs.

And in fact,

the name apparently comes from the Greek word for bed bug.

So something something smelly,

not necessarily a nice, nice thing to add to whatever dish you're having.

Harold McGee is a food scientist.

You may well have his famous book in your kitchen.

It's called On Food and Cooking.

It explains everything about cooking scientifically.

But there is at least one thing about cilantro that he doesn't have a good explanation for.

Why did it basically disappear from European cuisine?

It it is a big puzzle.

And And

I've

skimmed what I can in

Western European literature and recipe books and so on to try to figure it out.

And a couple of people have written about this.

I still haven't seen a good explanation because people clearly did use it in Roman times.

Then it just does kind of disappear.

It's there in herbals,

but not really actively used.

And then it kind of shows up in Portuguese cooking, of all things, but nothing between Italy and Portugal.

So I really don't have a good explanation for it.

It's a very unusual, peculiar kind of career that cilantro has had.

Things get weirder when cilantro crosses the pond.

Despite its slide from popularity in Europe, Mike Balak says that...

In fact, it was one of the early spices that the colonists to the United States brought with them.

One of the first ones that planted here.

I hate to break it to you, Cynthia, but the first place cilantro touched down in the Americas was your home state, Massachusetts.

And then it disappeared because I can tell you that traditional New England cuisine is not full of cilantro, luckily for me.

But it became hugely popular in South America.

Another mystery.

But it means that when Mexican and Vietnamese and Thai food all started to become more mainstream in the U.S.

in the 80s and 90s, that cilantro was hitting hitting virgin taste buds.

Like yours, Cynthia.

Exactly.

And it was not a hit with everyone.

There was this amazing article in the Washington Post in 1994 by a woman who just hated it.

That was my senior year.

Those three women from the Vietnamese restaurant and I were now roommates, and my friend Melissa and I ran around the house brandishing the article.

I was not alone.

And since then, a fully-fledged anti-cilantro campaign has sprung up.

There are I Hate Cilantro websites, there are celebrity haters, Julia Julia Child came out as one on Larry King in 2002.

And a lot of these haters blame their genes.

I've read that.

I certainly think that most of my responses to taste and smell have some potential basis in genetics, but I wasn't sure.

So we called up Charles Waisaki at the Monell Chemical Census Center.

He's done a few studies on the relationship between genetics and cilantro loving or hating.

There are cilantro lovers and there are cilantro haters.

And my training has always been that if you see this huge huge amount of variability in some trait,

it's likely to have some genetic contribution to that.

And so he went to Twinsburg, Ohio with some cilantro.

In Twinsburg, Ohio, the first weekend in August, there's a twins festival that is held annually.

And it's quite amazing.

There are thousands of people there and twins and triplets, some quads.

It's really a stunning sight.

If you've never seen that many twins before, the first time you experience it, it's amazing.

But Chuck and his colleagues weren't there just a gog.

Twins are very good to study if you have a suspicion that there's some underlying genetic contribution to variation.

And when I speak of variation, with respect to cilantro, which is one of the compounds that we studied, there is a significant variation in the response that people give.

They had each twin smell both cilantro and basil.

Basil, because it supposedly doesn't have as much variability in whether people like it or not.

And the twins rated the herbs on how pleasant and how intense the smell was.

As expected, we had the full gamut from, I hate it, it smells like terrible soap, to the other end of the extreme where it's very savory,

it's I'll eat it all the time.

And was it hard to persuade some of those cilantro haters to actually taste the leaf?

We actually had the cilantro haters also put the cilantro in their mouth and chew it and give us a response.

And

as you can well imagine, we weren't the most like people for those haters.

More cilantro torture.

But this was for science.

And what Chuck and his colleagues found is that there were three genes linked to whether you like cilantro or not.

One gene was related to the way molecules get turned into taste experience on the tongue.

One was to do with bitter receptors.

receptors, and the final one had to do with how you sense astringency and spiciness, chili peppers, and things like that.

So, those are the genetic variations that seem to influence whether you're a liker or a hater.

But strangely, the experience isn't because of taste on your tongue, it's because of smell.

We do know that if you have a cilantro hater and you have that individual plug their nose and then chew on some cilantro leaves, they do not tell you that it tastes terrible.

It's not until they let go of their nose that they then respond, oh, what did you do to me?

If you're keeping count at home, this is cilantro mystery number four.

Why are the genes that are associated with liking or disliking related to taste when the actual thing that people are responding to is the smell of cilantro?

They investigated this further.

They put cilantro through a machine that separates out the different chemicals that make up its complex smell and taste.

The machine that does this separation releases the different chemicals in order of how quickly they boil off.

At 23 minutes, Charles says there's a really unpleasant kind of soapy scent.

Then 10 minutes later, there's a really nice smelling green, herbaceous, aromatic compound that gets released.

He says, for likers, that's the smell of cilantro.

We've had people who were cilantro haters and put their nose on the machine and they could not detect that compound.

But they did get the soapy characteristic.

So one interpretation of that is that individuals who are cilantro haters don't get that very pleasant smelling aromatic character, but they do get the soapy component that overwhelms their overall impression.

Another interpretation might be that cilantro likers have the ability to smell the

very pleasant compound, but they have a reduced ability to smell the unpleasant soapy characteristic.

We don't know which way it goes yet.

It's going to take some additional research to get an answer to that.

That is weird, quite frankly.

So, Nikki, we don't know if you're smelling something delicious that I just can't sense, or if I'm smelling something horrible that doesn't come through to you at all.

Or if the nice smell I can smell just outweighs the nasty one, but you don't get the nice one, so you don't see the point.

Man, cilantro is like a riddle wrapped in an enigma, or whatever the expression is.

And then Chuck told us something even weirder.

He said some people who originally hated cilantro eventually do start to like it.

We know from some unpublished studies,

we have done some survey work.

We have people who start out as cilantro haters.

So they're likely at the genetic level on the one end of the spectrum.

However, over the course of time and exposures to the cilantro, they become a liker.

So people can change what we call their phenotype, that is what you're able to measure.

So they're likely to rate the cilantro as pleasant after the numerous experiences with the herb, even though at the genetic level they may be a cilantro hater.

This might explain something that seems bizarre to me.

There doesn't seem to be as much passionate dislike of cilantro in South America and Asia as there is in Europe and North America.

I had originally wondered whether maybe there were fewer people in those regions with the dislike genetic variants.

But Harold threw cold water on that theory.

It's hard to get good data on that question, And the few studies that I've seen that make an attempt to generally find that cilantro hating in general is pretty low pretty much everywhere,

which is surprising given the vehemence with which you see it expressed online.

And you get this feeling that there's a large, angry crowd of cilantro haters out there.

But in fact, it's somewhere between 3 and 10 percent, almost no matter what ethnic background you look at, which is pretty small.

There's not a lot of research money floating around to study cilantro dislike.

Despite it being the most pressing issue of our time, of course.

So basically, some people might be able to overcome their genetic predisposition.

Well, yes.

And when I wrote that piece back in 2010, I think it was, I spoke with a neurobiologist named Jay Gottfried at Northwestern University.

He studies flavor perception and the development of likes and dislikes.

And it turns out that he is a reformed cilantrophobe.

So he could speak from personal experience.

His interpretation, based on what he knows about how the brain works and his own experience, is that it's not necessarily that you're born hating cilantro.

It may be that you're born with an especial sensitivity to the compounds that give cilantro its particular aroma.

And it turns out that it shares those aroma compounds with things like soap and hand lotions.

That's just the chemistry of it.

And so if you grow up in a culture where your first exposure to those particular smells is in soap and hand lotions,

then when it comes to you on a plate, you don't really want to put it in your mouth.

That's not where it belongs.

Whereas if you grow up in a culture that uses it all the time in cooking and you first experience it at the dinner table with your parents and your siblings and so on, then it has a very different set of associations and you're going to like it.

So, there's hope for you yet, Cynthia.

It is hard for me to believe that's even a possibility.

But I have a friend named Toni Mazzaya who runs a food tour company in Florence, Italy, called Taste Florence.

She was on our last episode talking about how much Italians love their bitter greens.

I trust her taste buds.

I used to detest cilantro.

I did not like it anywhere near my food.

If even a little piece was in my food, I could not eat that dish.

I just felt like it invaded all the flavors.

But then something changed.

I don't know.

I don't know how it happened.

I mean, your taste buds do adapt as you get older.

And because the first few times I had it, maybe I had it where they were overusing it.

You know, a lot of the time in the States, we have a tendency to do that.

where we'll take an ingredient and just, you know, use it abundantly in a dish.

I maybe I

my tastes change.

So that's two actual people, Jake Gottfried and your friend Tony, and however many people Chuck Wasaki surveyed in his unpublished data, too.

You know, the evidence is piling up that conversion is possible, Cynthia.

I'm not yet convinced.

But after he talked to his neurobiologist friend, Harold McGee certainly thought cilantro haters could be converted, so he came up with an idea to help people like me embrace our culinary nemesis.

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I came across the fact that in Portugal people throw handfuls of cilantro into soups and things and they also make a pesto out of it instead of using basil.

So I tried making the pesto and was kind of disappointed that it didn't have a really strong cilantro flavor because I'm one of those people who happens to like it.

But then I thought, well, actually, that's a good thing for people who aren't wild about it.

It's really toned down.

And so maybe that's the place to start.

If you want to learn to like cilantro, but it's going to take an effort, maybe starting with the pesto is a good place.

And then he dug up a Japanese study showing that chopping up cilantro leaves really fine allowed the plant enzymes to mix with the particular chemicals that have that soapy smell and take them down a notch.

So there's some science behind this pesto theory.

Okay, so my source is Harold McGee, and Harold is rarely wrong.

Sometimes he is.

That's Seth Gooden, the cilantro hater who got us started today.

He had heard about Harold's pesto conversion therapy.

And so reading between the lines, if you made cilantro pesto and had it breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a few days in a row, maybe you could get over it.

So I have done this three times, bought the cilantro, bought the walnuts because pinuts are too expensive, and gotten ready ready to make vegan cilantro pesto for three or four days in a row.

And then I haven't opened the bag because I just can't do the last step.

I just can't put myself

without knowing that it's going to work.

If I knew it was going to work, I would do it.

But I need someone, I need you to test it and then announce to me that it's worth the journey.

You're going to make me do this because you can't do it.

Correct.

I'm a little scared now.

And yeah, I mean, the headache is yours, not mine.

It's all you.

You're the professional.

And so begins cilantro mystery number five.

Can Cynthia be converted by pesto?

Okay, I'm standing in front of the cilantro section, and I can smell it without even touching it.

And I'm gonna take down the two bunches.

Oh my god, I can't handle the smell.

I don't think I can do this.

Okay, I have to buy the rest of the ingredients for the pesto.

Picture an evil smile on my face right now.

Thanks.

I went over to my friend Abby's house to make the pesto.

I needed moral support, and she loves cilantro.

Pesto.

A half cup of toasted almonds.

I have those.

Three cups.

Coriander leaves and tender stems.

They want tender stems.

Garlic, olive oil, and grated cheese.

Okay.

Doesn't that smell good?

At least it smells good to one of us.

Do I need to measure it?

Maybe we can just throw it in the blender.

I mean, it's supposed to be three cups, right?

What do you think?

No, I think we can probably just throw it in.

Let's just take out some of the bigger stems.

I know you're reluctant to handle it.

Yeah, it's true.

Aww.

Poor Cynthia's retching.

I could do this without breathing through my nose.

Yeah, there it is.

Okay, it's turning into pesto.

Hmm.

Is that working?

Yeah, actually, I can't really smell it.

When you stick your nose in, what do you smell?

No, I smell cheese and garlic and nuts.

And those are all things I like.

In fact, those are all things I love.

It smells delicious.

It

does because it doesn't smell like cilantro.

So that's a smell test, but you tried it, right?

I tried to try it.

Do I have to eat it by itself, or can I put it on something?

I don't know.

You're going all in with a spoon.

Okay, I can't believe I'm eating this voluntarily.

It still tastes like cilantro.

I'm not quite there.

Just to let the listeners know, I gave Cynthia the absolutely tiniest bite possible, and she managed to eat about a quarter of it.

I'll eat the rest of it.

Yeah, so, okay, your turn.

You can taste the cilantro when you taste it.

Kind of at the end.

Mm-hmm.

It tastes very green.

It is reminiscent of basil pesto, but you need to be a cilantro lover for this pesto.

The next morning, I mixed in about a teaspoon of the pesto into some rice for breakfast.

If I'm trying to desensitize myself, would it help if I plugged my nose?

Or maybe that defeats the purpose.

Maybe I'm supposed to get used to the smell.

I don't know, but I really don't like it.

Ah, yeah.

It's really.

Okay, I made it through only about half of that half a cup with that teaspoon of cilantro.

I can't do it.

I hate, hate, hate throwing food away, but I think I have to put the rest of this rice in the compost.

I just, I can't do it.

This was not working so well.

We turned to Harold for advice.

What Jay Gottfried at Northwestern said was you just want to ingest it in pleasant circumstances.

You're still going to find it unpleasant to begin with, but if the context is pleasant, if you're having it with friends, people who enjoy it and who are not going to give you a hard time, then eventually you'll associate it with pleasurable things.

I think the message here is try harder, Cynthia.

I am taking Harold McGee's advice.

I made myself a delicious lunch.

There's cooked kale and scallions and tomatoes and feta, and I am super excited to have a bite.

So I'm very happy in my food situation.

And now

I'm going to add a tiny bit of cilantro pesto just to one part of it so that I don't have to compost this the way I did with my rice yesterday morning.

I'm going to take a bite.

I just spoiled my kale.

There are very few things that can spoil kale, tomato, and feta for me.

Harold, I don't think this is going to work.

Coach Harold got back on the line.

And if you just try to approach it, I think a little bit analytically as well.

And

as you eat it and have your sort of automatic reaction, try to step back from it a little bit and ask yourself, what is it about this that really bothers you?

And if it's the soapy quality, well, you can look at it and see that it's not soap, it's something green.

And so try to imagine that you're just eating it as

a green leaf for the first time.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

At least I think that's what they said in kindergarten.

Today I'm eating a dish with a really strong regular pesto, which I adore.

Lots and lots of basil and there's garlic and the parmesan and it's awesome.

Absolutely fantastic.

Could not be happier.

Now I'm going to put a little bit of cilantro pesto on the side of it.

And this time I'm gonna do what Harold said.

I'm gonna try to think about what the flavor it is and tell myself it's not soap, if that's what it speaks to me.

I'm looking at it.

It's green.

It's gorgeous.

It looks like the pesto that's in my dish that I love.

And it just tastes, it just tastes really bad.

I tried one more time after that and it still did not work.

Scientifically speaking, I think we have to take this as convincing proof that Harold's pesto theory is not a universally successful conversion therapy.

Something must work for some people.

Jay Gottfried eventually liked it, and Tony did.

You know what I think the problem is?

You don't want it enough.

I do, I do, in theory, I guess.

I mean, I'd love to be able to travel around South America and not try to pick out green leaves and stems all the time.

I just have a hard time imagining that something that inspires such intense dislike for me would ever change.

But here's the thing.

Does it really matter?

We all perceive the world differently.

Your basil, Nikki, it's not the same as my basil, and so there are just some things I don't like.

Who cares?

Well, you're missing out.

Guacamole is nothing without cilantro.

Guacamole is so much more delicious without the cilantro in it.

I'm not even going to stoop to that argument.

But it is true that we all live in slightly different sensory universes, especially when it comes to smell.

It is certainly true that there is tremendous variation, especially in our experiences of smells.

We published a paper a couple of years ago suggesting that there's so much variability in the human genome that no two individuals are experiencing the same olfactory world.

That's scientist Chuck Waisaki again.

There are other smells that individuals cannot experience, whereas others find them totally offensive.

For example, if I'm out in the countryside and I come across roadkill skunk, my window goes down.

I very much enjoy the smell of skunk.

My wife, on the other hand,

will not let me put the window down if she's in the car.

This is an even bigger mystery than cilantro.

Whoever heard of someone liking the smell of roadkill skunk?

I can't even imagine.

But you know, the final mystery for me about cilantro is why are there such violent feelings about it?

I mean, Chuck likes skunk, my basil's not the same as yours.

And I don't love beets, but who cares?

It's not anything I'd start a blog about.

Whereas people get really, really passionate about cilantro.

Why?

Again, that's a really good question.

I started that piece in 2010 by quoting Julia Child, who was a cosmopolitan eater and who said if she came across raw cilantro on a dish, she would throw it on the floor, which is a pretty strong statement.

So it's a really good question.

To me, that's one of

the ongoing mysteries in food,

why it inspires such

deep feeling.

Well, I love it.

I personally very much enjoy cilantro.

Because I'm one of those people who happens to like it.

It has a very pungent flavor.

I love it.

I love it now.

I love it with lime.

I love it, especially in Thai food.

So you're in the minority, really, Cynthia.

It's true.

What did Harold say?

You know, maybe 3 to 10% of people hate it, but we're loud.

I don't know why, but it certainly inspires deep feelings.

It's possible that there's just no hope for you and cilantro are never going to get along.

It might be true.

You're both under the wrong sign.

Might be possible.

You're a Capricorn, right?

Cilantro is like a Gemini or something.

It's just all wrong for you.

But I am a Gemini.

And I do like you, so maybe there's hope for cilantro.

We have lots of people to thank this episode.

Seth Godin set us this challenge.

This episode is his fault, and I hope he's grateful.

Thanks, Seth.

I have some leftover pesto I can send you.

Thanks also to Mike Balak.

He's vice president of botanical science at the New York Botanical Garden, and he recently published a book called 21st Century Herbal, a practical guide for healthy living using nature's most powerful plants.

Thanks to Harold McGee, I'm a huge fan of his writing and of his book on food and cooking.

But I'm sorry, Harold, I just couldn't make your experiment work.

Thanks to Abby Klema for moral cilantro pesto support.

And finally, thanks to Charles Wysaki, Emeritus Member of the Monel Chemical Census Center in Philadelphia and Skunk Smell aficionado.

If you're a gastropod liker, feel free to make a donation at gastropod.com.

Also, you can find all the links to the cilantro studies and articles there.

And if you decide to try out the pesto desensitization technique yourself, please do let us know.

I would love to hear if it works for someone else.

We are on Facebook and Twitter at Gastropodcast, so you can connect with us there or email contact at gastropod.com.

We'll be back in two weeks with a trip to Mexico to explore the history and science of tequila and mezcal.

Salud.

Till next time.

Support for this show comes from Nike.

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