Hacker News Reader

Comment by gweinberg | Hacker News Reader

What's "wrong with people" is they don't like eating poison. You can train yourself to like anything, but the bitter alkaloids that give brussel sprouts and such their nasty bitter taste are indeed a toxin. There isn't enough to be dangerous in modern varieties, but there was in their wild ancestors.

View on HN

There's a saying, The bitter the better

Many bitter foods are highly nutritious.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/bitter-foods

Bitterness is quite literally the "this is poison, stop eating" taste category that incidentally happens to have a lot of false positives because for the most part it's cheaper to reject some good food than to accept eating some poison. An ironic thing to say in a thread about peppers, but still.

And much much more false negatives, which raises the question if the "stop eating this, this is bitter and bitter means poisonous" has any truth in it.

If bitter = poisonous, then the plants that evolve to be more bitter will be eaten less. Thus, non-poisonous foods that evolve to be more bitter have a genetic advantage over their less bitter counterparts.

That would be true if there were a fitness advantage for the plant when a herbivore dies, but in actually the fitness advantage comes from discouraging the herbivore from eating the plant.

They are much less bitter if the plants had been exposed to frost before harvesting. My parents used to have them in the garden. Brussels sprouts in winter were nice.

Never had to train myself, always just liked them, and they don't taste particularly bitter.

So I had a hunch it was like cilantro, and seems there's indeed a genetic reason[1].

So fair enough, if they taste bitter I'll accept it's not a nice side dish.

[1]: https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/12/04/brusselssprouts/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com