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One of my co-workers has all kinds of rules about the foods she likes and dislikes: No cooked fruit (too sweet and mushy). No “sweet meat” (no barbecue sauce!). No raw tomatoes.

Courtesy Flickr user Phil Dragash

Another friend pretty much only likes foods that are beige: pasta, potatoes, creamy sauces. Nothing too spicy or tangy. She once came to an Indian restaurant with my family for a birthday celebration. We had to take her to McDonald’s afterward.

Some people will eat just about anything, but most of us have a few food rules of our own. My big no-nos are cilantro (tastes like glass cleaner) and mushrooms (tastes like mildew and feels like snails), other than certain flavorful wild or Asian varieties. I’m also not a huge fan of saffron (which I think tastes like dirty dishwater), though I can tolerate it doesn’t overwhelm other flavors. I love foods that are spicy, tangy or sweet—preferably at the same time—and garlic, lots of it.

How did we come by these strong flavor preferences, and why do they vary so much from person to person? A few weeks ago I wrote about one of the earliest influences on our food likes and dislikes, exposure to flavors via the womb and breast milk. But it isn’t just Mom who has a role in determining what we like to eat: the way we perceive some flavors is coded in our DNA.

One of the first discoveries of this phenomenon was in 1931, when a chemist named Arthur Fox was working with powdered PTC (phenylthiocarbamide) and some of it blew into the air. A colleague in the room commented that the powder tasted bitter, while Fox detected no flavor at all. They conducted an experiment among friends and family, and found wide variation in how (and whether) people perceived the flavor of the PTC.

Geneticists later discovered that the perception of PTC flavor (which, although it doesn’t occur in nature, is similar to naturally occurring compounds) was based in a single gene, TAS2R38, that codes for a taste receptor on the tongue. There are multiple versions of this gene, accounting for the variation in how strongly bitter flavors are detected. The Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah Web site explains the science:

There are two common forms (or alleles) of the PTC gene, and at least five rare forms. One of the common forms is a tasting allele, and the other is a non-tasting allele. Each allele codes for a bitter taste receptor protein with a slightly different shape. The shape of the receptor protein determines how strongly it can bind to PTC. Since all people have two copies of every gene, combinations of the bitter taste gene variants determine whether someone finds PTC intensely bitter, somewhat bitter, or without taste at all.

In a 2005 study, researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center found that the version of this gene also predicted a child’s preference for sweet foods. Those with one or two copies of the bitter-perceiving gene were more likely to favor foods and beverages with a high sugar content, and less likely to name milk or water as their favorite beverage. It is not known yet whether this relationship is due to the children trying to mask the bitter taste of foods or some undiscovered aspect of taste receptor biology. It is also not fully understood why bitter sensitivity sometimes decreases with age.

And what about people like my colleague, who doesn’t much care for sweets? It’s possible she is a supertaster, the name scientists give people who have inherited more taste buds than the average person and therefore taste flavors more intensely. These people tend to shun strong-flavored foods, including rich desserts. This may explain why supertasters are more likely to be slim.

Though our food preferences have a lot to do with genetics, or nature (as much as nearly half, according to Kings College London research on identical twins), nurture is just as important. Over our lifetimes we build many complex associations with flavors and scents that can override our DNA.

What food likes or dislikes do you think you inherited?

I just read an interesting article in the Washington Post’s travel section about traveling with no guidebooks, advance planning or reservations—just a wallet and an iPhone. The author used applications, or apps, to find everything from a parking spot to a hotel room, with only a few minor glitches. Since he also used it to find local restaurants and navigate their menus, it got me thinking about food-related apps. (I don’t have an iPhone, but my iPod Touch functions similarly when in range of a wireless network.)

Here are a few food-related apps I’ve tried and liked; most of them are free. All are available from Apple; several can also be downloaded for other kinds of smartphones (BlackBerry, Android, Nokia, Palm) from the developer’s websites. Feel free to chime in with your own recommendations!

Courtesy Flickr user bump

Eating Out

1. Urban Spoon. The shakeable slot machine gimmick is part of the fun with this one, but it’s also a reliable source of user-generated restaurant reviews. Handy when you can’t decide exactly where to go, but have a general price range, cuisine or neighborhood in mind.

2. Open Table. This is an easy, free way to make a reservation at some 13,000 restaurants in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, and I like the bonus of accruing rewards points which can be redeemed toward the cost of future dining.

Cooking

3. Whole Foods Recipes. A fairly small database, but useful because all the recipes show nutrition information and are based on fresh, natural ingredients. I like being able to search for recipes by specific ingredient (or a combination of up to 3 ingredients). Let’s say you have beets on hand, for example—you can choose from recipes ranging from borscht to roasted beet and fennel salad, then make a shopping list to e-mail to yourself. And, of course, it’ll point you to the closest Whole Foods store.

4. Big Oven. This is a massive database of over 170,000 recipes, which means there’s bound to be some mediocre ones in there, but there are also plenty of reliable classics. You can base your search on ingredients you have on hand, exclude specific ingredients, or let the app pick a recipe at random. You can even see what other people are cooking in your geographic area—which I don’t really care about, to be honest, unless they’re going to invite me over!

5. Epicurious. My favorite recipe tool, because it includes the archives from Gourmet and Bon Appetit. I recognize many of the dishes as things I bookmarked and never remembered to return to among the stacks of magazines on the coffee table; this makes them easy to find again and save as favorites. It’s well-organized into a range of categories that include specific occasions (Fourth of July), times of day (weeknight dinners) and dietary considerations (low-fat).

Grocery Shopping

6. Grocery IQ. There are shopping-list functions included in most of the recipe apps, but this is worth getting separately if you’re into particular brands and/or coupons. Notice one morning that you’re running low on Cheerios? Hold your phone’s camera up to the barcode on the cereal box, and that specific product will be added to your shopping list. Then you can search to see if there are any coupons available for Cheerios (or cereals in general), and send them to your inbox or printer.

7. ShopShop. If you just want to write down a basic shopping list but have a tendency to lose little slips of paper, this is perfect. No bells and whistles.

8. Seafood Watch Guide. Keeping track of what’s being overfished or mismanaged can be confusing for consumers, but this tool breaks down the issues into a format you can access quickly while perusing the specials of the day at the fish counter. King crab may be on sale, for example, but is it sustainable? Depends whether it’s imported (on the “avoid” list) or from the U.S. (a “good alternative”). But don’t hide behind technology too much—simply talking to the fishmonger could be your best source of information.

Cooking over a campfire, courtesy of Flickr user Rev. Xanatos

Today’s guest post is by Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker, who knows a thing or two about roughing it. She’s camped in the Arctic to interview narwhal scientists, schlepped through a swamp in South Carolina in search of Venus flytraps, and ridden snowmobiles deep into the Western wilderness for an upcoming wildlife feature.

Roughing it is always easier if there’s good grub around, but cooking while camping can be tricky. Refrigeration isn’t always available, canned goods are dead weight in a backpack, and sometimes it’s a pain to build a fire. Granted, it is possible to concoct a scrumptious ratatouille in the middle of nowhere, given time and materials (fennel and parchment paper, for starters), and anyone who feels like hauling a pie iron into the wilderness is welcome to a campfire panini. I know I’ll be eternally grateful to the fellow camper who smuggled a watermelon the size of a small sleeping bag in his backpack and unveiled it five days into a college wilderness trip, just when our supplies were dwindling.

But because we can’t all be heroes, here are a few light-weight, ultra-simple and even tasty options suggested by outdoorsy types who got tired of granola. Have better ideas? We’d love to hear them.

1. German bread. Resembling a brick, but ever so much lighter and more flavorful, this pre-sliced bread comes wrapped in plastic, has a long shelf-life, and doesn’t crumble as easily as ordinary bread. There are many flavors, though the sunflower seed variety is particularly good. Look for it at health food stores.

2. Pesto. Out of the refrigerator, it lasts longer than you’d think—a couple of days, as long as it’s not too hot. Mix it into pasta or spread on bread; a little goes a long way.

3. Mini-cheeses. Babybel cheeses come individually wrapped in wax and plastic, making them more durable than larger hunks of cheese. Plus, you don’t need a knife (or clean hands, really) to eat them.

4. Potatoes. Not exactly light, but a nice treat if you’ll be making a campfire the first night. Pack clean potatoes wrapped in tinfoil with a pat of butter (may want to put the whole thing in a Ziploc so it doesn’t ooze in your pack), and nestle them among the coals for roasting.

5. Instant Oatmeal 2.0. Stir in a tablespoon of peanut butter (and yogurt, if you’ve got it) and it will keep you going all morning.

6. Couscous. Less of a cliché than rice and just as light and versatile.

7. Tuna. It comes in foil pouches and you can add it to the couscous with some spices, or if you’re hungry enough, eat it right out of the bag.

Any other tried-and-true suggestions, readers?

Welcome to the second installment of Inviting Writing, our new monthly storytelling feature where we welcome food-related submissions from readers. In case you missed the first set, here’s how it works: We give you a writing prompt—last month’s was “manners”—and then Amanda or I will share a story that relates to both food and the theme of the month. If the prompt brings to mind a true tale from your own life, send it to FoodAndThink@gmail.com with “Inviting Writing” in the subject line. Be sure to include your full name (feel free to include a link if you have your own blog or website). We’ll post the best ones on the blog on subsequent Mondays.

These stories can be funny, sad, strange or just interesting, as long as they’re true and have to do with both food and the theme, however you interpret it.

This month’s prompt is “Fear.” I’ll start it off, then it’s your turn!

FEAR

When people talk about childhood comfort foods, they often mention macaroni and cheese or fresh-baked chocolate cookies—what Mom would dish up when they were feeling blue or sick or scared. The love that went into it was as important as the food itself.

Not me. During what may have been the scariest period of my young (and admittedly sheltered) life, the food that gave me solace came in a styrofoam clamshell container, not-so-lovingly prepared by a minimum-wage worker: it was an Egg McMuffin.

Courtesy Flickr user iirraa

The year was 1978, and I was in the middle of first grade. My family had just moved from a small community in a semi-rural suburb of Philadelphia to the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. Until that point I had loved school. My new one, however, was a far cry from the gentle, nurturing place I had come from, where the teacher had spoken in soothing tones and the harshest thing to happen on the playground was getting caught in a game of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

My new teacher was a gruff New Yorker who raised her voice frequently—even, to my horror, at eager-to-please little me! Scarier still were the other children—streetwise girls who talked tough and shoved each other around. My only “friend” was a girl who joined in bullying me whenever her other playmate was around, digging their nails into my arms to try to make me cry.

Everything was unfamiliar; on the first day in my new class, the “caf monitor” came around to collect “caf money.” Having no idea that this was short for cafeteria, I missed my chance to purchase lunch and went without.

Not surprisingly, I often tried to get out of going to school. Every morning I tried to persuade my mother that I was sick. I wasn’t exactly lying; I’m sure my anxiety about going to school caused me to feel queasy. Though my mother sympathized, she couldn’t allow me to be a first-grade dropout.

So she did the only thing that seemed to work: she bribed me.

If I went to school, she’d say, we could stop at McDonald’s for breakfast on the way. For reasons that are hard for me to fathom now, something about the combination of a puck-shaped fried egg, Canadian bacon and American cheese oozing out of an English muffin was impossible for me to resist. It was even worth enduring a day of school for. Maybe it was because McDonald’s was familiar from my former home, or because it felt like something special between just my mother and I (my older brother took the bus). Whatever the reason, it worked.

Fortunately, this little deal we negotiated didn’t lead me down the path of childhood obesity or interfere with my education. At the end of the school year, my family moved again, this time to a place with less intimidating schools. I once again became a model student, eager to go to class without having to stop at a drive-thru on the way.

A bottle of gruit beer, courtesy of Flickr user bernt_rostad

I just can’t get on board the ultra-hoppy beer bandwagon. Lately brewers have been vying to create the world’s bitterest beer, and it seems that every microbrewery has put forth an IPA (India Pale Ale) that scores high on the IBU (International Bittering Unit) scale.

Hops are the flowers that give beer its bitter taste, and have been used since the Middle Ages as a flavoring and preservative—extra hops were added to British beers exported to the warm climate of India. I don’t mind hops in moderation, but I prefer when I can also taste the other flavors in a beer. (I should point out here that I am not in any way claiming to be a beer connoisseur. I enjoy a pint now and then, but my interest is casual.)

Hop wimp that I am, I was eager to try gruit ale when I saw it on the menu of American Flatbread, a restaurant in Burlington, Vermont (with other locations in Oregon, Virginia and Vermont) that serves house-brewed beer. Described as a “Medieval herbal brew—no hops,” it had a light, slightly floral flavor—still recognizably ale, but unlike any I’d ever had. That was two or three years ago; since then I’ve ordered gruit every time I’ve gone back, but I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

Apparently, that wasn’t always the case. Long before Budweiser crowned itself the “king of beers,” gruit reigned in Europe—though, since it was often brewed by women, or alewives, it might more aptly be called the queen. Brewers, both commercial and small-scale, used all kinds of other herbs and botanicals, which varied from place to place. Then, for some reason or combination of reasons, beer made with hops came into favor by the 18th century, eventually overshadowing gruit to the point it nearly disappeared.

According to herbalist and author Stephen Harrod Buhner (in an article posted on gruitale.com), the primary gruit herbs were yarrow, sweet gale and marsh rosemary, though other flavorings, including cinnamon, nutmeg and caraway seed, were also popular. Some of these herbs had stimulant effects, which produced a highly intoxicating beverage that was thought to be an aphrodisiac and, according to Buhner, eventually led to their replacement with hops. I’m not sure whether any of those were in the gruit I tasted, though I can say that it was not highly intoxicating (and I am a lightweight). It didn’t make me feel sleepy, though, which beer sometimes does.

Hops, on the other hand, have traditionally been used as a sedative and were thought to reduce sexual desire and male potency. They contain phytoestrogens, the naturally occurring compounds that are molecularly similar to human estrogen and are found in soy, nuts and other foods. Although there has been speculation that over-consumption of phytoestrogens (especially from soy additives in processed food) could lead to health problems, there hasn’t been enough research to determine the effects of phytoestrogens on humans. It’s a complicated topic that will have to wait for a future post.

In the meantime, if you’re a home brewer (or would like to become one) and are interested in trying gruit, gruitale.com links to a handful of recipes.