Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food (Hippocrates)

The case for bitter

You only have to look at the face of a baby who is introduced to a bitter food to know that it is an acquired taste!

As we grow and mature, we lose taste buds and are able to tolerate bitter plants safely in small quantities. Yet in today’s industrialised food scene, even adults baulk at bitter flavours and prefer the ubiquitous sweet and salty foods that have been designed to stimulate our palettes and make us eat more. We put sugar and milk in our coffee, we eat low cacao, high sugar and milk chocolate, we eschew grapefruit and citrus peel, and hate radicchio, radish and endive. Many even dislike the bitterness of olive oil. Somehow beer, although bitter, seems to be well tolerated, possibly because of its alcoholic side effects.

We often think we know more than our ancestors did, but they had a comprehensive understanding of the curative power of plants. One of the many examples is willow bark, which was ingested to ease pain and relieve fever for thousands of years; today we distil the active ingredient in it to make the painkiller aspirin. To protect themselves against predators, plants produce chemical compounds, many of which are bitter tasting and even poisonous. Evolutionarily, bitter tastes warned humans and animals of the potential of the plant to make us sick or even kill us. However, there is another side to bitter tasting vegetables, herbs and fruit - they help to improve digestion and stimulate the appetite, they can balance out sweeter flavours and make our cooking more complex and interesting.

As Jennifer McLagan explains in her book “Bitter - A taste of the world’s most dangerous flavour”, we know of the benefits of vitamins and fibre in plants, but we are now discovering that phytochemicals are equally important, some are anti-oxidant protecting our tissues from damage and disease, some are anti-inflammatory or analgesic, some reduce fevers. A number of these compounds are responsible for the bitter taste of plants and are grouped according to their chemical composition into phenols, polyphenols, flavonoids, glucosinolates, terpenes and alkaloids.   

The best way to benefit from these phytochemicals is to eat many different plants and not to avoid the bitter tasting ones. I encourage you to start your discovery of the many grades and subtleties of this complicated and intriguing taste, from the downright tongue-curling to the soft and elusive.