On Food and Cooking

mushrooms, lettuces, burdock, basil, and
peppermint. This may be one of the
benefits of ending a meal with fruit, and
one of the reasons that some cultures serve
a salad after the main course, not before.
Bitter tastes are generally encountered
only among vegetables and seeds (for
example, coffee and cocoa beans), which
contain alkaloids and other chemical defenses
meant to discourage animals from eating
them. Farmers and plant breeders have
worked for thousands of years to reduce the
bitterness of such crops as lettuce, cucumbers,
eggplants, and cabbage, but chicory and
radicchio, various cabbage relatives, and the
Asian bitter gourd are actually prized for their
bitterness. In many cultures, bitterness is
thought to be a manifestation of medicinal
value and therefore of healthfulness, and there
may be some truth to this association (p. 334).
Though savory, mouth-filling amino acids
are more characteristic of protein-rich animal