Aging and the sense of taste: Boomers drive a big trend toward spicy foods
October 10th, 2007Americans are eating more spicy food, but it’s not due to a big increase in culinary adventure. Turns out taste buds start to go as we age–and when that happens, people eat spicier food. The Boston Globe explains that the Boomer age wave is driving a major increase in spicy food offerings on grocery shelves
, and the popularity of ethnic restaurants featuring hot food:
“So far, few marketers or researchers have studied the link between boomers and spicy food. The industry is just now starting to draw the connection, food scientists say. Research in this area has been slow in part because the science of smell and taste is complicated and still emerging. What’s known is that at a certain age - after about 40 for most people - the number of nerve receptors in the nose and tongue that respond to smell and taste dim and decrease. As that happens, complex flavors become duller. Sweet and sour tastes decline sharply; salty and acidic tastes remain brighter for longer. The tastes that penetrate the fog most clearly come from another group of flavors called sensory irritants. These hit the body not through taste or smell, but through the chemosensory system, which conveys sensations like touch, temperature, pain, and pressure. A list of foods in the sensory irritant category reads like a roster of modern flavorings: habanero, jalapeno, black pepper, horseradish, ginger, cinnamon. All of them - generally lumped together as “spicy” or “high-flavor” - help kick up the overall sensory experience of eating.”
Evidence of the trend turns up in older Americans’ preference for more flavorful cheeses, visits to websites for spicy food aficionados, and growing use of the word “spicy” on restaurant menus. (Yes, there’s actually someone tracking this–MenuMine, a database maintained by the Foodservice Research Institute.)
