How To Do Everything

On some occasions you may have wished that you could turn off your taste buds.  Whether it was to avoid Aunt Selma’s cooking or to stomach taking some awful medicine, or worse yet, cod liver oil.  Well, there is a way you can desensitize your taste buds.  You can trick them by learning how they work, and outsmarting them.

1. One of the best ways to fool your taste buds is  to avoid smelling whatever you are about to consume.  Your tongue is covered with taste buds, but they can only recognize sweet, salty, bitter, and sour.  If you can avoid smelling whatever nastiness you are about to ingest, it will reduce your ability to taste the nastiness.

2.  Consume really cold water.  Have you ever noticed that any liquid tastes different when it is hot or warm than when it is cold?  It is the same liquid, right?  What’s going on?  Well, the fact is that cold actually numbs your taste palate and will work to tone down flavors.  Drinking a glass of really cold water before ingesting something nasty may just numb the taste buds enough that there is little or no taste.  For an extra punch, chill the substance that you will be eating/drinking.

3. Celebrate.  Well, celebrate with a strong alcoholic beverage.  A drink with a high proof like whiskey will numb the nose and it will coat the tongue, making it difficult to smell or taste anything.

4. Discover your tongue.  Only certain areas on your tongue are sensitive to particular tastes.  However, everyone’s tongue is different.  So it is crucial to map out your tongue so that you know which sections have sensation for a particular kind of taste.  A great way to figure out what is where is to dip a cotton swab in 4 different taste substances (sweet, salty, bitter, and sour).  Next, you apply the swab to your tongue and mark on a paper where you could taste the substance.  Now your best bet to avoid a nasty taste is to avoid the receptive area for that taste type.  If it is a sour substance, do not let it touch the sour area.
5.  Try a Straw.  When all else fails, try using a straw.  Just position the straw far enough back in your mouth so that the substance avoids the tongue completely.  Avoiding the tongue, will avoid any taste receptors.

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