I'd like to keep my lungs healthy so I can continue to play Lisa Simpson's instrument.
Good, good! You're a musician! Think about taste like you'd think about the sound of a note. I'm sure you can play an adequate B flat, in tune and stuff, but consider the difference between your B flat and Miles Davis's.
Everything my wife cooks seem to taste just fine even though she (and others) occasionally would say this is too salty or that is too sour or whatnot.
See, there's your problem. You've got only
two tastes - "bad" and "fine."
You need to learn to think about flavor in terms of more than whether or not it tastes bad to you, or whether or not you can eat it. Don't just wonder if something tastes "good" - ask yourself, what does it taste
like? Where have you tasted it before? What were you doing the last time you tasted something like this?
You need to explore taste. Try to
remember how things taste. I mean, right now, when you're not eating something. Try to remember the last really special meal you had and focus on
the taste of the food.
People get into this habit of food being ancillary to whatever they're doing, where even a meal is just using the body's need for food in order to watch TV, or get some work done, or hang out with friends. And that's fine, but sometimes a meal should be about eating, too.
But as I understand it, much of what's "good" is completely subjective.
It's not about how good things taste. It's about what things taste
like. Wine tastings aren't a bunch of people sitting around and saying "mm, that's good. Oh, that's bad." That's not how it works at all.
How does one of these taste events work anyway?
You show up. Maybe it's free, maybe you pay a little fee. Let's say this is a wine tasting. Somebody who knows something about wines has picked out some bottles for the tasting.
He or she goes around, and pours you a little bit into your glass. They tell you something about the wine - what kind of wine it is, where it was grown, how old it is. Maybe they even explain some wine terms, if this is a "beginner" kind of event.
The discerning taster swirls the wine in the glass for a little bit, to get a sense of its color and to aromatize some of the volatile compounds that give wine its flavor. They inhale the aroma of the wine (the "nose"). This primes your olfactory senses. They take a slurping sip to get both wine and air into their mouths, and then they let the wine run over the entire surface of their tongue (because different areas of the tongue detect different flavors.)
Then they describe the different tastes in the wine, comparing them to other tastes and smells. Chocolate, maybe, or the smells of oak or applewood, or the tastes of fruit. They consider how sour the wine tastes, to get a sense of its acidity. As they swallow the wine, alcohol in the wine begins to vaporize off the tongue, and the intensity of that sensation is called "dryness".
You don't have to make a big show of doing all that at a wine tasting; you just have to understand that wines are meant to be perceived in those five different ways - color, nose, flavor, acidity, and dryness. People sometimes bring a little notebook to write down their impressions and they organize it by label, so that when they go to buy some wines, they have an idea of what they'll enjoy. Or you can just try and remember.
You can do the same thing with coffee.
What does it
look like? Does it have that smokey dark brown color? Or is it pale or black, like sludge? Does it have that little chestnut-colored ring of foam (called
crema) around the edge, or was it just slopped into your cup lukewarm from a carafe that's been on the heater all day long?
What does it
smell like? Does it smell roasted, caramelized, kind of like a roast turkey? Or does it smell sharp and bitter? Does it smell full-bodied, like there's too much going on to describe? Or does it just have the flat "bitter" smell?
What does it
taste like? Is it complex and deep, like there's a lot going on? Or does it just taste like one thing, like soup without enough salt? Is it drab and boring? Is it too bitter or sour? Or is it like... well, I dunno. (I sat here for 10 minutes trying to think of how to describe how good coffee tastes, but I've got nothing.)
How do people really know what's the best without reading each other's minds?
It's a lot less about "the best" than you think. It's more about understanding what things
taste like, not just whether they taste "better" than another thing. Leave the ranking for the wine judges. Just learn to taste the things that you're eating and drinking - not in terms of goodness, but in terms of
the way they taste. You'll see what your wife is talking about when she says something is too salty or sour.
It's the difference between Miles Davis blowing on a saxophone and me doing it. Sure, there's a portion that you just can't put into words. The "essence." But some of it, you can consciously identify and describe. Doing so, talking about it with people (like your wife or your friends or the people at wine tastings) helps you identify the different tastes. Doing it with other people can give you the vocabulary you need to put word to flavor, and to remember the way things taste.
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