A continuation of an argument
It doesn't make sense to argue about whether broccoli and rutabaga are bitter or not. They're not bitter for me unless they're really old and poorly cooked, and even then they're perfectly edible. The exact same head of broccoli, cut up and steamed for six minutes, that just tastes green and sweet to me tastes bitter to some of you. Your TAS2R genes are different from mine.
Now, if you're asking whether broccoli and rutabaga contain glucosinolates or not, that's a different matter. They do. But the techniques we have to use to find and identify them are pretty far removed from the dining room. (Perhaps not so much the kitchen.) The Brassica vegetables have been with us since we stood up and spoke, and their wild forms long before. We've been able to isolate and identify glucosinolates for perhaps a hundred years. So the appropriate questions - do these vegetables contain these particular compounds? do you have the right genetic makeup to taste them? - are all very recent, and technology dependent. Until the last few years, the only question we knew to ask - are these bitter or not? - was the question that didn't make sense.
Those of you who are color-blind know that there is a similar issue with "Is this red?," as opposed to "Does the light coming off of this object have a wavelength in the vicinity of 700 nanometers?"
I experience ripe pomegranantes as red. I don't experience broccoli as bitter. There is a pretty good chance that your experience of one or both of those things is significantly different from mine. Doesn't mean one of us is wrong. Moreover, it doesn't mean one of us isn't paying attention, either. That's a really easy aasumption to make, by the way; if your experience is sufficiently different from mine, especially if I noticed it and you didn't, my first guess is likely to be that you'd notice if only you looked/listened/felt/tasted hard enough. (Some things are like this. Part of this song is in 7/8. I notice that, and if you don't sing, dance, or play an instrument, you probably don't. But that's a dangerous experience to generalize.) It just means that our experiences are different.
There are many things we came up with that we don't yet have the language or the ability to name, quantify, label, classify, pin down. Kinsey pinned a million wasps to cardboard, but in his second area of research he had to invent half the tools and terms. So there's food and sex. There are other cultural universals we are even further behind on. If you haven't at least tried to discuss your actual experiences, or lack thereof, it doesn't make sense to argue about them.
Now, if you're asking whether broccoli and rutabaga contain glucosinolates or not, that's a different matter. They do. But the techniques we have to use to find and identify them are pretty far removed from the dining room. (Perhaps not so much the kitchen.) The Brassica vegetables have been with us since we stood up and spoke, and their wild forms long before. We've been able to isolate and identify glucosinolates for perhaps a hundred years. So the appropriate questions - do these vegetables contain these particular compounds? do you have the right genetic makeup to taste them? - are all very recent, and technology dependent. Until the last few years, the only question we knew to ask - are these bitter or not? - was the question that didn't make sense.
Those of you who are color-blind know that there is a similar issue with "Is this red?," as opposed to "Does the light coming off of this object have a wavelength in the vicinity of 700 nanometers?"
I experience ripe pomegranantes as red. I don't experience broccoli as bitter. There is a pretty good chance that your experience of one or both of those things is significantly different from mine. Doesn't mean one of us is wrong. Moreover, it doesn't mean one of us isn't paying attention, either. That's a really easy aasumption to make, by the way; if your experience is sufficiently different from mine, especially if I noticed it and you didn't, my first guess is likely to be that you'd notice if only you looked/listened/felt/tasted hard enough. (Some things are like this. Part of this song is in 7/8. I notice that, and if you don't sing, dance, or play an instrument, you probably don't. But that's a dangerous experience to generalize.) It just means that our experiences are different.
There are many things we came up with that we don't yet have the language or the ability to name, quantify, label, classify, pin down. Kinsey pinned a million wasps to cardboard, but in his second area of research he had to invent half the tools and terms. So there's food and sex. There are other cultural universals we are even further behind on. If you haven't at least tried to discuss your actual experiences, or lack thereof, it doesn't make sense to argue about them.