How much do you love Cilantro?
Do you use a lot of Cilantro on your dishes? I’m not a big fan of it, I admit. It tastes like medicine. Then again, I’m not a fan of any herb (which would sound rather silly).
But I wasn’t aware, there are plenty of people out there absolutely despise this herb, bad enough to even form an “I Hate Cilantro” group on Facebook.
Here’s an interesting story about Cilantro on The Wall Street Journal , after the cut…
At the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, Dr. Wysocki and fellow researchers asked 41 pairs of identical twins and 12 pairs of fraternal twins to rate the “pleasantness” of cilantro. His scale ranged from plus 11 to minus 11, with zero indicating “neither pleasant nor unpleasant.” More than 80% of the identical twins gave ratings similar to their siblings, while only 42% of the fraternal twins did — suggesting cilantro hatred may be a genetic trait. But Dr. Wysocki cautions that he hasn’t yet analyzed enough fraternal twins to draw a firm conclusion.
Dr. Wysocki contends dislike of cilantro stems from its odor, not its taste. His hypothesis is that those who don’t like it are unable to detect chemicals in the leaf that are pleasing to those who like the herb.
Facebook groups have sprouted up to bash all kinds of foods, ranging from broccoli to Brussels sprouts. (One is called “I Hate Tomatoes, But I Love Ketchup And Other Tomato-Based Products.”) But anti-cilantro groups are especially plentiful. They include “Cilantro Isn’t Edible,” “People Who Hate Cilantro And Think There Should Be Laws Against Its Use,” and “Youth Understanding Cilantro Kills (Y.U.C.K.).” The Web site IHateCilantro.com, which dubs the herb the “most offensive food known to man,” has accumulated 2,519 members.
“My family is Mexican and I always feel guilty that I don’t like it,” wrote Natalie Sample, a geography major at the University of Washington, in a Facebook posting. It’s “like somehow I am letting my heritage down for [not] liking such an important element of our cooking.”
Around early 2007, after imploring her mother not to put cilantro in a black-bean dip, Florida State University student Lauren Kennedy started the “I HATE CILANTRO” Facebook group. Ms. Kennedy didn’t pay much attention to it after that. “I honestly wasn’t sure if other people hated it as much as I did, or if I was just kind of overreacting,” she says. Months later, she found it had attracted hundreds of members.
One group member confessed that she once “threw a burrito across my living room because, despite my specific delivery order, it was packed with cilantro. no joke.”
