1. During our first interview, the food taster tells me a mad, strangely appetizing dream: She dreams that all of the tires in her neighborhood are suddenly transformed into wheels of solid chocolate. Vehicles in motion skid off the streets, which become playgrounds of semi-sweetened slickness. Parked cars are rendered immobile, useless but for the delectations of roadside snackers and their uncontrollable cravings. Air quality in the city noticeably improves as more people walk to their destinations, but these same pedestrians are marked with cocoa-brown tread marks all over their faces, as if in thrall to some wild, neo-Wonka-ian fantasia. When she wakes up, the food taster realizes she’d crashed with a half-eaten chocolate donut on her bedside dresser, and it had melted all over her copy of “Crash” by J. G. Ballard. Usually, her dreams are less on the nose than this, she tells me, but the line between food and fantasy for her is razor-thin. As thin as she might one day become were she to ever—heaven forfend!—consider a less savory vocation.
2. When the food taster’s friends find out what she does for a living, they instantly swoon. That’s so awesome, they say. Let me be the judge of what’s awesome, she wants to tell them. She had to go to school for this, she reminds her new acolytes. She had to learn to understand the science and language of taste and smell and visual appeal. She had to study marketing, chemistry, agriculture, even a bit of linguistics. It helps, of course, that the food taster is synesthetic: colors trigger smells, tastes evoke images. She’s able to make fine distinctions others can’t to assist farmers in creating, say, a 50% raspberrier raspberry, or to help a well-known hummus brand develop a cilantro-flavored offering that doesn’t completely polarize the food-buying public. She isn’t always thrilled with her job: She’s had to ingest some pretty nasty items and she’s had to turn even her worst encounters into serviceable reports—but she can’t imagine doing anything else. The sign of being in the right place, the food taster tells me, in a job or in anything in life, is when that thing radiates so completely through your body as to exclude all other possibilities. The food taster is fulfilled in her job in a way she knows most others are not. Something about this makes her uneasy. Something about this makes her ravenous for more.
3. The food taster falls ill and is unable to smell or taste food for three months. This makes it impossible for her to do her job effectively, but she’s such a professional that she can still convincingly fake it, using words like “floral”, “buttery”, “picante”, and “palette cleanser” in her reports. While under the weather, the food taster acquires a case of that new coconut-lime diet soda that’s taken Tokyo by storm. Once she’s finally well enough to drink it, she finds herself wishing that her senses had remained out of commission just a little longer. The food taster marvels constantly at the impossibility of predicting what the public will go bananas for—and if sometimes it’s actual bananas, or if it’s something the appeal for which she can’t even begin to fathom.
4. The food taster briefly dates a man who claims not to care a whit what food tastes like. She’s fascinated by this stance, but also terrified. The man dresses impeccably, has clean-cut slicked-back black hair, and wears tailored Italian suits and fresh-pressed pastel-hued shirts—none of the slovenly masculinity of most guys she meets, but also none of the raw gluttony. He orders simply prepared poached chicken breasts, salads without dressing, and steamed veggies on the side. He avoids desserts, he says, because all they are to him is texture: A caramel ice cream sundae is just an onslaught of gooey cold. Plain pasta is tolerable to him, maybe a slight drizzle of oil if the noodles are sticking together. The food taster wonders aloud more than once whether this man might be a serial killer. When she figures out this is unlikely and that he’s merely someone whose vanilla tastes preclude even the basic enjoyment of vanilla flavor, she’s ready to move on to more appetizing options.
5. The food taster reads a book called The Food Taster, a true story about a man whose job is to sample meals for the President of a small island nation, an authoritarian strongman. Every day the book’s food taster vacillates between the thrill of sampling world-class meals, and the possibility of dropping dead at any moment of food poisoning. The President recognizes the food taster’s dilemma and pays him handsomely for the risks he takes. At least his family would be taken care of, the food taster calculates. Although, upon the food taster’s real-life death, less than two years after the book’s publication, his family is murdered by the President’s successor in an act of counter-revolutionary vengeance. Our food taster, meanwhile, is relieved that she’s never had to deal with that kind of pressure. Still, she wonders, if she had been under a mad dictator’s sway, unsure if any given bite might mean her demise, would flavors now smack her a little harder, would her taste buds have laddered up to heights of gustatory pleasure she’d never imagined possible within the limits of the receptors on her tongue and cheek(bitter, sour, salty, sweet, umami)? How much of life is about security and comfort, and how much of it is about chasing sensation? It’s a question she’s fortunate not to have to answer today, she tells me, as she sinks her teeth into a matcha beignet, and rates its flavor profile according to 17 scientifically-curated factors.
6. The food taster thinks a lot about what her last meal would be were she sentenced to death: grilled lamb chops, spaghetti, and canned Hunt’s tomato sauce. This combo is hardwired into her brain and stomach from the time she was a little girl, she tells me, because it was always her mom’s favorite. She would want, in full view of the ultimate penalty, to taste her own childhood one more time before never being able to taste again. Or perhaps tasting would still be on the table even after she was gone? Would the Great Beyond include a menu, a meal plan, room service, and its own restaurant row? Would we still somehow have access to our taste buds, our tongues? By all logic, when we die, these things should die too. The food taster tells me that over the course of her career, she has eaten a panoply of tongues—tongues of creatures great and small—and always assumed that doing so meant game over for those creatures as gustatory beings. But what if, she thinks, upon our demise, we’re issued new bodies with new taste buds that can access flavors we’ve never heard of through conduits we didn’t know existed? Sometimes the food taster looks perversely forward to her own death in the way she once looked forward to presents at the holidays (and also the lamb chops and spaghetti that sometimes formed those holiday dinners). What she really wants though is to be given the indulgence of a Last Meal, and have it followed by a last-minute pardon from the Governor. It’s the sheer cinematic unlikeliness of this scenario that helps keep her on the straight-and-narrow. Plus, she lives in a non-death penalty state, so any infraction she might commit could only lead to the brutal reality of flavorless prison food for as long as she might be sentenced, for as long as her own escargot-like tongue can taste, tingle, kiss, and feel alive.
7. The food taster, in a late-night fit of invention, conjures up a superfood—not in the conventional sense—although her superfood would contain such superfoods. Her superfood would be an amalgam of all foods: all fruits, all veggies, all ingestible animal proteins (along with all “impossible” substitutes for them), all of it seasoned with every spice yet discovered by humankind (and theoretically any spice not yet unearthed because while the world has seemingly been scoured and picked clean to the exclusion of new flavor discoveries, you never know). When the food taster imagines the taste of this grand final dish (the last thing she would ever eat, perhaps the last thing that would ever be eaten on this planet) she envisions it tasting wonderful and terrible and sublime and nauseating all at once. She imagines it tasting like everything that is and everything that ever was, edible or not: like apples, mountain goats, leaves, dirt, Napoleons (the dessert, and the man), paninis and panthers, drugs and dreams. Like chocolate and chalkboards, scallops and skyscrapers, like the letters or symbols of the word T-A-S-T-E in every language active and extant—like imagination itself.
8. The food taster, on vacation, cannot escape her work. That is, she continues to taste food: tinga tacos and octopi in Cancun; risottos in Milan; pâtés in Paris; Wagyu beef in Kyoto. This seems an obvious point, perhaps, but it means for the food taster that there is no separation, no off the clock. Even if she tries to not really “taste” what she is eating on holiday—that is, if she does not analyze and evaluate every bite—taste is happening in spite of her. Even if she goes somewhere specifically infamous for the blandness of its cuisine (as the British Isles might once have been known, before the spicier influx of South Asian influence) she would still be tasting the tastelessness of it. It would not be a neutral experience. The only way for the food taster to completely escape her vocation would be, she supposes, to not eat at all. Which she has done on occasion, she tells me, for Yom Kippur. The other option would be a hunger strike, though these often have a political purpose. The food taster is far from apolitical—she has marched at rallies for causes she believes in, for science, for women and girls, and of course for the prevention of starvation in her country and around the globe—but she can’t justify to herself the idea of a hunger strike purely in the interest of work-life separation. Her work is her life and her life is her work.
9. The food taster sometimes imagines herself as food. Whether this means food for cannibals or food for predators like tigers doesn’t particularly matter. Without having tasted human flesh itself, she’s unable to have a framework for her own unique flavor profile. But she assumes that she must have such a profile, same as any piece of meat. This frontier will have to remain a mystery, she supposes. She is not the food tasted. This is not (or at least not yet) her role. But perhaps one day, it might be. And though it is hard to imagine a worse fate, perhaps there are worse fates. Perhaps in the end, she confesses, it would not be so bad. Perhaps another food taster would be able to describe her in way more intricate bite-by-bite detail than she’s ever been able to describe herself. Perhaps being eaten would be the ultimate way to be known. Or perhaps, in the most generic sense, she would be described by her eater as “tasting a bit like chicken.”
10. The food taster and I meet for dinner to celebrate reaching the final “course” of this profile. She asks me a question that I really should have asked her earlier, were I truly worth my salt as a journalist: “What was the most memorable single bite of food you’ve ever taken?” Not meal, not dish, but bite. Isolated down to tooth, tongue and swallow. And down to the most powerful engine of taste we have: the brain. My brain isn’t good for all that much anymore, but I know what my answer must be. When I was eight years old, living in the suburbs of Chicago, my father would take my brother and me trout fishing. It was a rigged kind of fishing, we found out: The lake was absolutely stocked, pre-populated with trout. They couldn’t swim more than three feet in any direction without crashing into one another head into tail. This was a game of bumper fish, school members dodging each other’s shimmying swims when they weren’t drifting inexorably toward the worm-baited hooks they seemed powerless to resist. We took the better part of our catch home, excited as hunters. Our dad would grill them up, wrapped in a belt of bacon and doused in a bath of lemon. The first time this was our dinner, I took the biggest bite of grilled fish my little mouth could muster—and got a jaw full of tiny bones I had to extract from my cheek with pinched fingers. The remainder of the bite was so delectable: crispy, lemony, bacon-y, even more mouthwatering perhaps because I had to work for it. The food taster, hearing my story, snaps her fingers to call for the waiter’s attention. She whispers something in his ear, and within minutes arrives the trout from my 40-year-old story, improbably yet seemingly the same down to the gills. A meal in the form of grilled nostalgia. The food taster senses my confusion but appears uninterested in it.
“Go ahead, take a taste,” she commands.
She eats it as well, and the food taster and I begin to experience a merged memory. It’s my past, of course, but maybe it’s hers too. Maybe for her it tastes like lamb chops and spaghetti. Maybe the truth is we’re tasting everyone’s favorite bite: hers, mine, the strongman’s, the death row inmate’s, the chocolate tire eating fools’, and yours, too. The food taster and I carefully pull the ribs of trout bone from our mouths as we devour the last of the fish. We stack them on a separate plate where they form a kind of barren, ghostlike structure—like a tiny, un-stocked pantry. Then, we stick out our tongues at each other, lick our lips, and smile hungrily.
Matt Leibel lives in San Francisco. His short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Portland Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, Wigleaf, DIAGRAM, Socrates on the Beach, and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his work has been included in the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2020 and 2024. Find him on Twitter at @matt_leibel or on Bluesky at @mattleibel.bsky.social.
Photo by: Missy Fant