Flavor Tripping

Last night our friend Brian had us over for a rather interesting experiment. He bought these concentrated berry pills, the name of which I forgot shortly after it was mentioned, that temporarily deactivate your sour, salt and bitter taste buds. The result is, naturally that only sweet remains and also the other more difficult to articulate flavors that don't fall into the main four categories. Brian had bowls of lemons, limes, grapefruits, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, salt and vinegar potato chips, various sour candies and a couple different beers for us to sample. The absence of sour is the most obvious thing when you're eating and unless you know the stuff you're tasting is supposed to be salty you wouldn't really notice that absence as much. Straight up table salt tastes like nothing with this stuff and salt and vinegar chips taste like they've been dusted in sugar. You can still tell what fruits you're eating, but in each case the core element in their flavors is missing. Tomatoes were interesting because without the tangy zip that normally dominates their flavor all you get is this almost leafy, earthy...undertaste that's always there but impossible to really parse apart from the main flavor.
One's sense of bitterness isn't completely neutralized, however, Guiness still has a bit of bite that I think is the actual alcohol taste (the head on the other hand tastes sweet) and eating the citrus rinds still tastes gross, but not as bad as it would be normally. There also was a bit of cognitive dissonance when you smell the foods and expect something rather acrid but end up overpowered by the sugariness of a bowl of limes. It really helps you realize that, despite common misconceptions, taste and smell function independently of one another. Thankfully, the pill's effects wear off after an hour or so and you can go right back to puckering when you have a mouthful of sour candies. If the effects were permanant I think it might almost be a Hellenistic afterlife punishment; all the most delicious food in the world but in each case the one thing that made it so good is missing. Overall, I'd recommend it not because it's really terribly exciting but it's a great exercise in making the familiar exotic.