Whatever Happened to Bitter?

What a dinner in Sydney reminded me about one of nature’s most forgotten flavours.

Last weekend I was having a family dinner in Sydney and ordered a salad containing radicchio. I smiled when I saw it on the menu. Anyone who has eaten traditional radicchio knows its distinctive bitterness. It isn’t everyone’s favourite, but that’s part of its character.
Except this wasn’t bitter. It tasted more like lettuce.
It made me wonder…

Have we slowly bred bitterness out of our food?

The more I thought about it, the more fascinating the question became. Because bitterness wasn’t always something people tried to avoid. For thousands of years it was simply another flavour on the plate.

A Taste We Once Expected

Walk through almost any traditional cuisine and you’ll find bitter foods quietly woven into everyday meals. Rocket, endive, chicory, dandelion greens, olives, mustard greens, artichokes, citrus peel…

Across Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia and the Middle East, bitter flavours appeared naturally with the seasons. They weren’t considered unusual. They were simply part of eating.
Today, many of these foods have become milder, sweeter or are eaten far less often. Without really noticing, our palate has changed.

Why We Naturally Resist Bitterness

Unlike sweetness, bitterness isn’t something we’re born to love. From an evolutionary perspective, bitter flavours acted as a warning. Many poisonous plants are bitter, so avoiding them helped keep our ancestors safe.
Sweetness usually meant energy whilst bitterness asked us to pay attention. Yet humans are wonderfully adaptable.

Over generations, cultures learned which bitter plants were safe, delicious and worth celebrating. Bitterness moved from being something to fear to something to appreciate. Perhaps that’s why coffee, dark chocolate and olives are such interesting foods. Most people don’t enjoy them the first time they taste them. Appreciation often develops slowly.

The Forgotten Place of Bitters

One of the things I appreciate about Western herbal medicine is that it preserves generations of careful observation. Long before laboratories could explain plant chemistry, herbalists recognised a group of plants known simply as bitters: gentain, dandelion root, globe artichoke, centaury … These herbs were distinguished not by where they grew, but by the unmistakable taste they shared.

Today we understand that bitter compounds interact with specialised taste receptors that help initiate digestive processes. Herbalists arrived at these observations centuries earlier through careful experience and tradition. To me, that’s one of the beautiful things about herbal medicine. Science often now explains why but tradition first noticed it.

Why Do We Taste Bitter in the First Place?

One of the remarkable things about bitter foods is that they don’t simply add another flavour to a meal. They ask the body to pay attention.

Our tongue contains specialised bitter taste receptors, particularly concentrated towards the back of the tongue. When these receptors detect bitter compounds, they don’t work in isolation. They send signals that begin preparing the digestive system for a meal.
This early stage of digestion, sometimes called the cephalic phase, begins before food even reaches the stomach. It is the body’s way of anticipating nourishment.

Research has shown that tasting bitter flavours can stimulate digestive reflexes, including the secretion of saliva and the release of digestive juices that help prepare the gastrointestinal tract for eating. This may be one reason why many traditional cuisines naturally included bitter foods at the beginning of a meal. Long before these mechanisms were understood, people simply observed that certain foods had a valued place on the table.

Around the World, Bitterness Never Really Left

Travel offers an interesting reminder that bitterness is still appreciated in many cultures. In Italy, bitter leaves like radicchio and chicory remain part of everyday cooking, while aperitifs often celebrate bitter botanicals. Across India, bitter melon has long been used in traditional cooking despite its intensely bitter taste. In Japan, matcha carries a gentle bitterness that is balanced by ritual and careful preparation.
Every culture seems to have found its own way of making peace with this often misunderstood flavour.

Have We Changed Our Food… or Our Expectations?

Modern plant breeding has achieved remarkable things…maybe. We’ve produced fruit that’s sweeter, vegetables that are milder. Salads that appeal to more people. It’s understandable. Most consumers naturally choose sweeter flavours. 

But sometimes I wonder what gets lost in the process.
When every tomato becomes sweeter…
Every lettuce milder…
Every radicchio less bitter…

Are we also losing part of the remarkable diversity that nature originally offered? I say yes!

Learning to Appreciate Complexity

Children often wrinkle their noses at olives. Many adults remember their first sip of black coffee. Dark chocolate is rarely loved the first time.

Bitterness asks something of us. It slows us down and encourages us to notice.

Perhaps that’s one reason these flavours remain so memorable. They’re complex and complexity is something worth preserving.

A Different Way to Think About Food

One of the things I enjoy most about working in a health store is watching people rediscover ingredients they haven’t seen for years. Buckwheat, tahini, sauerkraut, herbal teas. Foods that quietly disappear often have fascinating stories behind them.

Perhaps bitter foods belong in that conversation too. Not because every meal should be bitter. But because every flavour has something to teach us.