At an annual twins festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, five years ago, Wysocki had 41 pairs of identical twins and 12 pairs of fraternal twins take whiffs of chopped cilantro and rate the scent on a scale of minus 11 to plus 11.
(Eleven? Like the amps in This Is Spinal Tap, feelings for and against cilantro apparently crank past the standard 10 mark.)
"A correlation can go from zero to one," he explained. "The identical twins correlated to 0.8, the fraternal twins to 0.04."
That means the identical twins loved or loathed cilantro almost completely in sync. Not so for the fraternal twins, who share genes as any siblings do but aren't carbon copies of each other.
Wysocki theorizes that some people have a specific anosmia - a nasal blind spot, if you will - that makes them insensitive to cilantro's pleasing, aromatic notes. All they get is a soapy-smelling component that's normally masked by the good stuff.
If it's all genetic, those who detect soap could never hope to acquire the taste. But cilantro can be an acquired distaste, due not to genetic makeup but culinary malpractice.
"At first, yeah, I liked it. I grew it," said Nancy Carr, 44, a Towson public relations consultant. "It was kind of fresh and different" - especially for someone who grew up in a household where "herbs were salt and margarine. Even ground pepper was a novelty."
Before long, the bloom was off the sprig.
"Like many people, I probably overdosed on cilantro in the '90s," she said. "It started appearing everywhere, kind of like tarragon in the '80s. The '80s completely turned me off tarragon. I liked it in 1981 and by 1989, I was done with it. Now I can't even put tarragon in my herb garden."
Likewise, she's rooted cilantro out of her life. Before biting into a Vietnamese spring roll, Carr pulls out any green stuff. She hasn't been back to Austin Grill, whose tacos were the last straw.
"They used to put these giant sprigs of cilantro in the tacos - just flavor overdose and big, stringy twigs," she said. "You never see somebody put an entire stem of parsley in something. Oh, man, how many times do you see stems of cilantro? If they would chop it up into tiny, fine bits I could probably handle it a little bit better."
Epicures exist on both sides of the cilantro divide. While many chefs celebrate it, no less a foodie than Julia Child told Larry King in 2002 that she thought cilantro (and arugula for that matter) had "kind of a dead taste."
