I learned to-day that wasabi is part of the horseradish family. In fact, it’s even called “Japanese horseradish”. This surprised me. Why?

I like wasabi. It has this pungent taste like nothing else I know, so it’s very hard to describe in writing, but I’ve become accustomed enough to mixing wasabi paste into my soy sauce for sushi that not doing so would feel wrong. I know I’m only able to enjoy it in small quantities, lest it burn my nasal passages, but that’s part of the fun of it.

I don’t like horseradish. When I was young, no more than ten, someone had me try horseradish. I think we were learning about Passover in grade school, and we had a Seder, and there was horseradish. It was strange and bitter and I gagged.

So what gives? If wasabi and horseradish are the same sort of beast, why do I crave one but recoil at the other?

One possibility is that wasabi and horseradish are just different enough, and in a specific direction that happens to align perfectly with my pleasure gradient. If you took horseradish and chemically shifted it into wasabi, I would like it. I’m not sure about this, though. They both are so far apart from all the other taste-sensations and yet so close to each other that I’m sceptical they would lie perfectly on opposite sides of my taste boundaries.

Another possibility is that I had horseradish so long ago that my tastes have changed and my dislike of horseradish is outdated. Seeing horseradish fills me with revulsion, but I haven’t actually tried tasting horseradish in a long time. In fact, I don’t think I started to appreciate wasabi until years after the Horseradish Incident.

If this is so, then maybe if I tried horseradish (blindly) to-day I would like it! But this feels strange. It’s as if I’ve tricked myself into liking horseradish, or as if liking wasabi has vaccinated me against disliking horseradish, because I’ve been pretty much eating horseradish all long.

But maybe not too strange. After all, this might be analogous to me taking the freeway for the first time. I was terrified of merging onto a freeway, but I had no problems with San Jose’s expressways. Then I read a source that said that some of San Jose’s freeways are called “expressways” for some odd reason, and I thought, wait, so does that mean I’ve been driving on freeways all along?