I agree that it's refreshing for an article on cilantro to not be about that. But they make some very misleading implications by completely ignoring it.
> Coriander leaves fell even further out of fashion than the seeds because their distinct flavor clashed with the trendy imported ingredients of the time, such as rosewater. In 1544, physician and botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli described the leaves as smelling like bed bugs or stink bugs, a comparison echoed by later authors.
I read this as "Cilantro fell out of fashion due to it's incompatibility with other popular flavors at a time, and since people love following recent trends, they started describing it in a negative way". In other words, people saw it as "stink-bug-like" because the fashion changed. This happens a lot with food (e.g. Jell-O texture now being repulsive to a lot of people) but in this case, it has nothing to do with fashion, because to a lot of people cilantro does actually have such taste, and this shift in popularity is much better explained by the shift in genetics.
… I mean, coriander leaves (cilantro) was barely a thing at all in Ireland 50 years ago, and is now all over the place, primarily as a component of Indian and Mexican food, which are quite popular. I’m going to bet on fashions/familiarity, there, rather than a spate of sneaky gene therapy.
No, I am just saying that the article is omitting a very important fact that would go against the argument it implies. I am not saying that it was necessarily genetically driven, I am simply saying that I find it strange that this other perspective was not even mentioned, especially since this genetic predisposition to disliking cilantro is such a widely known fact, and since the author they cite chose to describe cilantro in exactly the way everyone with this genetic predisposition (including myself) chooses to describe it.
If an article about the lack of dairy in east Asian cuisine never mentioned the high frequency of lactose intolerance in those regions, it would be equally misleading, even if there were many other factors resulting in this lack of dairy (primarily different agricultural practices).
