Does cilantro taste like soap?
Does cilantro taste like soap to you?
There is a gene for this. A quarter of people cannot say which way theirs went.
A preference, not a test. There is no right answer.
The one food argument that is not about taste
Every other question in this family is a preference, and this one is not quite. People who say coriander tastes of soap are not reporting that they dislike it; they are reporting a different sensation from the same leaf. That makes it the odd member of a set of food debates — the disagreement is about perception rather than about judgement, so being in the minority here says something different from being in the minority about pineapple on pizza.
The published reference is a YouGov survey of US adults from October 2025, the same fieldwork behind several of the other food questions on this site. People who were unsure are excluded from the shape used here. Worth holding lightly for this one in particular: whether someone has ever noticed the effect depends on how often they have eaten the herb at all, which a survey of one country cannot separate out.
YouGov Survey: Food Debates, 3-6 October 2025
Published figures are kept separate from this site’s own responses and weighted lightly against them, so answers measured here overtake the literature rather than being anchored by it.