This sounds more like the infamous post-covid loss of taste / smell. To my knowledge, Lucas has never complained that foods don't taste as they should, he just likes mixing together foods that objectively DON'T go together. And its certainly not the result of a dental procedure: his last dentist visit had to be with or before Suzanne, and evidence suggests Lucas has ALWAYS been this way about food. I would even bet that his ego about his own cooking stems from his parents thinking it was cute that lil' Lucas liked to mix together disparate ingredients, and told him he was a little chef. He's so proud of his culinary creations; he MUST gave gotten reinforcement about them at some point.
I appreciate the medical insight, (never heard of dysgeusia) but I dont think its quite the same thing. This is a bigger problem than dysgeusia. Something's wrong with his brain in the area of food pairing. Popcorn on pasta? Thats more of a textural abortion, but ok. Raw green beans and pepperoni in an uncooked tortilla? Mustard on a protein bar?
Its not as though lucas is simply using what he has on hand, and because of a lack of ingredients, is forced to try strange combinations. Rather, he has actually gone out and bought these bizarre incongruous ingredients for the express purpose of crafting these nauseating "dishes".
Before I start, I just want to make it clear that I’m not trying to correct you or intentionally powerlevel here, but I thought some gentle pushback might give us a chance to talk about something I’ve never seen discussed much before on this thread.
I invite everyone to give their hot take.
Usually I skip all mention of COVID because I want to minimize my chances of talking to an aliterate paranoid sperg about the fundamentals of epidemiology, but you don’t fit that category and we aren’t in Internet Famous, so I’ll break protocol to say that the symptom in question would be ageusia.
Dysgeusia is the entire spectrum of changes to taste modality, but here is something that might be interesting to think about re: Lucas while we wait for the next saga to kick off.
Why should we consider this a problem?
Any alteration to any sense is ultimately going to be rooted in the brain, so we probably all agree that something with Lucas’ brain is fucked up and that is the efficient cause for his eccentric gustatory habits. Being an outlier isn’t always a bad thing.
We are talking about the perceptions of a particular subject after all, so we couldn’t be dealing with something more subjective than this. If Lucas isn’t complaining and it isn’t keeping him from mechanically eating food, what is the harm? I could see how this might raise dietary concerns, in the sense that the dysgeusia motivates him to make poor choices in consumption, but he seems to inhale food at such volumes that he doesn’t strike me as a particularly picky eater.
Given what we know (which is precious little), I don’t think we could rule out past dental work. The chorda tympani is a fickle and sprawling bitch (the nerve primarily responsible for transmitting taste related sensation), trauma to the oral cavity from something like endodontic surgery could cause something like this and if Lucas never reported it, no one would know unless they watched his disgusting mukbangs he performs as a mating call.