Not quite a year ago came the first news that rising-star chef Grant Achatz was seriously ill. In what can only be called the cruelest irony I have ever heard, it was announced that he had Stage IV cancer of the tongue and might lose his tongue altogether to the only recommended treatment for the disease, radical surgery.
Then, a couple of months later, a news item that he had opted to decline the surgery in favor of a largely untried regimen of chemo and radiation therapy. (The WSJ link in that post still works, so I recommend reading it for background). Less than a month after that, the announcement of a book deal AND the news that the tumor had been reduced 80% by the chemo/radiation therapy.
Ten months after the original diagnosis, which came with the likelihood that he would die within weeks, Achatz’s tumor is gone. And, according to this excellent New Yorker profile from last week’s issue, so is most of his sense of taste (a side effect of the radiation therapy). But his tastebuds are slowly beginning to return, and his type-A level of determination and drive never left, and so he is back in the kitchen thinking up recipes, relying on a cadre of sous chefs to do his tasting for him. His prognosis is not certain; typically patients with this sort of oral cancer only have a 30% survival rate after three years, however patients who received the chemo/radiation therapy in an earlier trial had a 70% 3-year-survival rate.
Meanwhile, Achatz tells writer D.T. Max that he is fascinated by the process of having his palate return a little bit at a time. The ability to taste sweetness is the last taste sensation to go and the first to return. Doctors and researchers have observed that patients who lose their sense of taste eventually lose their desire to eat altogether, and the human instinct for eating sweet foods is perhaps our most deeply ingrained sensory experience. Over the winter, his ability to taste saltiness has begun to return, but his ability to sense fat remains elusive (we perceive fat as creaminess or richness in our taste). If he is lucky, all his tastebuds might return within a year. For now, he pushes on.
