For many, it is a staple of their diet, used to flavour a multitude of dishes.
However, other claim it simply tastes like soap, and have even expressed their hatred for it in poetic form.
'O soapy flavour / Why pollutest thou my food? / Thou me makest retch,' reads one of the hundreds of haikus posted to the website IHateCilantro.com (cilantro is the american name for coriander).
Researchers believe whether we like or loathe coriander could be down to whether we posses a particular gene.
Researchers now think they know why coriander elicits such a 'marmite' reaction in people -and they said it could be in your genes.
Statistical geneticist Nicholas Eriksson and colleagues worked through a genetic comparison of two separate samples of over 10,000 people.
One was one a full range of people of European ancestry who said coriander tasted like soap, the other one of people of all genetic backgrounds who had declared their like or dislike of coriander.
The result was a correlation between disliking coriander and two genes -- one associated with enjoying smells, and another associated with linking smells to taste.
The genetic link the team found was part of a group of olfactory receptor genes which control our sense of smell; one such gene in particular, OR6A2, appears to be responsible for our reaction to coriander.
'These results confirm that there is a genetic component to cilantro taste perception and suggest that cilantro dislike may stem from genetic variants in olfactory receptors,' the team said.
'We propose that OR6A2 may be the olfactory receptor that contributes to the detection of a soapy smell from cilantro in European populations.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2202656/Dont-like-coriander-The-reason-genes-scientists-find.html#ixzz26NHc6jNK
