The science of taste – 8 things you didn’t know about taste

Lately, I have been immersing myself in the science of taste and what makes us taste and experience food as part of some research I am doing. I must say it’s fascinating and at the moment I just can’t put this book down “Tasty – The art and science of what we eat”. Read on to enter the magic world of taste…

Did you know that flavour is the most important ingredient at the core of what we are? More than vision, hearing or even sex, flavour created us. Through millions of years up until today, foraging, hunting and eating food have driven life and led to the development of our brains and achievements of culture. We always had to outsmart food and provide for ourselves.

However, research shows that even 3.18 million years ago our Homo Sapiens cousins were going through large distances across the Savana just to experience a different kind of food – you could call it the choice of taste.

8 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT TASTE

1. Your taste buds aren’t just on your tongue; they’re on the roof, cheeks, and back of your mouth, even your esophagus. A full mouth experience!

2. 80% of what we experience as taste is actually smell! Talk about eating with your senses! Smelling our food gives us cues on its safety and provenience and prevents us from eating food that’s gone bad that could poison you. Do you remember ever having a cold and blocked nose and food being pretty blunt and tasteless? Yep, that’s because you can’t taste food without smelling it.

3. You also can’t taste what your saliva can’t dissolve: Saliva dissolves the chemicals in food allowing the receptors on your taste buds to detect taste. Without it, obviously, food is tasteless. To see (or taste) for yourself, dry your tongue with a paper towel and attempt to taste dry foods consisting of sugar and salt. It’ll be as if you were devoid of the sense altogether!

4. Taste senses both harmful and beneficial things. Sweetness helps to identify energy-rich foods, while bitterness originated as a warning system to keep toxins out of one’s body. When combined with other flavours bitterness tastes good. Sooo good! However, the amount of bitterness you taste (see the Brassica family and those love or hate Brussels sprouts) is given by a set of genes. “Taste perceptions are programmed by DNA and have been passed down across millions of years that helped us survive during our evolution.” One person may love the taste of coffee, while another one hates it. And children may really tell the truth when they say they don’t like Brussel Sprouts. It’s just biology.

5. Taste perception fades with age 🙁 We lose almost half of our taste receptors by the time we turn 20! Babies have an incredible amount of synapses between ages of two and three (up to 15000 – whereas an adult has 8000 to 10000!) which makes their senses merge together and emphasize all experiences. They live in a world of overlapping experiences and memories can crossfade with taste and flavours. That’s why early a single taste can evoke entire moments from one’s childhood. Remember Marcel Proust’s “In search of the forgotten time”?

6. Taste buds only live for 10 to 14 days. Then they regrow. Remember burning your tongue? Auch, yes that time. Your taste buds died and food had a weird taste. Then a few days after you’ve completely forgotten about the incident.

7. Flies and butterflies have taste organs on their feet, so they can taste anything they land on. Catfish have taste organs across their entire bodies. Take that for an entire body food experience! Not sure whether we should envy them or be glad – can you imagine touching everything and knowing how it tastes? Hmmm…

8. The classic tongue map is wrong. Remember that tongue map from school teaching you about where you taste sweet, salty, sour and bitter, and the newly added umami, from a Japanese word for “pleasant savory taste”, distinguished from saltiness? Well, it has nothing to do with the way we taste. “The average human tongue contains about 10 000 taste buds – tiny structures found on the visible papillae. While eating, a mix of food and drink in the mouth enters a bud via a single pore-like opening at its tip. A bud is a knotted clump of 50 to 80 specialised cells, each detecting one of the basics tastes.” Every single one of these cells will differentiate all tastes. Intense!

Hope you feel more knowledgeable now about the way you eat and perceive taste. Plus, you’ll have new trivia for your next dinner party 🙂

Until next time, keep it tasty!

Much love,
Denisa xxo