Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good by Barb Stuckey Page A
Authors: Barb Stuckey
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use as a prop for a demonstration on taste that I was giving a while ago. It’s an amazing way to point out the papillae on the tongue. Just like ours, only bigger.”
“I’m in need of a tongue,” chimed in Michael Tordoff, a researcher at Monell who studies, among other things, our taste for the mineral calcium.
“You mean a human tongue?” I asked. “For research?”
“Yes,” he answered. Human tissue samples are apparently hard to obtain.
“I’m not just looking for any tongue,” said Tordoff, “I’m looking for a fresh tongue.”
“Some people at Monell just lop off their own tastebuds,” Margolskee told me as we arrived at the restaurant. When you dine with sensory scientists, disturbing visual images about their work accompany the meal.
The first thing I learned when I got to Monell was how the improper use of the word taste sends sensory scientists into a bit of a tizzy. I was corrected no fewer than five times for using the word taste to mean the combination of taste, smell, and texture. Science demands proper terminology, but since I’m not a scientist, I don’t use their jargon. I speak and write in plain English, as you do, and I say things such as I can’t taste anything when I have a cold and my nose is stuffed up. Yet my taste system, as the scientists pointed out, is most likely perfectly functional. It’s my sense of smell that is compromised when I have the flu. Taste is just the tip of the iceberg, since most of what we think of as taste is smell. Some of the food odors we smell come from sniffing the food when it’s under our nose (outside the mouth). But most of the aromas we perceive when we eat are released in the mouth and reach the nose through the mouth.
When you eat something new, you taste it for the first time, although you’ll also smell, feel, and touch it. When someone asks you whether you like a food, he asks if you like the taste of it, but what he really wants to know is if you like its combination of smell, taste, texture, appearance, and sound. Yet taste has become the default word for the experience of eating food—in both noun and verb form—because we do (using correct scientific terminology) taste with our mouth.
You instinctively know that what you experience when you eat is just as dependent on your nose as on your tongue. In fact, research has proved that every other sense—sight, hearing, touch, and smell—can influence what you taste as well. But you don’t eat with your nose. You don’t put food into your ears or eyes. When the system is working the way it should, you put food into your mouth.
This causes us to connect flavor to the mouth because it’s the place we taste, the place where taste sensations are initially sparked. But only a small portion of what you experience as flavor happens on the tongue. Linking theentire experience of food to the mouth, though understandable, is what causes the confusion.
There are only five tastes that humans can detect using their mouths, alone. Technically speaking, if it’s not one of the five Basic Tastes, it’s not a taste at all. Everything else we experience in the mouth is either an aroma or a texture. The combination of these three characteristics—tastes, aromas, and texture—is correctly called flavor. The tastes in a tomato include sweet, sour, and umami (the taste described as savory or brothy). The aromas in a tomato include grassy, green, fruity, musty, and earthy. The texture depends largely on how ripe the fruit is and how it has been prepared, from juicy, firm, raw tomatoes to tender, soft, simmered ones. And the overall flavor of a tomato is what you know of as a tomato, the whole gestalt.
To appreciate, firsthand, how profound the difference between taste and smell is, I suggest you try the exercise called Separating Taste from Smell, which is at the end of this chapter. Plug your nose, and while holding it shut, put a jelly bean in your mouth and start chewing. After a few chews,
“I’m in need of a tongue,” chimed in Michael Tordoff, a researcher at Monell who studies, among other things, our taste for the mineral calcium.
“You mean a human tongue?” I asked. “For research?”
“Yes,” he answered. Human tissue samples are apparently hard to obtain.
“I’m not just looking for any tongue,” said Tordoff, “I’m looking for a fresh tongue.”
“Some people at Monell just lop off their own tastebuds,” Margolskee told me as we arrived at the restaurant. When you dine with sensory scientists, disturbing visual images about their work accompany the meal.
The first thing I learned when I got to Monell was how the improper use of the word taste sends sensory scientists into a bit of a tizzy. I was corrected no fewer than five times for using the word taste to mean the combination of taste, smell, and texture. Science demands proper terminology, but since I’m not a scientist, I don’t use their jargon. I speak and write in plain English, as you do, and I say things such as I can’t taste anything when I have a cold and my nose is stuffed up. Yet my taste system, as the scientists pointed out, is most likely perfectly functional. It’s my sense of smell that is compromised when I have the flu. Taste is just the tip of the iceberg, since most of what we think of as taste is smell. Some of the food odors we smell come from sniffing the food when it’s under our nose (outside the mouth). But most of the aromas we perceive when we eat are released in the mouth and reach the nose through the mouth.
When you eat something new, you taste it for the first time, although you’ll also smell, feel, and touch it. When someone asks you whether you like a food, he asks if you like the taste of it, but what he really wants to know is if you like its combination of smell, taste, texture, appearance, and sound. Yet taste has become the default word for the experience of eating food—in both noun and verb form—because we do (using correct scientific terminology) taste with our mouth.
You instinctively know that what you experience when you eat is just as dependent on your nose as on your tongue. In fact, research has proved that every other sense—sight, hearing, touch, and smell—can influence what you taste as well. But you don’t eat with your nose. You don’t put food into your ears or eyes. When the system is working the way it should, you put food into your mouth.
This causes us to connect flavor to the mouth because it’s the place we taste, the place where taste sensations are initially sparked. But only a small portion of what you experience as flavor happens on the tongue. Linking theentire experience of food to the mouth, though understandable, is what causes the confusion.
There are only five tastes that humans can detect using their mouths, alone. Technically speaking, if it’s not one of the five Basic Tastes, it’s not a taste at all. Everything else we experience in the mouth is either an aroma or a texture. The combination of these three characteristics—tastes, aromas, and texture—is correctly called flavor. The tastes in a tomato include sweet, sour, and umami (the taste described as savory or brothy). The aromas in a tomato include grassy, green, fruity, musty, and earthy. The texture depends largely on how ripe the fruit is and how it has been prepared, from juicy, firm, raw tomatoes to tender, soft, simmered ones. And the overall flavor of a tomato is what you know of as a tomato, the whole gestalt.
To appreciate, firsthand, how profound the difference between taste and smell is, I suggest you try the exercise called Separating Taste from Smell, which is at the end of this chapter. Plug your nose, and while holding it shut, put a jelly bean in your mouth and start chewing. After a few chews,
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