Taste and smell

Taste and smell
Taste and smell, described as our two chemical senses, work together in our perception of the flavor of food.

The process is extremely complex and not completely understood. Neither the tongue nor the nose alone is sufficient to experience flavor; we must have the combination of taste and aroma, as the brain registers signals from the taste buds and mouth and from the olfactory sensory cells at the roof of the nasal passage.

In addition, the sense of touch is inextricably involved in our experience, as we react to the “mouth-feel” of food, determined by its texture and c0nsistency.

The temperature of food, as well as the presence of certain chemicals which we describes as “hot” (as in chilies) or “cool” (as in mints) are also factors.

Piquant foods actually cause a degree of pain, in a way that offends some eaters but excites and pleases others. The look of food before we eat is important, as are the sounds we hear – crunchy, squeaky, slurpy, fizzy, and so on – as we chew and swallow.

And finally a feeling of satisfaction, satiety, or even bloatedness, or the discovery that “it tastes like more,” all contribute to the profound experience of savoring our food.

Moreover, these sensations are modified by our mood at the moment, our state of health, our expectations, nostalgia and the taboos and aversions.

Our sense of smell, while perhaps dull in comparison to most other mammals’, is nonetheless extremely subtle, and we can discriminate among thousands of different scents.

In contrast, the gustatory sense - the perceptions communicated by the taste buds – is usually regarded as rather crude, being limited to just four basic tastes: sweet, sour (or acid), bitter and salty.

This theory is by no means universally accepted, however, some physiologists and some culinary cultures suggest that there are one or more additional basic tastes, variously describe as earthy, metallic, stringent, alkaline (soapy), or spicy (pungent).

It is difficult to specify precisely what is meant by these terms, and some of them may overlap. Our problem is identifying the basic tastes may reflect a physiological fact: Although the question of how many basic tastes there are goes back at least to Aristotle, no one has yet demonstrated that such a thing as a basic taste actually exists.
Taste and smell