What Does Water Taste Like?
Salty, sweet or something else?
Does water have a taste? I was surprised to find that during casual conversations about food and drink, water often came up as the being bland, tasteless and boring. Bland I can concede. Boring, sure. But tasteless, definitely not. I inadvertently appeared to have taken one side of the age-old debate: what, if anything, does water taste like? Each camp vehemently defends their stance, and I wanted to know, is there a definitive answer to the whether or not water has a taste.
Flavour vs Taste
Firstly, we need to clarify something. The terms flavour and taste are often used interchangeably, but scientifically, they mean very different things. Put simply, taste is an aspect of flavour.
When talking about taste we are talking exclusively about the experience on our tongues. When we eat a food, molecules in the food interact with our taste buds and we experience one of the five broad food tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour and savoury (umami).
Flavour, on the other hand, encompasses a much broader range of sensory information. The texture, temperature, smell and visual…
