What is Taste, Anyway?

This month is taste month on our Medium blog. Taste is essential, because it’s directly connected to our relationship with our food. It’s a word that is so common that “tasting” has become synonymous with the act of trying something out, and hopefully savoring it. To think about how that became the case, we took a deeper dive into the subject. 🕵

The art of sensing the full richness of our foods

To understand the origins of taste, we need to use our imagination. 🌟

Picture being just about to eat a strawberry. For fun, let’s say it’s an Agricool strawberry, so it’s one that is sweet and full of taste.

As soon as you put it in your mouth, it starts transferring a complex set of information toward your brain.

Your first impression? This strawberry is so DAMN GOOD ! And when you think “good”, you’re actually talking about its taste. You’re thus directly associating the taste coming from the strawberry with the experience of the fruit that is in your mouth.

But if the role of taste is important, it’s not the only one that influences your perception of your food. Taste is just a tiny part of what is really taking place. There is a huge amount of other information, coming from all of our 5 senses, that is also very important.

To understand, we need to get a bit further into the details. 🔬

Taste, Savor, Enjoy

So, taste. It is the sense most associated with food, essential when we’re testing out a new flavor.

That’s why it’s time to start chewing on that delicious strawberry sitting in front of you. Yummy.

In doing so, you activate your taste buds, and you start to take in those first sensations. You can tell whether what you’re eating is sweet, salty, sour, bitter or umami. But your taste buds aren’t everything.

Here’s a little test you can try at home. 🕹

Pinch your nose and chew the strawberry. Your tongue will immediately sense that it is sweet. That is coming from its sugars, and it’s the primary taste of the fruit. But with your nose closed, you’ll not be able to exactly identify what it is you’re eating. Now let go of your nose. You’ll immediately have it back again: ah, a strawberry.

So tell me, doctor — is it serious? No, everything’s fine. It just that “taste” as we commonly use it is actually a very complex phenomenon. It brings into play all of our 5 senses, even if we are only aware of a small part of the total experience. And smell is one of the things that plays a large, if hidden, role.

Smell, Breathe, Sense

It has been shown that most of what we think of as “taste” in fact starts with the nose. 👃

What’s more, when we ask people to judge a series of smells, they typically use terms associated with our gustatory system. That’s why you’ll hear words like “sweet” and “bitter” applied to smells. And yet the olfactory system itself doesn’t have any sensors that relate to these tastes. Again, try it at your next meal with your family, the results may surprise you.

But let’s come back to our strawberry. When you breathe in its odor, you’re stimulating the olfactory receptors found in your nose.

If, by chance, you’ve already eaten things over the course of your life, the memory of those experiences will activate the reward pathways (dopamine, in technical terms) located in your brain. In other words, you’ll be dying to taste that strawberry. It will be just like madeleines were for the good old Proust.

Now start eating the berry. There — your brain is immediately receiving new sensory impulses.

When we chew, swallow and exhale, as Linda Bartoshuk explained, “the volatile molecules of our food are forced to the back of our palate and into our nasal cavity from behind”. In fact, it’s kind of like smoke rising from a chimney. The odors that we receive from food come from the outside, when we smell the food, and from the inside, when we’re chewing.

In the nasal cavity, the volatile molecules of the strawberry are linked to odor receptors. We have somewhere between 350 and 400 different ones. And they’re actually the first source of that which we perceive as flavor.

Furthermore, numerous studies have shown that odors can change the level of sweetness (that is to say, the taste) of our food.

Let’s have a concrete example 👉 When you’re sick and you have a stuffy nose, have you ever noticed that your food doesn’t have much taste? It’s precisely because of the importance that odor has in our tasting of food. Because, as you’re certainly aware, it isn’t the taste that has gone away. It’s not less strong in our mouth or on our taste buds. But all of the sensations released by chewing don’t get to our brain, and so we have the impression that our food has no taste.

Essentially, our olfactory receptors are stimulated through two pathways: the nose (#sniff) and the mouth (#chew). Odor is key in sensing everything about our food.

The brain combines information coming from these senses to produce our flavor experience. And if taste and odor are essential, what about our other senses?

Other senses are Important, Too

As we said above, science has shown that taste is a complex phenomenon including all of our 5 senses. You’ve seen how for taste and smell. For the others — sight, touch and sound — things are a bit more subtle.

Scientists argue that while the senses are anatomically separate, each with distinct functions, they aren’t cognitively separate. In other words, they all interact with each other to form one very complex system.

Based on physiological definitions, taste would be considered a minor sense. It is limited to a relatively small number of sensations: sweetness, acidity, bitterness, saltiness and umami. Odor can be seen as a double sense, having a role both in smelling and tasting. Sight, touch and hearing intervene as secondary senses that complement and refine other information that our system has already taken in.

Taste alone isn’t enough to identify a particular food. Together with smell, we can immediately have a better experience, with more precise information regarding what we’re eating.

And then it is the other senses that complete the experience.

👉 Touch lets us feel new contrasts. That’s how you can identify the texture and temperature of a strawberry, for instance. These elements have an indirect impact on your judgement. If you touch a strawberry with your tongue and it’s hard as a rock, you won’t want to eat it. On the other hand, if you touch it and find it pleasantly fleshy, your mouth just may start watering.

👉 Hearing brings forward the same type of sensation. It lets us know, for example, if a particular food is crunchy. In the case of the strawberry, hearing is relatively limited. But if we were thinking about a bag of chips, we quickly see a difference. Hearing the crispiness of a chip adds another dimension to our analysis of the food. That directly impacts our perception, letting us anticipate texture.

👉 Finally, sight connects all of the above senses, again in a complementary way. If you see a strawberry that’s bright red, its smell will seem even more explosive in your nose, as opposed to seeing a strawberry that’s clearly not yet ripe. That’s not only linked to the maturity of the fruit itself, but also to our perception of the fruit. Sight is thus a bit like the cherry on top of the sundae.

And that brings us to the purely grammatical aspect of the question. If “taste” isn’t enough to define the experience of eating food, is there a better term?

Let’s Get Familiar with Flavor

If we don’t talk about taste, what can we say? According to neurobiologist Gordon Shepherd, the brain relies on all of our senses to bring together a complex “image of taste” that is rooted in our memory. Scientists have named this phenomenon “flavor”.

There is one other essential piece of information in our perceiving flavor. The use of terms like “taste” and “smell” refer to a perceptual system.

And that means that flavor involves another essential ingredient: each individual’s overall sensory system. If we give the same strawberry to two people from entirely different cultures, they won’t have the same judgement in terms of its taste.

This is what Ali Bouzari calls “the ultimate personal status update”.

When you have a taste experience, all of your culture and who you are takes on a considerable role: your personal history, your memories, the people around you…

For example, one sometimes hears that it is more enjoyable to eat seafood when you’re near the ocean. But how close must one be to the ocean in order for it to alter our perceptions? If we take strawberries, are you more in tune with this fruit if you ate it often during childhood? Are you repulsed by a certain food because you ate it too often over the course of your life?

This is why there are relatively few studies today that have centered on the taste of our food.

To finish up, Ali Bouzari brought up one last point. Each of our senses has a minimum level that lets us perceive a particular piece of information. For example, when sugar drops below a certain level, we’re no longer able to sense it. That leads to a critical question. What if there are an infinite number of sensations, perhaps so discreet that we cannot consciously distinguish them, but which are nonetheless known to our unconscious? And what if these tiny bits of information had an influence on our overall perception of a food? For the moment, nothing has been proven, but this remains a significant question.

So when we talk about the taste of food, and of the fact that food no longer tastes like it did 50 years ago, is it really the taste that has changed? Is it our perception that has evolved? Or even our expectations? Whatever it is, it seems that we are oftentimes disappointed with the flavor of our fruits and vegetables. With Agricool, we want to change this experience, putting flavor back at the center of our expectations, bringing a new solution to food production. We want to bring the pleasure back to eating.

Make your next meal UNFORGETTABLE

So the next time that you taste a strawberry, we’re counting on you to live it to the max. Keep all of the factors around you in mind — the people, the environment, your memories. Live the subtleties of the moment and let it stay in your head. Take your time, savor it. The fruit that you’re eating will be an integral part of who you are. The flavor that you perceive will become part of your history, playing a key role in your future experiences. 🍓