Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good (8 page)

YOU WILL NEED

Blue food coloring (
Caution: The blue dye stains fabrics, including carpets and towels!
)

Small nonporous cup

Paper towels

Cotton swabs

1 paper or plastic reinforcement ring for each person

Magnifying glass

Mirror

DIRECTIONS

1. Pour a bit of blue food coloring into a nonporous cup.

2. Using a paper towel, blot your tongue to remove as much saliva as possible.

3. Dip the swab into the food coloring and apply the dye to your tongue. Let it saturate your tongue and dry out before you apply the reinforcement ring. Try to keep your tongue out while you’re doing this, or the ring will get wet and messy!

4. Apply a reinforcement ring to your blue tongue.

5. Using the magnifying glass and mirror, count the number of round taste buds inside the inner circle.

RESULTS
³

0–15 = Tolerant Taster

16–39 = Taster

40 or more = HyperTaster

I
was in Philadelphia in a minivan heading to the restaurant Buddakan with five researchers from Monell, a nonprofit research institution focused on uncovering the scientific mysteries of taste and smell. Seated behind me was Marci Pelchat, whose expertise includes food cravings and food addiction. One of the chattier scientists from Monell, she pointed out landmarks during our quick ride. Reading Terminal Market, Pelchat told me, houses downtown Philly’s version of a farmers’ market, although it has become a tourist destination.

“But I think you can still get pickled tongue there,” she said.

“Beef tongue?” I asked, remembering it from the Jewish delis of my youth, where the sight of a five-pound cow’s tongue would make me squeal.

“Kosher tongue?” inquired Bob Margolskee, a Monellian who studies taste at the molecular level.

“Yes, you know, cow tongue that’s been cured like corned beef. You slice it to make sandwiches,” said Pelchat. “I bought a whole one there to 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 the
entire 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, you’ll easily detect the two Basic Tastes evident in it: sweet and sour. Once you release your nostrils, the aromas of it will spring forth: tropical, cherry, pear, melon, buttered popcorn. The flavor of the jelly bean you’ve chosen is the combination of the two Basic Tastes, the signature aromas of whatever flavor you’ve chosen, and the texture, chewy-tender.

Of course, you don’t have to use a jelly bean to isolate the taste from the aroma of a food. Use a cherry tomato or fig or strawberry and you’ll experience the same thing. With your nose pinched shut, you’ll detect very little of the characteristic flavor of what’s in your mouth. You’ll get only sweet, sour, bitter, salt, or umami. Release your nostrils, breathe, and then you will get the aromas of tomato, fig, or strawberry.

In
Taste What You’re Missing
, I’m going to use plain English and say, “when you taste a tomato” even though I may be talking about the total multisensorial experience of eating a tomato. But I will also use (and recommend the common usage of) the term
savor
as a verb when the word
taste
is scientifically incorrect. For example, “When you savor a tomato, you get the green aroma first, followed by the basic tastes sweet and sour.” We usually think of savoring something as consuming it with delight. But Merriam-Webster defines the verb
savor
as “to have experience of,” so
savor
really does work in sentences where the word
taste
is incorrect.

The linguistic tendency to use the word
taste
to mean flavor is not an idiosyncrasy
of the English language. University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Rozin asked bilingual speakers of nine languages to provide synonyms for the words
taste
and
flavor
. They were given a dictionary to see if they could find better words. And then they were educated on the difference between the Basic Tastes and aroma. In seven of the nine languages (Spanish, German, Czech, Hebrew, Hindi, Tamil, Mandarin Chinese), it appears that this same idiosyncrasy exists, so that if it goes in the mouth, it’s
tasted.
Only Hungarian and French seemed to have words that hinted at a distinction between the concept of taste versus that of taste plus aroma: what you know now is flavor.

The word for flavor in French is, not coincidentally,
saveur.