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How taste works

When people say something tastes good, they are usually referring to the flavor of the food or drink. Flavor is a combination of taste, smell, texture, and other characteristics of the food itself, such as temperature. The sense of taste is complex because it is so intricately linked with flavor and weaves in many of the other senses, especially the sense of smell. There are five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (pronounced oo-MAM-ee). Umami was described in the early 1900s, but only in the late 1990s did food researchers officially recognize it as a distinct taste. Umami is the taste that occurs when foods with the protein glutamate are eaten. Glutamate is found in meat, fish, and the flavor-enhancing chemical monosodium glutamate, or MSG.

Humans get the sensation of taste through their taste cells, which lie within the taste bud. The average person has about 10,000

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1. Introduction
2. How taste works
3. Smells at work: Lime or lemon?
4. All senses are not created equal
5. Experiment 1 - Supertasters: Is there a correlation between the number of taste buds and taste perception?
6. Experiment 2 - Smell and Taste: How does smell affect the sense of taste?
7. Design Your Own Experiment