What is a taste ?

Introduction
Taste, is one of our five senses. It is located on the tongue and allows to appreciate and
determine foods, by analyzing the flavors of these.
Taste is also a mechanism of defense: most poisons are bitter, and their bad taste prompts us
to spit out a food of this kind at once. In rotting, food also becomes poisons. Taste, but also
smell, make it possible not to ingest these substances harmful for our organism.
We will see how when we put food in the tongue, it’s possible to define his taste.

I. The perception of taste

Directly in contact with food, tongue is the essential organ of taste. Indeed, it makes it possible
to identify the chemical substances in the form of solutions thanks to chemoreceptors located
on the tongue.
The taste sensations originate in the taste buds located on the tongue, the lateral and
posterior walls of the throat. These are sensory receptors made up of a group of cells
stimulated by specific taste stimulants. The information collected by these cells is transported
by different cranial nerves to the brain, the final organ of taste.
Three types of taste bud are involved in tasting: the fungiform taste bud, which are very
numerous on the front of the tongue and are the smallest, the foliate taste bud on the sides
of the tongue, and the “caliciformes” taste bud at the back of the tongue and which are the
largest.
The determination of taste is therefore based on the stimulation of a whole of receptors, and
it is the combination of these stimulations which is at the origin of the taste attributed to a
food.
This allows distinction of a very large number of flavors with relatively few types of receptors.
So, there are four different tastes:
• sweetness like sugar and honey;
• salty taste like salt;
• acid taste as in lemon or vinegar;
• bitter taste like the artichoke tail;
• umami taste, such as in meat juices or glutamate sauces;
• pungent taste like pepper, ginger or chili;
The perception of tastes is essential for eating. A food with a sweet, salty or umami taste is
often appetizing, because our bodies perceive that it is rich in nutrients. Much of bitter or acid
taste will sometimes be repulsive, because the body perceives these sensations as the mark
of a decomposed food.

II. The role of saliva

An experiment show that when a person put a cube of chocolate on his tongue, these
chocalote has a taste but if this same person dry his tongue with paper towel, and then put
chocolate, so this person don’t detect chocolate taste.
The only difference between the two experiments is the presence of saliva. It is concluded
that the latter is involved in the perception of the taste of a food. Indeed, the sapid molecules
dissolve in the saliva, which convey them in the pores of the taste buds.

III. The role of sense of smell and the sight

The taste is completed by the sense of smell for other fine sensations.
At the nose, sensory receptors are stimulated by fragrant molecules, which diffuse from the
mouth to the nasal mucous membrane. This olfaction makes it possible to accentuate the
taste of food and to give indications on the flavor of a food.
During a cold, for example, olfactory molecules cannot fix to the receptors of the nasal mucous
membrane; The taste is very much reduced, which shows the importance of this way in the
perception of flavors.
The taste of a food is not attached to color, but our gustatory representations make us
associate a color with a taste. Vision is therefore also involved in our taste perception. It can
be misleading, because it corresponds to an anticipation of the real taste of a food. For
example, in general, a light-colored, bright food should be sweet

Conclusion

To conclude, Taste is very important in food determination and is determined by the three
senses. In fact, tasting and olfaction defines flavor of food. Furthermore, the sight gives an
idea of the taste that will be felt, also allows the salivation, so important in tasting. Many other
parameters are involved, such as the temperature of the food consumed, but also parameters
that are more difficult to measure and yet very real, for example the atmosphere in which the
food is consumed, our mood, our appetite, our eating habits.