Umami in a Tube?

Yep, you can buy it now. What’s inside these shiny, hip-looking tubes? A cynic might say it’s plain ol’ tomato paste with a little puréed anchovy, porcini mushroom and parmesan mixed in, all sold for many times the price. Of course that’s not me. Find out more about packaged umami here, but ignore the snarky comment about Americans and how we’d only appreciate it if it tasted like pizza or potato chips. Indeed! I wouldn’t touch the stuff unless it tasted like either Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supremes or deep fried JELL-O in a cup. So there!

READ ON

Speaking of your brain…

Did you know that there is no single “taste center” in it? Considering all the various pieces of sensory hardware that are used for tasting, it’s really no surprise. MRI’s administered to test subjects made to slurp different-tasting syrups through tubes have shown that flavor sensations are processed in at least four different parts of the brain, parts that are distributed in both hemispheres. This is almost certainly why people who sustain various kinds of brain injuries often report different effects – many of them strange and contradictory – on their taste buds. It’s probably also why, since tastes are perceived by the brain as a kind of global “impression” versus a specific sort of data, tastes can be so hard to put into words.

READ ON

The Nose Knows

We’ve done taste buds, tongues and chewing, so at last we can get around to perhaps the most important part of tasting: smelling. For it’s in the nasal cavities where the majority of the sense we think of as “tasting” occurs.

As anyone who’s ever had a cold can tell you, things don’t have much flavor when you can’t smell. The reason is because plugged sinuses prevent the essential oils liberated by chewing from reaching our olfactory receptors.

READ ON

Taste and Fullness

Reader Stacey asks if it’s really true that it’s the sense of taste that cues the brain to tell us if we’ve had enough to eat. Staci, I was more confident of my answer before I found out that there was a full-on satiation researcher following this conversation (see the comments on the below post). So expect to see a lot more qualifiers and far fewer declarative sentences moving ahead. But yes, that’s at least partly true.

As I understand it, it’s our umami sensors that bear much of that burden. Umami is stimulated primarily by glutamic acid, a so-called proteinogenic amino acid, which is to say, an amino acid that’s used as a building block of protein molecules.

READ ON

Flavor vs. Taste

Reader Susan writes:

Taste and flavor; two words that are often used interchangeably. Discuss.

Are you kidding? I can hardly wait! Technically speaking, the word “flavor” is more narrowly defined than “taste.” Sensory researchers define flavor as the set of sensations that occur on the tongue. Taste, on the other hand, is what happens on the tongue, in the sinuses, the ears…the whole shootin’ match. And it’s all related to chewing.

READ ON

What Happens on the Tongue

A big part of the reason science ignored taste for so long is because it’s incredibly complicated. Not only are there thousands of flavor receptors, known as papillary cells, on the tongue, each one functions as its own little multi-functional unit.

Certainly some progress had been made observing flavor and receptor interactions over the years. The sensations of sour and salty for example. Researchers had long known that those flavors are created by hydrogen and sodium ions delivering minute electrical charges directly to papillary cell membranes. Those charges, which are received by the cell and carried along to nerve endings, can be measured.

READ ON

Tasting and Genetics

Reader Lee brings up a fascinating topic:

There is one question I’ve been curious about: How much variability is there between humans in the capacity to taste? I always say I have a “weak palate,” certainly compared to my sister, who can pick out, and then name, subtle flavors and spices in a dish, tastes that I am only dimly aware of. It shouldn’t surprise us that people might have stronger or weaker taste buds; vision skills, after all, vary from person to person. But what do scientists have to say on this topic?

READ ON

The Science of Taste

Would you believe that up until about fifteen years ago there wasn’t much? It’s true. Scientists knew virtually nothing about how the human taste sense actually functioned. Sure, we had these types of simple diagrams, but as far as determining exactly how human sensory organs intercepted and interpreted flavors, there was virtually no data. That began to change in the mid-1990’s when scientists in the US and Europe finally started to hold some long-held assumptions about taste up to scientific scrutiny. What they found was that there was far more to the perception of taste than anyone had ever imagined.

READ ON

Traveling, but I won’t let that stop me!

Well it’s happened again, I’m being forced to actually go out make a living. However because I’m sick and tired of leaving everyone in the lurch just because I’m away from the oven, I’m planning to press on blogging anyway. I received no end of questions about sensation, specifically as it applies to food, so I’ll blog about that. I’ll recycle some content (apologies to any deep Joe readers out there) but also add what I can as I go along. Hopefully the result will be at least mildly amusing!

READ ON