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Accounting For Taste

I was totally fascinated by a randomly-chosen topic, how our taste buds work.
Still crazy busy, I worked til 10pm last night, and ate dinner standing up, allowing deep-fried food into my digestive system and (sniff) on to my expensive new tie.. : - )

Sweet, sour, bitter, tangy, spicy, each taste with its own particular flavor.

10,000 taste cells which cover the tongue, palate, epiglottis, and pharynx, help us to determine the flavor of our food. Each taste cell consists of small hairs that lie in the taste pore.

There, dissolved food or drink binds to a receptor, like a key in a lock. If the key fits, then the taste cell sends a signal to the brain, telling it that this morsel is sweet, salty, sour, or bitter (the four basic types of taste cells).

With thousands, perhaps millions of flavors, we only only four types of taste buds! The vast combinations and strengths of each contribute to those vast numbers. Even if each of the basic flavors always had equal strengths, there still would be 256 different flavors. But with a hint of sour, a dash sweet, a pinch of bitter, that number increases exponentially to a gastronomical feast.

To read more about the sense of taste and smell, read In The Realm of the Chemical.