How Taste Works

Children learn about taste in grade school -- out of the five senses, it seems like one of the
simplest. There are no cones, rods or lenses. There are no tympanic membranes or miniscule
bones. Yet scientists know less about taste than they know about sight and hearing -- senses that
are far more complex. Why is something seemingly so rudimentary so complicated and
controversial? Why is taste so mysterious?

This chef knows that flavor is more than gustatory sensation.

Flavor: It's a Science

When food scientists

manipulate taste sensation,
they use chemical compounds
to block or stimulate taste
receptor cells. One such
company, Senomyx, contracts
with Campbell's Soup, CocaCola, Kraft Foods and Nestl.
Senomyx states that its flavor
enhancers and taste
modulators will allow
companies to "improve the
nutritional profile" of
packaged foods and
beverages by cutting back on
sugar, salt and MSG without
compromising flavor

To start with, most people confuse taste with flavor. Taste is a

chemical sense perceived by specialized receptor cells that make up
taste buds. Flavor is a fusion of multiple senses. To perceive flavor,
the brain interprets not only gustatory (taste) stimuli, but also
olfactory (smell) stimuli and tactile and thermal sensations. With
spicy food, the brain will even factor in pain as one aspect of flavor.
Testing sensation is also a subjective science -- taste perhaps more
subjective that most. Some people have inherited genetic traits that
make certain foods taste disgusting. Others, called supertasters, have
abnormally high concentrations of taste receptors. To their
heightened palates, bland food tastes perfectly flavorful. And, as we
all know, food tastes differently to different people -- we don't all like
the same flavors.
In recent years, scientists have expanded the definition of taste,
allowing one, and possibly two, primary tastes into the original canon
of four -- sour, bitter, sweet and salty. They've challenged the tongue
map, the biology-class staple that charts distinct regions of taste.
Food scientists have even tampered with taste receptor cells, blocking
or stimulating them in an effort to cut sweeteners and salt out of food
without sacrificing flavor.

Sensation to Perception
Taste begins with sensation in the form of electrical impulses. Sensations, however -- responses
to stimuli like pressure, light or chemical composition -- become perceptions like touch, vision
or taste only when they reach the brain.

Different stimuli activate different sensory

receptors. Chemical stimuli activate the
chemoreceptors responsible for gustatory and
olfactory perceptions. Because taste and smell are
both reactions to the chemical makeup of solutions,
the two senses are closely related. If you've ever had
a cold during Thanksgiving dinner, you know that
all of the subtlety of taste is lost without smell.
In some species, however, the two chemical senses
are practically one. Invertebrates like worms do not
have distinctions between gustatory and olfactory
receptors. They instead differentiate between
volatile and nonvolatile chemicals.
In humans, the chemoreceptors that detect taste are called gustatory receptor cells. About 50
receptor cells, plus basal and supporting cells, make up one taste bud. Taste buds themselves are
contained in goblet-shaped papillae -- the small bumps that dot your tongue. Some papillae help
create friction between the tongue and food.
Every gustatory receptor cell has a spindly protrusion called a gustatory hair. This taste hair
reaches the outside environment through an opening called a taste pore. Molecules mix with
saliva, enter the taste pore and interact with the gustatory hairs. This stimulates the sensation of
taste.
Once a stimulus activates the gustatory impulse, receptor cells synapse with neurons and pass on
electrical impulses to the gustatory area of the cerebral cortex. The brain interprets the sensations
as taste.
In the next section, we'll learn about the primary tastes and how taste gives us clues about what
we eat.

The Primary Tastes

Until recently, scientists have accepted four basic tastes. You know them
well -- sweet, salty, sour and bitter. They are the building blocks of flavor
and at the root of other tastes. Each primary taste triggers a particular
gustatory receptor (although receptors can, and frequently do, respond to
multiple tastes). The basic tastes went unchallenged for years, perhaps
because of their familiarity -- name another taste that is as distinctive as one
of the four.

Sour? Sweet? When the primary tastes collide, lemonade is just delicious.

Taste Assimilation
Everything tastes better when
you're hungry, right? Well, it
actually might. In a study
done by researchers at the
University of Malawi, groups
of students who had not eaten
in 16 hours could perceive
weaker sucrose and salt
solutions than those who had
eaten only an hour before. In
order to discern taste,
students who had just eaten
needed a sucrose
concentration 50 percent
higher and a salt
concentration, double that of
those who had not eaten. But
our poison-detecting sense
never rests: An empty or full
stomach had no effect on the
perception of bitterness

In the early 1900s, however, a Japanese scientist sought to detect

another taste -- that of the savory seaweed common in Japanese
cooking. Kikunae Ikeda eventually isolated glutamic acid as a distinct
fifth taste -- one with its very own gustatory receptor. Ikeda named
this fifth taste umami, a Japanese word meaning delicious, savory
taste. You can taste umami in meats and tomatoes. Researchers
continued to study umami throughout the 20th century. An important
breakthrough came in 1985 when scientists trying to mimic the
controversial, flavor-enhancing substance MSG failed to replicate the
taste with any combination of the basic four.
But because Ikeda's study on taste was not translated into English until
2002 and because the taste of glutamic acid is subtle and less common
in Western food, umami has only recently entered the taste canon.
Now that the gate is open, however, it's unlikely that scientists will
ever be so secure in the limits of primary taste. French researchers
even identified a potential gustatory receptor for fat. Fat could actually
be the sixth taste. The primary tastes gave early humans clues about
what food was good to eat and what was harmful. Sweet foods usually
had calories. Salty foods had important vitamins and minerals. Sour
foods could be healthy, like oranges, or spoiled, like rotten milk. Bitter
tastes were often poisonous. The enhanced flavor of processed food
could signify nutritional value that isn't actually there, but our
preferences have remained. We still crave and respond to our ancestral
favorites, even to our detriment.
So if there are at least five primary tastes, what's up with the tongue
map? In the next section we'll learn about the biology-book mainstay
and why it might be completely wrong.

The Tongue and Regions of Taste

Just as scientists are reexamining the basic tastes, they are also redefining the tongue map. The
tongue map breaks the tongue down into regions of sensation -- bitter in the back, sour on the
sides, salty on the front edge and sweet at the tip. Umami researchers have claimed that the
tongue's posterior is important for detecting the fifth taste.
But for everyone who remembers arguing the tongue map as a grade-schooler, insisting they
could perceive salt at the back of the tongue or sour at the tip, news that the tongue map is
flawed at best must come as sweet vindication.
A German scientist named D.P. Hanig developed the tongue map in 1901 by asking volunteers
where they could perceive sensation. Other scientists later corroborated his findings but charted
the results in such a way that areas of lowered sensitivity looked like areas of no sensitivity. By
1974, Virginia Collings determined that while the tongue did have varying degrees of sensitivity
-- some areas could perceive certain tastes better than others -- there was no real truth to the strict
tongue map. Although taste receptors usually react strongly to a single taste, many respond to
multiple gustatory stimulations. People can perceive taste anywhere there are taste receptors.

The Artificial Tongue

A chemist at the University of
Connecticut developed an
artificial tongue that analyzes
substances and determines
taste. The tongue, a platinum
electrode coated with two
polymers, conducts electrical
currents, much like a human
tongue. It then charts the
results on a graph where
analysts recognize patterns as
primary tastes. Developers
hope the tongue can be used
in environmental monitoring,
food testing and landmine
detection

Supertasters
Supertasters don't always make better food
or wine critics. Their sense of flavor often
differs drastically from that of the general
population.

Usually, it's great to have heightened senses like

20/20 vision or sharp hearing. But a heightened
sense of taste, no matter how delicious it might
sound, is really no joy. Supertasters are people with
two or sometimes just one dominant allele for the gene TAS2R28. And although they can
perceive more nuanced flavor in food than nontasters, they often find common foods too bitter,
sweet or spicy.
In the 1930s, a scientist at DuPont discovered that people had varying degrees of sensitivity to
the chemical PTC (phenylthiocarbamide). For some, PTC tasted shockingly bitter, but for the
mystified minority, PTC had no taste at all. Due to concerns about PTC's safety, scientists began
studying people's reactions to PROP (6-n-propylthiouracil), a synthetic compound used in
thyroid medicine. For nontasters, PROP had no flavor; for tasters, it was unpleasant and for
supertasters, PROP slapped the tongue with an intense bitterness.
In 1991, Linda Bartoshuk, then of Yale Medical School, coined the name "supertasters" for the
people with acute PROP sensitivity and noticed that they had a denser covering of fungiform
papillae than nontasters. She linked the number of taste receptor cells to supertaste.
For supertasters, coffee, hoppy beer and vegetables like Brussels sprouts might be too bitter;
cake and ice cream might be too rich and chili peppers might be too hot. There are, however, a
few advantages of super taste-sensitivity.
Beverly Tepper, a scientist at Rutgers University, discovered that, at least among women in their
40s, supertasters were 20 percent thinner than nontasters. With their heightened sensitivity to
sugar and dairy fats, supertasters are less likely to crave junky foods. They actually eat less food
overall -- but, unfortunately, they also skimp on leafy vegetables. Tepper saw no correlation
between tasting and weight in men
With such stunning links developing between taste and body mass, scientists are eager to study
taste receptors as a possible factor in obesity. Yet just as flavor is more than taste, taste is more
than a genetic impulse. People's food preferences and eating habits are largely based on what
they grew up on and even what their mothers ate while pregnant.