How we taste food

Discover the chemicals that combine to create an extensive assortment of flavours

- AILSA HARVEY

Food is essential to life, and all animals eat to gain the necessary energy for survival. Since the dawn of agriculture, people have experimented with different foods’ potential and learned how to turn cooking into an art. The art of flavouring requires not just taste intuition, but an understanding of the chemistry of different foods and their complementary pairings.

Today, chemists and chefs experiment with flavour combinations to create unique taste profiles for your tongue. The human body experiences flavours by combining the senses of smell, taste and touch. Your tongue is covered in sensory cells, which are packed into groups called taste buds. These protrusions on the surface of the tongue are stimulated by five main types of food flavour: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. For a flavour to be processed, the food must be dissolved in water and come into contact with the taste buds. Food that has little or no water content relies on saliva that’s released into the mouth to instigate the taste sensation.

Between individuals, flavour preferences can vary. Your favourite food is likely to be different to your friends’, and a food that you can’t stand might be a staple in someone else’s diet. Our flavour preferences depend on our genes, experience and age. How your taste buds interpret flavour sensations can change as you get older, making some bitter foods more tolerable for adults than you remember them being when first exposed to them as a child.

Meanwhile, the foods that a pregnant person includes in their diet influence a child’s flavour preferences when they’re born. Despite our interpretations of flavour being personal, to some extent humans share the same core attraction to sweet flavours.