These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.
We assume everyone else experiences the world like we do. That we see colors the same, hear music the same, and taste foods the same, but we don’t. Everyone is in a unique sensory world of their own. This is obvious when it comes to people’s tastes in foods, but it applies to the others senses too.
In general, females have better senses of both taste and smell than males. Most of what we think of as taste is actually smell, which is why you lose your sense of flavor when you have a stuffy nose. Block your nose and apple and raw potato taste the same. In the back of our nasal passage on an area about half the size of a postage stamp, we have hundreds of receptors that detect volatile chemicals. Everyone has a different mix of receptors and receptors with different sensitivities, so everyone’s sense of smell is unique.
Primates are particularly sensitive to flavors because we’ve lost the transverse lamina—a bone which separates our mouths from our noses. This allows aromas to rise from the back of our mouths into our noses enabling us and our primate cousins to sense very complex flavors.
Our sense of taste is limited to a few basic types. We have taste cells that sense sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter, although it’s not quite that simple since we have more than 30 different bitter receptors and two types for salt. We also seem to have ones that taste fat, and there might be some for starch, water, carbon dioxide, and metallic taste, and some that respond to several of these tastes.
Taste researchers categorize people as nontasters, normal tasters, and supertasters. Supertasters can have more than 10 thousand receptors, while nontasters might have fewer than 500. Females are much more likely to be supertasters than males. Asians and Africans are more likely than those of European descent. Supertasters don’t like bitterness, so prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate. They love sweets and add lots of cream and sugar to coffee, if they drink coffee at all. They want food to be mild. Both supertasters and nontasters use additional salt and sugar—supertasters to hide bitterness, nontasters to increase flavor. Nontasters prefer spicy foods, jalapeños, and atomic hot sauce.
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| © John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
The spiciness in food is not a taste. It doesn’t activate any of our taste receptors. The capsaicin in chili peppers actually activates a pain receptor that senses heat. Normally the TRPV1 receptor goes off at temperatures of 104º Fahrenheit (40º C) or higher, but capsaicin lowers that to 91º F (33º C). This heat receptor is also triggered by wasabi, mustard oil, the low pH of vinegar, allicin in garlic, and by piperine in black pepper. Menthol in mint has the opposite effect by triggering the TRPM8 cold receptor.
About half the population is sensitive to bitterness, which is why many don’t like Brussels sprouts, spinach, and hops. Part of that is genetic, but bitterness is also an acquired taste. Many people learn to like it by the time they’re adults, which is why more children than adults are repulsed by it, although you can train many kids to like it by pairing it with something they like, such as broccoli and cheese. Also, you can overcome a dislike of bitterness by adding a touch of sugar or a lot of fat. People who find coffee bitter will still go for mochaccinos or lattes.[1] And while almost all animals dislike sour tastes, humans and pigs are rare exceptions.
It’s apparent that we all like different things, so many of us have probably figured out that our senses of taste, smell, and flavor differ. This is most obvious when it comes to the “king of fruits”, the durian (Durio zibethinus). Greatly prized by many people, particularly in Southeast Asia, those who love it talk of its creamy texture and exquisite custard-like flavor. But to many other people it tastes like a mixture of rotten onions, spoiled meat, garbage, and old sweat socks, with a subtle hint of sewage. The smell is so strong that in some countries it’s illegal to have it in certain public places, transportation, and hotels. It even causes divorces, as the smell is so powerful you can’t wash it off.
To me it tastes like slightly fruity custard. It has a slightly oniony smell, but that didn’t come through in the taste. I suspect the smell gets stronger as the fruit ripens. My wife thought it smelled like fruit that was going bad and she thought Vietnamese durian sweet cakes smelled like garbage. I ended up eating three-quarters of a pound of the fruit in one sitting, since I couldn’t bring it indoors and had to throw the rest away. I’m not a huge fan, like some, so it’s not going to break up my marriage. I would recommend cherimoya, which to me tastes similar, but which I think will appeal to a much broader audience. Mark Twain described that as “a rare and curious luxury[...], which is deliciousness itself.”[2]
The Scots have haggis (a pudding of heart, liver, lungs, suet, and oatmeal stuffed in the sheep or calf’s stomach), Sardinia has maggot cheese (cheese infested with live maggots), the Philippines has balut (soft-boiled duck eggs containing embryos with beaks, bones, and feathers), Scandinavia has lutefisk (dried fish brined in lye until gelatinous), and Iceland has hákarl (ammonia fermented shark meat). Tastes clearly vary.
Some differences in perceptions are cultural. Taste preferences begin with the foods your mother ate while you were in the womb and evolve with what foods you’re exposed to throughout your life. The culture you live in also influences your interpretations of color. For those who were raised in Western cultures, red is usually associated with anger, danger and passion, while in China it symbolizes luck, celebration, success, and brides. In the West, black is associated with death, while in Asia, white is, and sometimes light blue.
Do You Have Good Taste?
What your mother ate while she was pregnant with you and what she fed you as a baby also influenced what tastes good to you. These are two ways babies learn what’s safe to eat. One example of this is that researchers found that for people whose mothers drank alcohol while pregnant, alcohol tasted sweeter and less bitter to them. Alcohol is a mixture of both bitter and sweet.[3] You can make that a double entendre if you like, I won’t.
But young children are naturally sensitive to bitterness, since it’s an indication that a food might be poisonous, and a small amount of something bad—which might only make an adult sick—can kill a baby. Ultrasound scans have shown fetuses grimacing when their mothers ate kale. Eventually we learn that bitter things like coffee are safe and most people—except for supertasters—grow to like them.
People do lose some sense of taste and smell as they age. Still, some 90-year-olds are more sensitive than some 20-year-olds. But the loss is selective and only affects certain smells and tastes, such as fried meats, onions, salt, and coffee. As a result of this sensory loss, some elders also lose their appetite, but this can be corrected by adding monosodium glutamate. Though MSG has received a lot of bad press, it is actually quite natural and less toxic than salt. You consume it every time you have tomatoes, cheese, and fruit juices.[4]
Actually, our own sense of taste changes throughout the day. In the morning, when our levels of the hormone leptin are low we’re more sensitive to sweet tastes than we are at night when they’re high. Caffeine also temporarily reduces your sense of sweet taste, while alcohol temporarily reduces overall flavors and smoking does it for longer. Cold temperatures deaden taste, which is why some drinks and beers are served very cold; it’s to hide their poor taste. Similarly, salt is added to many products to mask their bitterness, such as with canned tomato sauces, so those without added salt will probably taste better.
Tastes on a Plane
People often complain about airline food. Aside from the difficulties of preparing dinners for hundreds of people—some with restrictive diets—while dealing with cost restrictions, the lack of space for a preparation area, the requirement that the meals not weigh much, and the problems with refrigerating and then reheating them without a flame or a microwave, there’s also the problem that eating at high altitudes significantly alters how the food tastes, making them seem dry and flavorless.
The pressure and oxygen levels of an airline cabin are about the same as being on top of a mountain that’s one-and-a-quarter to one-and-half-miles high (2 to 2.4 km). This reduces the tastes of salt and sugar, while retaining acidic and bitter flavors. It even increases the taste of some ingredients, such as curry and lemongrass. For some people, the noise levels in an air cabin also reduce sweetness, while enhancing savory and crunchiness. Low cabin humidity—which is dryer than most deserts—dries out passengers’ nasal passages, reducing their sense of smell and flavor, and making food seem dryer. This is why airlines tend to use heavy sauces, while ramping up salt and spiciness. It’s also why tomato juice is a popular selection on planes.
Taste, like smell, is a chemical sense. Sweetness is sensed from complex particles, like sucrose and sucralose, but sour detects the hydrogen ion, H+. Amazingly, scientists in Japan and Singapore have created the sensations of taste just by applying various amounts of electricity. Japanese scientists made an electric fork which gives the taste of salt, without any salt, and chopsticks that can make salt taste one-and-a-half-times saltier, while the Singapore researchers made a cup that creates what they call virtual cocktails. Using electricity, lights, and scent, they make you think you’re drinking lemonade when you’re actually downing water. You can switch the electrodes between sweet, salty, and bitter. Their test model has three scents, and the colored lights do the rest.[5]
You’d think that color doesn’t have much of an effect, but it does. In one study found that hot chocolate tastes better in an orange or dark-cream colored cup.[6] Also yellow cans enhance the lemon flavor of drinks, while pink or red drinks taste sweeter, and coffee tastes stronger when it comes in a brown bag.
In his book Drunkard’s Walk (the title refers to mathematics and a type randomness—not alcohol), Leonard Mlodinow—a theoretical physicist and coauthor of a couple books with Stephen Hawking—effectively hosed down wine experts and their ratings system, at one point pointing how one wine guide chose a particular wine as the best of the year, while another guide chose the same wine as the worst vintage in a decade. Citing considerable research, he showed how the vagaries and variations of human taste and smell, along with our biases, render the expert opinions and ratings system practically useless for consumers.[7]
In fact, in recent years we’ve discovered that just about everything influences flavor. High-end restaurants are adjusting table shapes, weight of cutlery, and shape of plates to influence taste. Even types of music can alter flavors by up to 15 percent. Particular music can enhance sweet, sour, savory, spicy, creamy, and bitter tastes, ranging from high-pitched for sweetness to low-pitched for bitterness.[8]
Tastes are largely innate—the term scientists now use instead of “instinctive”—although our tastes are influenced by what our mothers ate while we were in the womb and we can alter our likes and dislikes, such as by learning to enjoy the bitter tastes of dark chocolate, coffee, and beer.
Smells, on the other hand, are not inherently good or bad. Those are value judgments we place on them, gained through learning and context. Just ask your dog, who probably finds all smells interesting. To illustrate how our expectations influence smells, researchers had subjects smell a mixture of chemicals that was labeled “dried vomit”, which they found repulsive. Then the researchers gave them the exact same mixture labeled “Parmesan cheese”, which they liked. Of course the subjects were stunned to find out that both were the same odor.[9]
P
eople also rate identical chocolate chip cookies and saltine crackers as tasting better when they’re labeled “new and improved” rather than “factory typical”. And they rated them as tasting much worse when labeled “consumer complaint”. This is in spite of the fact that all the cookies and crackers were exactly the same.[10] |
| Topi Pigula, CC BY-SA 4.0 (adjusted). |
Researchers at Stanford and CalTech asked subjects to rate five Cabernet Sauvignons and it was given to them with different price labels. They were actually given three wines because they were given two of the wines twice with different price labels. The subjects preferred the higher priced version of the identical wines and fMRI scans of their brains showed higher levels of pleasure with the higher price tags. Two months later the subjects returned to try five more wines, but they were given the exact same ones without price tags. This time their ratings of the duplicate wines were the same. It was the higher prices, not the wine, that increased their enjoyment.[11]
But don’t look down on wine lovers. When researchers put Coke in Pepsi bottles and Pepsi in Coke bottles, most test subjects confirmed they preferred their brand, even though what they tasted was actually the other brand.[12] This happens to everyone. We can all be fooled because there’s a lot more to flavor than how it tastes. Expectations play a big role, as it did in the vomit/cheese test.
Are you starting to get a feel for how our perceptions do not reflect reality?
Flavor Hallucinogens
We’ve seen how many things can influence flavor. What you eat can change it too. Usually this is temporary and subtle, but there are exceptions. Chewing miracle berries can radically alter your sense of taste. Not the way smoking changes and reduces flavors. The berries radically alter it. They’ve been referred to as “a hallucinogen for the taste buds” and while they’re not exactly a miracle, they are quite impressive because they make acidic things taste very sweet.
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| Miracle Berries. Stéphanie Kilgast, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. |
The berries,
Synsepalum dulcificum, themselves don’t taste like much, but once they coat your tongue, your taste is transformed for about an hour.I tried them several times with some friends back in 2009 and 2010. I recall liking lemon slices the best, as they tasted like lemon drops or lemon meringue. Raw onions were also surprisingly good. I’ve read that people have said that vinegar is like apple juice, wine becomes grape juice, goat cheese tastes like cheesecake, and straight Tabasco sauce is “hot doughnut glaze”. I tried vinegar and Tabasco, but can’t recall what they were like.
Once you try everything you have available to sample, then you start mixing things like a mad scientist into rather peculiar concoctions. I remember that potato chips with mustard were pretty tasty. I’ve also read that stirring lemon sorbet into a pint of Guinness makes it taste like a chocolate shake.
To me, the sweet taste from miracle berries doesn’t taste quite like sugar. It’s a little different and can get tiring after a while. But then my sense for things like this seems quite different from the average person. Sweeteners like aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal, and Canderel), sucralose (Splenda), saccharin (Sweet’N Low), and stevia (Truvia and PureVia) taste absolutely awful to me, so I throw away anything that contains them. So perhaps the berries will be a bit different for you.
There’s another fruit called lumbah (Curculigo latifolia) that has a similar affect, only it turns sour to sweet.[13]
Click here for the next article in this series:
[1] University of Washington, “Researchers Show That The Human Genome Is Helpless In The Face Of Chocolate”, ScienceDaily, February 5, 2001, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010205074522.htm.
[2] Mark Twain, Roughing It, Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1872.
[3] Anonymous, “Fetal exposure to alcohol blunts its bitter tang”, New Scientist, no. 2699, March 14, 2009, p. 15, and as “Fetal exposure removes alcohol’s bitter tang”, March 11, 2009, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126994-000-fetal-exposure-removes-alcohols-bitter-tang/.
[4] Jessica Hamzelou, “Lost your appetite? Umami tea can help”, New Scientist, no. 3006, January 31, 2015, p. 16, and the longer version “Is MSG a silent killer or useful flavour booster?", https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26854-is-msg-a-silent-killer-or-useful-flavour-booster/, citing Flavour, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-4-10.
[5] Reuters, “Electric Fork Tricks Taste Buds into a Salty Sensation”, April 1, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/id117456524.
And Timothy Revell, “Trick your taste buds with virtual cocktails”, New Scientist, no. 3151, November 11, 2017, p. 15, and as “Virtual cocktails hijack your senses to turn water into wine”, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2152409-virtual-cocktails-hijack-your-senses-to-turn-water-into-wine/, citing MM ’17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Multimedia Conference, https://doi.org/10.1145/3123266.3123440.
And Meriame Berboucha, “Say Goodbye To Cocktails And Hello To The Vocktail: A Virtual Cocktail”, Forbes, November 8, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/meriameberboucha/2017/11/08/say-goodbye-to-cocktails-and-hello-to-the-vocktail-a-virtual-cocktail/.
[6] Plataforma SINC, "Cup color influences the taste of hot chocolate", ScienceDaily, January 3, 2013. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130103073238.htm, citing Betina Piqueras-Fiszman and Charles Spence, "The Influence of the Color of the Cup on Consumers' Perception of a Hot Beverage", Journal of Sensory Studies, 2012; 27 (5): 324, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2012.00397.x.
[7] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.
[8] James Lloyd, “Experiment with our food” (interview with psychologist Charles Spence), BBC Focus, April 2017, pp. 90-91. Republished as James Lloyd, “The strange science of gastrophysics”, BBC Science Focus Magazine, July 3, 2019, https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-strange-science-of-gastrophysics/.
[9] Université de Montréal. “'Smelling' with our eyes: Descriptions affect odor perception.” ScienceDaily, February 11, 2014. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140211084007.htm, citing S. Manescu, J. Frasnelli, F. Lepore, J. Djordjevic, "Now You Like Me, Now You Don't: Impact of Labels on Odor Perception", Chemical Senses, 2013; 39 (2): 167, https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjt066.
And Heather Murphy, “You Will Never Smell My World the Way I Do”, New York Times, May 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/science/smell-odors-people-scientists.html.
[10] Ohio State University. "How to ruin the taste of a cookie with just two words: Negative labels influence consumer perception of food, study finds", ScienceDaily, January 26, 2022, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220126090533.htm, citing Maria T. Cotter, Morgan Whitecotton, Devin G. Peterson, and Christopher T. Simons. "The impact of applied labeling context on consumer acceptance of differently valenced products", Food Quality and Preference, 2022; 97: 104491, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2021.104491.
[11] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, citing Hilke Plassman, John O’Doherty, Baba Shia, and Antonio Rongel, “Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 22, 2008 105 (3) 1050-1054, https://www.pnas.org/content/105/3/1050, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0706929105.
[12] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, citing Mary E. Woolfolk, William Castellan, and Charles I. Brooks, “Pepsi versus Coke: Labels, Not Tastes, Prevail”, Psychological Reports, vol. 52, no. 1, February 1, 1983, pp. 185-86, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2466/pr0.1983.52.1.185, https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1983.52.1.185.
[13] James W. Kalat, Biological Psychology, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1981, p. 186.
And Ed Yong, “How the miracle fruit changes sour into sweet”, Discover Magazine, September 26, 2011, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-the-miracle-fruit-changes-sour-into-sweet, citing Koizumi, Tsuchiya, Nakajima, Ito, Terada, Shimizu-Ibuka, Briand, Asakura, Misaka, and Abe, "Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin", PNAS, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016644108.
And Patrick Farrell and Kassim Bracken, “A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue”, New York Times, May 28, 2008,
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