Explainer: Taste and flavor are not the same

Author: Lela Nargi / Source: Science News for Students

a photo of an assortment of lunch foods on a white background — What gives all of these foods a different flavor? For starters, each produces a different combination of tastes — information that the brain will sort through as it decides whether it likes a food (or doesn’t).

People often use the terms taste and flavor interchangeably.

Scientists do not. Flavor is a complicated mix of sensory data. Taste is just one of the senses that contributes to flavor.

Here’s how it works: As you chew, your food releases molecules that begin to dissolve in your saliva. While still in the mouth, these food molecules contact bumpy papillae (Puh-PIL-ay) on your tongue. These bumps are covered with taste buds. Openings in those taste buds, called pores, allow the tasty molecules to enter.

An illustration of five different tastes and what part of the tongue is associated with them — Five different families of taste buds contribute information on the “tastes” of a food or beverage. Most of these occur on the tongue, but often in different parts of it. Taste buds also appear elsewhere in the body, too — even in the gut.

Once inside the taste pores, those chemicals make their way to specialized cells. These cells sense tastes. Taste cells have features on the outside known as receptors. Different chemicals fit into different receptors, almost like a key into a lock. The human tongue has 25 different types of receptors to identify various chemicals that are bitter. Just a single receptor type unlocks the sense of sweetness. But that sweet receptor “has many pockets, like one of those toys that has slots you can fit a square or triangular block into,” explains Danielle Reed. She’s a geneticist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pa. Each of those slots, she explains, responds to a different type of sweet molecule. For example, some respond to natural sugars. Others respond to artificial sweeteners.

the five senses, sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing illustrated — Each of your five senses can send messages to the brain about what you’re eating or drinking. And in ways you may not realize, they all can contribute to the multi-media package we think of as “flavor.”

But those tastes sensed by the tongue are only a part of what we experience as flavor.

Think about biting down on a just-picked peach. It feels soft and warm from the sun. As its juices flow, they release odor molecules that you smell. These odors mingle with the fruit’s taste and that soft, warm feel. Together, they give you the complex sense of a sweet peach — and let you tell the difference between it and a sweet blueberry. (Or between a bitter Brussels sprout and a bitter turnip.) Flavor, then, is that…

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