To understand the experience of eating, one step is to define the components that go into that experience. Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s description of flavor in The Flavor Bible
FLAVOR = TASTE + MOUTHFEEL + AROMA + “THE X FACTOR”
Taste = What is perceived by the taste buds
Mouthfeel – What is perceived by the rest of the mouth
Aroma = What is perceived by the nose
“The X Factor” = What is perceived by the other senses — plus the heart, mind, and spirit
Scientific detail on each will follow in future posts, but the basics (summarized from The Flavor Bible
Taste happens in the mouth, primarily on the tongue. The taste buds have 5 kinds of sensors (called receptors) which sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory).
Mouthfeel happens in the mouth. Exactly as the name implies, it’s feeling (or touching) with our mouths, just like we feel with our hands, feet, etc. The sensation include temperature, texture, piquancy (or spicyness), and astringency (causing puckering).
Aroma happens in the nose. The “scent” of food travels up through the nasal cavity to the nose. The nose has about 350 kinds of receptors that detect different odarant molecules. Without smell, you only get sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami and all the rest of the delicious “chemical” details, are sensed by these receptors.
‘The X Factor’ happens everywhere else. It is our internal state of mind when eating (happy, starving, exhausted), how the dish looks (disgusting, tasty, ridiculous), the people around us, what memories the food inpires, etc. ‘The X Factor’ is why on a sunny day after a pick-up soccer game at summer camp, a warm and soggy thin ham and American cheese sandwich can taste incredible.
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I’d say “duration of taste” can also affect taste in the moment.
Have you noticed that eating food you have slaved over a stove to make can sometimes end up tasting bland? If I’ve have had a nose in a pot or pan for too long i can’t smell the food in a new and exciting way when I’m eating it.
Not sure how this compares to vision, where the brain has little tricks to prevent things from disappearing and improvisations for objects in the periphery.
Probably more precisely “duration of aroma” – the smell fades over time. Other examples of this phenomenon are driving past cow farms (eww to used to it in a few minutes) and stepping out of the room in which you’re cooking and returning to it (which is always such a delight – makes me wonder how much better cooking would be if we remained conscious of the aroma the whole time).
So now I’m curious how this fading perception of smell happens. Eventually I’ll post about the olfactory (smell/aroma) system in detail but broadly, we’ve got a system that allows you to perceive very low concentrations of odors new to the environment that is simultaneously detecting but giving less weight to your perception of odors you’ve detected for the past few minutes. From an engineering standpoint it’s a pretty cool system, and some interesting differences from vision – with vision if you’ve been effectively ignoring objects in your visual field you can actively shift your attention to them. With olfaction, to smell something that’s faded, you have to get away from it and then return.
Thinking about all this makes me want to be a food performance artist / molecular gastronomist. I lack a certain required artistic flair though.
That is really intriguing. It provided me a number of ideas and I’ll be writing them on my blog eventually. I’m bookmarking your website and I’ll be back. Thank you again!