"Our society is obsessed with the taste of food."
- Goldstein,
2010
I think this line perfectly
describes the existence of Jane’s Kitchenette. When we were planning to
establish this blog, we barely had any arguments because we like food. We like
the sensations and perceptions associated with food. And even though the
choices of topics are limited when explaining the general idea of what’s
happening when you sense and perceive, we managed to make it possible to relate
ideas to food because as what Goldstein has said, we are obsessed with it.
As there were a lot of foods that
we like to it, there are also a bunch of misconceptions that are often linked
to food. One of the most common misconceptions is the
idea that food is only experienced inside the mouth. In other words, we only
taste them and we only use our sensation of taste to perceive it. However, we
have this concept called flavor which is closer to food than taste, touch,
smell or to any other senses. This has a dual nature and is clearly defined
as the combination of taste and smell. The concept of flavor is a clear
evidence that when it comes to food, we also use our sense of smell, not just
our sense of taste.
If you are the type of person who enjoys the pleasure of
drinking aromatic coffee then suddenly you lose your ability to smell its
aroma, you would probably feel how smell is so contributory to the enjoyment
that you feel whenever you drink the coffee. This is fairly the same to almost
all of our food experiences.
By the way, the condition of inability to smell is
called anosmia. This condition is analogous to the experience of having colds
and you cannot smell food (therefore, you cannot enjoy it as much) and you also cannot smell anything. It is more
common to older people and so they demand more MSGs in their food in order to
taste them, which is a not so safe option for anyone’s health condition.
For this entry, I shall stress the
point that flavor perception is an explosion of different receptor activations
in our olfactory and gustatory system. It was highlighted in Goldstein’s
Sensation and Perception that olfaction (smelling) and taste system both
exhibit this property of identifying stimuli and discriminating each from one
another.
For olfaction, we are completely aware of how garbage differs from how
cooking adobo smells like. We have this aversion towards bad smells and liking
for good smells. This is one demonstration of how important olfaction is.
This
is particularly significant for chefs and other cooking enthusiasts (like me).
Just from the taste of the food that is on the stove, I for example, have this
anticipation whether the food would taste good or bad. For instance in adobo, I
know it would taste good if the steam from the pot gives me the sensation of sweet
and sour flavor, somewhere between the two. Of course, color plays a role in
this situation too. But if you focused it just on your judgment of its smell,
you would make your choices whether to add more vinegar, salt, sugar or any
other spice. As for cooking rice or baking bread, you would be alarmed once it
smells terrible or when you saw that the oven releases grayish black smoke. Smell is also significant in assessing whether the food is already rotten or not.
One problem posed by the olfactory
system is the lack of specifying the exact smell of the stimulus. One of the
more intriguing facts about odors is that even though humans can discriminate
between as many as 100,000 different odors (Firestein, 2001 as cited in
Goldstein, 2010), they often find it difficult to accurately identify specific
odors. That is why I can’t describe exactly the phenomenon behind the smell of
the rice experience.
As for tasting, let us go back to
the adobo example. I think our perception of how adobo smells is close to how
we would perceive its taste. If it smells sour and sweet alternately but almost
simultaneous, it would most likely taste that way too. However, our sensation
of taste is more specific than smell. We are more able to identify the property
of sweetness, sourness and other types of taste. We have five basic classifications
for taste: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami (Goldstein, 2010). Sweet
compounds cause an automatic acceptance response and also trigger anticipatory
metabolic responses that prepares the gastrointestinal system for processing these
substances (Goldstein, 2010). For a better elucidation of this statement, let
us use the concept of “sugar rush”. We know very well that sugar tastes sweet
and sugar rush basically encompasses the hype we experience after an intake of
sweet foods. That is a good strategy for Coca-cola company in their advertisement
of their softdrinks: Share your happiness.
On the other hand, bitter compounds
have the opposite effect—they trigger automatic rejection responses to help the
organism avoid harmful substances (Goldstein, 2010). This is a good explanation
towards the taste aversion of kids to ampalaya that is much known for its bitter
taste. Generally, kids don’t like vegetables because their bodies do not
develop yet enzymes that could break down the compounds and toxins vegetables
use as a defense against herbivores. I
got that information from my Bio 1 class and I’m not sure if I still explain it
as accurately and as factual as possible. But if this statement is proven to be
true, then it could only mean that this property of vegetables plus the
specific bitter taste of ampalaya explain why kids don’t like ampalaya.
Another explanation for bitter
taste rejection is our ancestors’ experiences relating poisonous plants and
their bitter tastes. Their schemes of this relationship might have been passed
on to generation by generation making the ability or preference against bitter
taste as evolutionary.
From these examples, we will see
the significance of smell and taste in our lives not just in eating but also in
other areas. After magnifying the smell and taste aspect of this entry, I shall
not shift my focus to flavor which I said awhile ago is the closer term to
food. Before reading the chapter of Chemical Senses by Goldstein (2010), I was
a member of the bandwagon saying that our experience of flavor is a subjective
analysis of all the stimuli we received through our olfactory and gustatory
system. But researches that were conducted show that there are genetic
differences that affect people’s ability to sense the taste of certain
substances. One of the best-documented effects involves people’s ability to
taste bitter substance phenylthiocarbamide (PTC). People who can taste PTC are
described as tasters, and those who cannot are called nontasters. Recently,
additional experiments have been done with a substance called 6-n-propylthiouracil,
or PROP, which has properties similar to those of PTC (Lawless, 1980, 2001 as
cited in Goldstein, 2010). Researchers have found that about one-third of
Americans report that PROP is tasteless and two-thirds can taste it. Genetic
studies have shown that PROP and PTC tasters have specialized receptors that
are absent in nontasters (Bufe et al., 2005; Kim et al., 2003). This only means
that some people taste foods in a more intense state compare to the usual
perceived taste for that food. They are sometimes called supertasters. This
finding, however, has not been constant or agreed upon by all researches. It
only means that further studies need to be conducted so to stabilize its
foundation.
From that study, we can infer that
flavor is not just confined to our subjective preferences but also, it has its
physiological characteristics. After knowing all these things, I was just so
amazed and I tried to plot myself in an imaginary spectrum of tasters. I think
I belong to the moderate ones. That is a very ‘play safe’ behavior but from
what I notice in our family, some members prefer intense taste and others a
milder form of it. This is parallel to the ideas of hyper- and hypo-sensitivities.
Indeed, every sensation and perception we feel is not some kind of isolation
but instead an explosion.
To end this entry, I would like to
use a very short quote that summarizes the vast experience we associate whenever
we eat food. I shall explain that the description is applicable to the trio;
flavor, taste and smell.
“Eating is more than just
sustenance, it is a visceral experience that can be very satisfying or totally
disgusting.”
References:
Goldstein, E.B. (2010). Sensation and perception (8th ed). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
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