Taste: Surprising Stories and Science About Why Food Tastes Good Read Online Free Page B

want to know where our food comes from. We want to know what variety of tomato or apple we’re eating. We want to know the nameof the farmer who grew it, as well as his farming practices and ethics. When food arrives at the restaurants where we eat, we want to know how it’s handled, stored, and prepared. We want to know not only who cooked it for us, but where he went to culinary school, when he opened his first restaurant, and on what television show he first appeared.
    But the revolution shouldn’t stop there.
    It’s time that we start to understand what happens from the plate forward : as seen by our eyes, smelled by our noses, tasted and felt with our tongues, and heard with our ears. It’s time we acknowledge that merely liking or disliking a food is simple judgment. Food appreciation is something altogether different. If we want to fully experience our food from the path it takes from our plate to our fork to the rest of our body, we need to understand the physical and psychological mechanisms of what makes up taste.
    Taste happens in your mouth, but that’s only about 20 percent of the story. Food that tastes good also looks good, smells good, feels good, and sounds good. That means a lot of what we think of as taste comes through the four nontaste senses. This book will explore just how intertwined all our senses are.
     
    sensory
    adjective
    1. Of or relating to the senses
    2. Transmitting impulses from sense organs to nerve centers
    Fifteen years ago, when I was thrown into the world of food development, I wished I had a book that would teach me the most basic science behind what happens when we eat. I hope this one helps you become attuned to a world of tastes, aromas, textures, sights, and sounds—all there at every meal, free for the taking—that you didn’t even know you were missing.
Tip of Your Tongue, Tip of the Iceberg
    “You have bald spots on your tongue,” the staff told me at a testing laboratory at the University of Florida.
    At the moment of this pronouncement, my tongue was stained a brilliant royal blue. I had it smashed up against a glass microscope slide, trying to stick it out as far as it would go because I was afraid that blue saliva would run down my chin or permanently discolor my teeth. The farther I stuck it out, the less I drooled on the paper bib around my neck. The main reason I was in that ridiculous predicament was to make sure the doctoral candidate who was testing me could get a good image of my taste buds with the digital camera. As I sat in the dentist chair, I tried to hold as still as I could be expected to—with my tongue forced out, stuck to a piece of glass. Click! The enormous camera took a magnified picture and minutes later I was given the most devastating diagnosis that a professional food taster could imagine: bald spots on my tongue.
    I’m going to have to make a public confession and quit my job at America’s best food development firm, I thought to myself. I will no longer be allowed to taste food professionally, which is an important part of what I do for a living. How can this be happening?
    My bald spots were clearly the result of damage, said Linda Bartoshuk, director of the Human Research Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida and one of the world’s foremost experts on the science of taste. My heart sank further. Then Bartoshuk—spurred on by the findings inside my mouth—began to explain a bizarre taste phenomenon called the release of inhibition.
    “What makes this particularly complicated is that another area in your mouth that doesn’t have damage,” she said, “may be released from inhibition and the sensations may be more intense in that area. This overshadows your bald spots. You get the counterintuitive result of a small amount of damage actually intensifying the experience of tasting.”
    Wait. Did I hear that correctly? The damage on my tongue might make me a more acute taster than someone without barren spots? Do