Taste

Taste is the sense that lets you tell what food is like when it touches your tongue. It is one of the five main senses, along with sight, hearing, smell, and touch. Taste helps you enjoy food, and it also warns you when something might be bad to eat. Sour or bitter flavors often mean a food is spoiled or even poisonous.

Most of your sense of taste comes from tiny bumps on your tongue called taste buds. An adult human has about 2,000 to 8,000 taste buds. Most of them sit on the tongue, but a few hide on the roof of your mouth and in your throat. Each taste bud holds 50 to 100 special cells. These cells send signals to your brain when food touches them.

Scientists once thought there were only four basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Today most agree on five. The fifth taste is called umami, a savory flavor found in foods like cheese, mushrooms, and cooked meat. The word umami comes from Japanese and means "delicious taste." A Japanese scientist named Kikunae Ikeda first described it in 1908. Some researchers think there may be a sixth basic taste for fat, but the idea is still being studied.

Taste does not work alone. Most of what you call "flavor" is really smell. When you chew, tiny bits of food float up into your nose from the back of your mouth. That is why food tastes bland when you have a stuffy nose. Try this: pinch your nose shut and bite into an apple, then a raw potato. Without smell, the two feel almost the same in your mouth.

Other senses join in too. Your tongue feels whether food is hot, cold, smooth, or crunchy. Spicy peppers do not really have a taste of their own. They contain a chemical called capsaicin that triggers pain and heat sensors. Your brain then mixes pain, heat, smell, and taste together into one experience.

Taste buds do not last long. They wear out and grow back about every one to two weeks. That is why a burned tongue heals quickly. As people get older, taste buds are replaced more slowly, so flavors can seem weaker. Kids actually taste some things more strongly than adults, which is one reason many children dislike bitter foods like broccoli or coffee. Your tongue is built to be picky for a reason.