Apologies for potentially overposting here, but the comparison above, contrasting to study of visual systems, got me thinking of studies on visual system development, such as the Hubel and Wiesel kitten experiments in which early monocular deprivation led to the undeprived eye taking over brain real estate from the deprived eye but not if either bother were equally deprived or it occurred outside of a sensitive period. It helped set up the understanding of brain development as portions that are innate (experience independent), some that is experience expectant (responding to normally universally available inputs), and experience dependent (refining based on environmental variability) - but more to the point of critical and sensitive periods of development. These processes are extensively studied for vision development but sparsely for taste.
Still there are inherited difference in taste bud receptors (which are actually broadly distributed other than on tongue - elsewhere in the gut, the endocrine system, and in the brain), innate taste preferences and aversions, and development that is experience dependent and expectant, with critical and sensitive periods including in utero and learned preferences from exposure to flavors that pass through in breast milk. With some fairly typical progressions through developmental progressions, including toddler and preschooler fear of new foods and textures (neophobia).
But understanding the actual mechanisms by which those developmental processes occur is fairly zilch. Even how much is changed value (reward and aversion systems) for different tastes vs actually changed perception of them? In the auditory system we literally can hear certain types of sounds more or less well as adults based on their importance in the language(s) we are exposed to in sensitive periods of language development (one recent example); does that occur for taste to any degree as well?
(@Reply sorry if this gets beyond explaining like you are five but it is interesting to me to realize how little we know about how taste works!)