Okay. This may sound stupid – actually it may be stupid, I’m biased I think – but why is it that the way something smells does not always equate to how it tastes?
I think the simplest example is coffee. I LOVE the smell of coffee, but it tastes like crap.
A more recent example of this, and which has been sitting in my craw for the past week, was at a nice seafood joint my Fiancée and I frequent.
I had ordered the blackened shrimp and ribs combo (Yummy). My fiancée wanted to try some shrimp, so I gave her a piece and she smelled it.
“Smells good,” she said. She then popped it in her mouth and then almost spit it out, claiming it tasted horrible (I found it delightful smelling and tasting).
Now I’m trying to figure out why our senses of smell and taste differ so. You would think after millions of years of evolution, we’d get the synapses set up right.
What do you all think? I can’t find this topic covered in any Cecil column, or on the board.
I’m not asking why my Fiancee’s smell and taste differ from mine. I just meant to a sigular human (Take your pick – there’s lots of 'em), the smell of something doesn’t equate to the taste.
I’m not a physiologist, but I think smell and taste don’t differ nearly as much as, say, smell and touch, or smell and eyesight, or taste and hearing. Things that sound sweet don’t necessarily taste or look sweet, for example.
Taste and smell are similar in that they tell you the chemical composition of something; they are different in that they are able to sense different kinds of chemicals and work in different media — smell detects airborne chemicals, while taste detects chemicals dissolved in your saliva. (There are exceptions; you can taste some gases, for example, although I’ve never been around these gases when my tongue was dry.)
To add to Kragen Sitaker’s answer, taste involves only sweet, sour, salty, and bitter (and some people think there’s a fifth, although I can’t remember what it is). Everything else that happens in your mouth is really smell.
So when you drink coffee, the bitter taste is overpowering the pleasant smell (your brain perceives it more intensely).
In the shrimp example, your SO may have only been smelling the spices, but when she tasted it she tasted something else (perhaps a bitter spice) that didn’t bother you as much.
I have heard 2 different answers to the ‘fifth taste’, but I’m not convinced by either.[ul]1. acid. I can’t see how this differs from sour.
2. astringent. I can’t see this as a ‘taste’[/ul]
I think Cecil did a column on this fifth taste a while back. It’s worth checking the archives. I always heard the fifth taste was the taste of MSG, but that’s just my WAG.
My mistake. It wasn’t Cecil’s column, it was a mailbag answer. See also Comments on mailbag answer in which pungency, spiciness, and ‘heat’ are discussed as possible further tastes.
Which STILL doesn’t answer my question, I think, If scent and taste are so closely related, then why haven’t they moved CLOSER together as far as ‘delightful smell is same as delightful taste’. That is, why doesn’t coffee TASTE like coffee smells?
Damn, we made ourselves some opposable thumbs, how hard can an equal smell/taste equation be?
I would argue that with taste, consistency is very important as well… I love mushrooms, both raw and cooked, but if I throw a cooked mushroom in my mouth alone, the mushy/rubbery sensation im my mouth makes me want to gag. I also am usually turned off by the consistency of shrimp (although is still eat em cause i love em.)
Cool. Now we’re onto something. SOmeone who has hit the topic.
Why is the SMELL of bacon different from the TASTE of Bacon. You can all go on with your “tounge senses sweet, salt, etc…” but my question is WHY hasn’t our brain linked the two together better? Why does coffee taste much more bitter than it smells (Regardless of where you get it). Why can’t our brain tie the knot between scent and taste???) It’s all there. Even if it’s our saliva and chemical breakdown that commands taste, why haven’t our brains linked it to the scent and adapted our scent to it? Shouldn’t, by now, coffee SMELL bitter to me since it TASTES bitter?
Is my question making any sense? AGGHH! This thing is eating away at my brain… And it smells like honeysuckle!
On the other hand, mild tastes can enhance the meal. Fruits taste good because they are sweet and a little sour. Salt is a good flavor enhancer. Stuff with no smell would not attract our noses, but our tongues still get us to eat it, which is why we like to salt up bland foods.
By the way, I’ve heard tons of candidates for the “fifth taste”. Some have already been mentioned.
(1) The taste of monosodium glutamate. Mmmm … cheap Chinese. There is a specific word for this taste in Chinese and/or Japanese.
(2) The metallic taste.
(3) Spicy-hot.
(4) Acid (I too don’t know what the difference between this and sour is.)
I think that the reason why taste and smell haven’t converged is the same reason why you can’t tell the difference between salt and sugar by looking at them- different sensory modes tell you different things about the object being sensed.
Smell detects volatile molecules, while taste detects water-soluble ones. Coffee smells good because the alkaloids which make it bitter can’t travel through the air. No matter how much evolution changes your neural wiring, those alkaloids still aren’t going to be able to make it to your nose.
Speaking of the importance of saltiness, I should point out that animals need sodium, while plants need potassium. Plants are poor sources of sodium partly because they excrete it in order to decrease their nutritional value.
There’s one species of moth which gets its sodium from drinking water. Unfortunately the amount of sodium in the water is small, so the moth has to process a large amount of water in order to extract a small amount of sodium. The end result is that the moth sits at the edge of a puddle sucking up water and squirting a stream of water out its rectum, doing this for several minutes until it gets all the sodium it needs.
-Ben
