HNFSC: talking taste
taste provides the base
Welcome to the start of this series on the Hierarchy of Needs for Food System Change! If you missed the intro to what this is all about and why I’m writing about it, check out this page.
This week, we’re going to chat about our first Level 1 Building Block: taste. What is it? Why is it important? Can you change your taste preferences?
The first time I had mapo tofu was an unforgettable experience. Even the most Midwestern version of it found a way to grip its claws into me and is still one of my favorite Sichuanese dishes. The first bite was uniquely bitter, citrusy, smooth and savory, but as I continued eating, this numbing and vibrating sensation started to impact my tongue and mouth. Each successive bite became a new experience, and water, tea and soda had a new bright taste dimension. Was I having an allergic reaction or was I tripping on copious quantities of silken bean curd and pork? The latter was more obvious after learning about a new ingredient for me: Sichuan peppercorn.
This isn’t the tale of a white suburban kid learning about the iconic málà spice of Sichuan. It is a tale of how taste is malleable and impacts the flavor and enjoyment of food. It is how compounds like the capsaicin from spicy peppers and hydroxy-alpha-sanshool from these Sichuan peppercorns bend the taste world by inducing nerve sensations that simulate heat or cooling, in conjunction with the five+ tastes. I liken it to a song being played on a piano rather than a rock guitar, but also in a major key instead of the minor. Sure, it might sound similar, but they’re wildly different experiences.
What is taste?
Let’s back up though – where does taste come from? We all know that your tongue is laden with taste buds, each with different types of receptor cells to detect a taste molecule. So when you eat something and begin to chew it, those molecules dissolve and bind to these receptors that are specific to a particular taste. This binding triggers a biochemical reaction within the cell and sends a signal to the gustatory cortex of the brain to say, “OH YOU GOT DESSERT, HUH?” These tastes can then start a chain reaction to impact hunger, fullness and satiety, which we may get into in a future discussion. For now, the taste sensations are generated in the following ways:
Sweet: detection of sugars and sugar alcohols
Sour: detection of acids, like citric acid in lemons, acetic acid in vinegar, or malic acid in apple cider vinegar
Salty: detection of salts (not just table salt!)
Bitter: detection of certain alkaloid compounds, like caffeine in coffee, quinine in tonic or theobromine in chocolate
Umami: detection of certain protein building blocks called amino acids, like glutamate and aspartate
Kokumi: this is a newer concept that describes the detection of certain small proteins and DNA building blocks, called nucleotides. The best way to describe this complex sensation is “heartiness” or “mouthfulness” that enhances sweet, salty and umami tastes. It’s less of a taste than a flavor booster – think a rich bone broth versus a run-of-the-mill Campbell’s canned soup.
These tastes combine with aroma signals we get through our nose and come together to produce a flavor. Taste gives us the perception of knowing whether a food is safe to eat, if it’s ripe or green, if it’s cooked or raw, and much more. My favorite understanding of taste is wrapped around bitterness because it is always instantly rejected. It has such a one-to-one relationship with whether we should eat it to the point that it could even be considered a reflex. Many poisons are bitter, which is why we would have evolved to have such a strong negative reaction to it. In the same breath though, coffee is one of the most consumed beverages on Earth and folks have found a way to attune with its bitter reality. It’s interesting how we interact with these tastes over our lifespan and what they have told us as we’ve developed as species.
How does taste change over time?
Sweet, moderately salty and savory umami tastes initially trigger our appetite as infants, while bitter and sour tastes are avoided. There is a baseline genetic predisposition to this, but as a child grows up, they are influenced by their family, friends, and society to develop and seek out all of these tastes. Unsurprisingly, your taste changes with repeated exposure to foods to increase their familiarity, and some studies have shown that you need at least eight exposures to begin that switch. Fret not! You can make yourself like foods you never thought you would!
Taste bud cells turn over throughout our life, and as we age, we can begin to lose the heightened sensation of certain flavors. Some of this can be from damage to your salivary glands, so those flavor molecules have less saliva to dissolve into, and are therefore less likely to be sensed. We begin to lose taste buds starting around 40, and the remaining ones we have can begin to shrink. This is why older folks can enjoy very intense tastes because there needs to be a larger signal coming in for the brain to notice this sensation. That’s why your grandpa might suddenly douse eggs with ketchup or hot sauce, when he would have used a bit of salt and pepper a decade earlier.
Taste, Modulation and YOU
Taste, like many of the Bare Necessities, is incredibly personal. Our thresholds for not sweet enough and too sweet are impacted by a lifetime of interactions. Sweetness has health implications as well, which we’ll talk about in our Nutrition post. Bitter compounds can actually be quite healthy, like antioxidants in leafy greens and brassicas.
How can we make foods that are interesting, balanced, pleasurable and healthy? You can change your preferences through exposure, like we chatted about earlier. Another way to do it is through taste modulation. The bitter-phobic amongst us can gain the benefits of healthy glucosinolates by blocking your ability to taste bitterness or turning up the volume on all the other tastes to push the bitterness to the background.
There are a number of ways to do this, and a laundry list of flavor and fragrance companies that want to solve this problem. They have compounds that will bind to these bitter molecules so that they’re intercepted before reaching your tastebuds. They can no longer alert your brain of this disgusting brown bean juice you decided to drink. They can also preferentially find these bitter receptors on your taste buds so that the bitter molecules can’t find a place to bind. This mechanism is almost like playing against an all-star in musical chairs. The bitter blocker always get to the seat before you, and they have no taste, but no taste is better than bitter-tasting you.
Most of us don’t have access to these companies’ bags of tricks, so there is a way to play the 5 tastes and kokumi off of one another to enhance, downplay or modulate off-tastes or preferred tastes. It’s an amalgam of rock-paper-scissors and a teeter-totter. Certain tastes balance or enhance others, and the goal is to find this right balance for the right dish.
This Taste Star is based on this link, though I’ve updated it to how I utilized flavors. The arrows can be one way or two ways and they can be black or gray to show if a certain taste tones down, or balances, a flavor, or turns up the volume by enhancing the pair. This two-dimensional plane of flavor impacts the larger matrix that makes up food via aroma, appearance and other factors we’ll touch on. You can see how classic flavor combinations emerge using this Taste Star, like the sweet/sour/saltiness of a margarita, the salty/umami of a chicken soup and bitter/sweet of a latte.
If your dish is too bitter, add more salt to it, or something sour like lemon can both brighten it with the citrus aroma and the tart citric acid. If it is too sour, you need to add sweetness in the form of honey or some other sugar. We’ll touch more on how to enhance sweet, salty and umami up with kokumi in Texture. Use this as a guide as you put together a menu for your dinner party and how to fix a dish as you taste it.
The Sichuan peppercorn, menthol from mint, and spiciness of peppers can then overlay on this Taste Star. The cooling of mint can enhance and balance sweetness and sourness. The numbing and vibratory effects of Sichuan peppercorn can enhance sour aspects and texture impact, while the spiciness can douse everything in gasoline. The fire is only extinguished by a delicate balance of sweet and sourness.
Taste is just the entrance to Flavor Town and is elemental to lasting food system change. Experiment and find out what other salts, acids, alkaloids and sweeteners you can use to push the boundaries of your dish. Let me know what you find out by emailing me howdy@polymorv.com or DMing me through Instagram. And don’t forget to subscribe to receive emails when the next post comes out!