Everything you need to know about the process, the history, and the benefits
Taste might come first when we bite down on a strawberry, but something else comes soon after: the unmistakable flavor of the fruit.
Flavor is something that's hard to put into words, yet it's what makes it possible to tell the strawberry apart from a blueberry or raspberry.
Even with our eyes closed, numerous perceptions combine to bring about our experience of flavor. But is it real, or is it something our brain constructs?
Yale University neuroscientist Dana Small is open to the idea that the sound of the food could play a role in our experience of flavor.
Scientists can agree on what flavor isn't: it's not considered a standalone sense like taste. However, there is no one definition about what it actually is.
Our tongue contains specialized receptors that are in charge of the sensations involved in taste. When our experience of food becomes more complex, it's within the realm of flavor, not taste.
If that's the case, flavor is actually not inherent. Instead, similar to the way an object does not contain color (what we see is a reflection of the light that we interpret as red, yellow, blue, and more), it's our interconnected brain that is responsible for creating the experience.
Robin Dando, an associate professor of food science at Cornell University, explains: "When people say something tastes good, they usually mean its flavor is good or its sensory properties are good."
Some scientists believe flavor is only what happens in the brain, a combination of the smell and taste of food and drink.
However, Small rejects the idea that vision is integral to flavor. While the color of something might change your behavior towards eating it, it wouldn't necessarily impact the sensory experience that takes place when you eat it.
It's a fundamental misunderstanding we have about how we experience food. The physiological reality of taste doesn't touch the complexity of what creates flavor.
Even without in-depth knowledge, we know that without the ability to smell, that our experience of food becomes flatter.
There are hundreds of receptors in the layers of skin that line the nose. These receptors are also known as the olfactory epithelium. Most of how we experience flavor comes from them.
When we chew down on food with our teeth, volatile compounds are released. These chemicals evaporate into the back of the nasal cavity, at the point where the nose and mouth join.
When we eat, we exhale through our nose. This action pulls the compounds on a current of air from the nasal cavity to the olfactory epithelium of the nose.
People who lose their ability to perceive flavor describe the experience of eating as something black and white, and uninviting. But that's because of our perception of the illusory nature of flavor.
The optical illusions of childhood books are a great example of how our cognitive perception can present us with an altered reality.
How we perceive the world is typically a poor representation of what's happening in reality. We are assimilating illusions all the time, mostly without noticing.
When we watch TV, we perceive the sounds we hear as coming directly from the mouths of the people speaking. This is despite the fact that we know the sound is coming from a speaker. Our brain bridges the gap, so we experience both sensory inputs as one event.
The perception we have that flavor is experienced in the mouth is another such illusion, a trick our mind plays on us about how our body actually works.
What we think of as taste aversion is actually flavor aversion, which developed as a way to prevent us from consuming foods that contain toxins.
Bizarrely, it's a biological process that humans share with the olfactory system of the fruit fly. Because of this, the tiny insect can also help provide clues about how the human brain experiences flavor.
However, for scientific experimentalists, flavor is something even bigger. Qian Janice Wang, assistant professor of food science at Denmark’s Aarhus University, says: "I think flavor involves also vision and hearing."
In the early 2000s, scientist Gordon Shepherd made a huge discovery about smell that would change neuroscience. It led to the creation of a discipline called neurogastronomy, as Shepherd uncovered that "flavor is created by the brain."
The experience is called the oral capture illusion. This mind trickery is what gives us the ability to 'taste' our favorite flavors.
Sources: (National Geographic)
See also: Insane optical illusions that will make you wonder if you're seeing things
The capture of information from the receptors on the tongue, at the same time as the chemical information from receptors in the nose, is being processed for us in the brain as coming from the same place.
We know almost immediately, bar some notable exceptions, when something is to our taste. Perhaps it's the aroma, or maybe we prefer salty (or sweet) tastes. What happens when aroma and taste converge? We get the mysterious concept of flavor. Many of us take it for granted, but this intangible quality is something hard to pin down and even scientists don't seem to agree exactly on what it is. This begs the question: is flavor real at all? Or is it part sense, part illusion? Click on to find out.
Others say it's what happens when aroma, taste, and mouthfeel (the physical quality of the food, when the tongue touches it) come together.
Could it really be possible that the auditory experience of, for example, a crunch, plays directly into our perception of the food's flavor?
While something might 'taste' aromatic (because the sensation appears to be coming from the mouth), what's actually happening in the brain is due to smell.
Is flavor real, or just an illusion?
Could it be that the flavors we perceive is just in our heads?
FOOD Taste
We know almost immediately, bar some notable exceptions, when something is to our taste. Perhaps it's the aroma, or maybe we prefer salty (or sweet) tastes. What happens when aroma and taste converge? We get the mysterious concept of flavor. Many of us take it for granted, but this intangible quality is something hard to pin down and even scientists don't seem to agree exactly on what it is. This begs the question: is flavor real at all? Or is it part sense, part illusion? Click on to find out.