What is Taste and Why Does Real Food Taste Good

The 5 flavor sensations are sweet, salt, bitter, sour, and umami. There is another thing going on called retronasal olfaction. This translates to back of the nose smelling. When you eat food it stimulates your smell receptors. It travels up the tube to the back of your nose to different parts of the brain. This is actually what gives food its rich taste and character. This is why when you have a cold, food has less or no flavor. We have something called post ingestive feedback. This is when we eat a food and our body takes notes on what types of nutrients are in there for future notice. Part of the way that this happens is through taste. When we test flavor, it always gets tracked back to a particular nutrient.

How Food Scientists Mimic Flavor

In the 1950s, a device called the gas chromatograph was created. This device can detect substances in minute amounts. Flavor exists in very tiny quantities in food, even parts per trillion. It volatilizes the chemicals in food, puts them in a coil. In the coil, they arrange in to their constituent parts, then you can analyze them using mass spectrometry. This allows us to know and create flavor.

Why Natural Foods are Having a Reduction in Flavor

The flavor of a food is directly tied to its nutritional content. We usually breed plants for yield and shelf life. When we stop breeding plants for nutrition and flavor, it loses the trait. Also, the soil has rapidly degraded in recent times do to modern day agricultural practices like tilling the soil. The food itself is much less nutrient dense.

Food Addiction

Food addiction tends to happen not do to hyperpalatability, but hypercraviability. We think ultra processed foods, like potato chips taste great, but pales in comparison to regeneratively raised steak. The issue with ultra processed foods is that it’s very difficult to eat just one. These foods tend to be more compulsive than delicious. One way that this occurs is with vanishing caloric density. This is a concept with ultra processed foods of which are high in calories,  but low in nutrition. Your going to be compelled to eat more because your bodies not actually getting the nutrition it needs. The thing with sugar is that it does not cause us to eat more alone. I don’t think people would want to drink sugar water. It’s really the flavors that come along with it that are pin pointed with a gas chromatograph.

How to Get Back Our Natural Palate

Avoid ultra processed foods. As I’ve said, these foods are artificially engineered to have all the flavor, but no nutrition. Also, add a wide variety of foods that hit all the flavor sensations. A lot of people are just used to hammering sweets, so their palate is not accustom to sensations that are bitter. Food will taste better when we balance our palate again. Real food is meant to be enjoyed, and great flavor is an indicator of great nutrition.