Leaving the math behind for a minute, our regular guest blogger, Joanne, takes us on a taste journey…
By Joanne Arcand
I have a son who gags whenever he eats zucchini. I must admit, it’s an acquired taste for me as well. For some reason, cold, cooked (not raw) cabbage and cold Brussel sprouts always brought out an involuntary gag reflex that drove my father to say such expressions as “you’ll sit there until you finish!”. While pondering my son and his (nature or nurture?) gag reflex, my husband is also struggling through the best way to sweeten his iced coffee without spiking his diabetic blood sugars.
With all this research I’ve been doing, I thought this concept of ‘taste’ would be a good launching point for the summer of the sweet tastes of watermelon and ice cream.
Here are a few ideas I’ve had to unlearn in the last little while:
4 different types of taste: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour.
Hooray! There are actually five different types of taste. The four we remember from Grade 8 science and a whole new one: umami. Umami (Japanese for ‘delicious’) is the name given to a savory taste. It is thought to be sensed when the taste cells (more on those later) sense a chemical called L-glutamate (The “G” in MSG). In a self serving platitude that can only come from the scientific community, umami was officially declared a taste in 1985 at (I kid you not) the first Umami International Symposium (I wonder how many there have been since). It was recognized by the majority of scientists by 2000.
Different regions on your tongue sense salty, sweet, bitter, and sour.
If you put a sweet thing on the part of your tongue that registers “bitter”, you won’t taste the sweetness.
Yep, as my youngest would tell you, zucchini tastes bitter no matter where on the tongue you put it. Blame it on a bad translation of a German research report in the 1890’s. Turns out every taste bud can register all of the tastes through the 50-100 taste cells that are in each taste bud. These taste cells have receptors on them that are keyed into one of the five tastes, but on the taste bud itself all tastes are represented.
Men have a better sense of taste than women.
While age does have a bearing on how well your sense of taste works (a fact that explains my dad’s love of both Brussel sprouts and blue cheese), your sense of taste is not dependent on your gender. There must be another reason that there are so many male chefs….
If you want something to taste sweeter, add more sugar.
Ok, this one is partly true. If you add sugar to your tea, it will taste sweeter. As anyone who has eaten chocolate covered pretzels or added salt to a brownie mixture knows; however, sometimes adding salt will do the trick making things taste sweeter without the added calories. Turns out, there is a sweetness detector in the taste buds, SGLT1, that will shepherd the glucose (part of sugar) to the sweet receptor in the closest taste cell if salt is present. If there is no salt, the glucose might hit the wrong taste cell and not get registered as ‘sweet’.
Joanne Arcand is trying to juggle her role as a math teacher with her other life as mom of twin boys. She lives in Oakville, Ontario.
