50 Fun Facts About Sense of Taste

Which popular household pets cannot taste sweetness at all because a gene for their sweet receptor is broken?

Cats cannot detect sweetness because the gene T1R2 has decayed into a non-working pseudogene. Vampire bats share the same loss.

Which West African fruit makes lemons and other sour foods taste sweet for a while after it is chewed?

Miracle berry contains miraculin, a molecule that binds to the taste buds and makes sour foods register as sweet. A European explorer saw West Africans chewing it before meals in 1725.

Which leafy herb tastes like soap to some people because of variations in an odour-receptor gene called OR6A2?

Cilantro, the leaf of the coriander plant, tastes soapy or rotten to people whose OR6A2 receptor is highly sensitive to the aldehydes in the leaves.

Which insects taste a leaf with sensors on their feet before deciding whether to lay eggs on it?

Butterflies carry contact chemoreceptors on their feet, so a female can check that a leaf will feed her caterpillars before she lays eggs on it.

Which drink is a favourite of airline passengers, perhaps because loud, pressurised cabins change how things taste?

Tomato juice is a popular order in the air, and a small study by Yan and Dando hints that cabin noise and pressure heighten the perception of savoury flavours.

Which games console has game cartridges coated in an intensely bitter chemical to stop young children swallowing them?

Nintendo Switch game cards are coated in denatonium benzoate, the bittering agent that is also added to antifreeze and to preparations that deter nail biting.

Which ice cream brand's famously big chunks arose because a co-founder who cannot detect odours craved texture?

Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen has anosmia, which flattens flavour, so he kept adding larger and larger chunks to satisfy his need for texture in food.

Which fish has taste sensors spread across its whole body, letting it taste anything it touches?

Catfish have chemoreceptors across their entire bodies, especially on the barbels around the mouth, and rely on them so heavily that their eyes are generally small.

The burn of chillies is not a taste but a signal from nerve fibres that normally report heat and what else?

Pain and temperature fibres on the tongue are what chillies set off directly, which is why spicy food feels hot rather than tasting of anything.

Which metal sweetened the wine of ancient Rome, where grape must was boiled down in pots made of it?

Lead pots gave the boiled-down syrup, called sapa, a sweet-tasting compound later known as sugar of lead. Wine was still being adulterated with it in Beethoven's day.

Which savoury fifth basic taste did the chemist Kikunae Ikeda identify in 1908 while studying kelp broth?

Umami was Ikeda's name for the taste of glutamate in stock made from kombu seaweed, which he found distinct from sweet, sour, bitter and salty.

Which seasoning, first sold in Japan in 1909 under the name Ajinomoto, was patented by the discoverer of savoury taste?

MSG, short for monosodium glutamate, went on sale as Ajinomoto, meaning essence of taste. Studies have largely failed to tie it to the headaches of so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome.

What did psychologist Linda Bartoshuk call people who taste bitterness far more intensely than most others do?

Supertasters emerged in the 1990s, when Bartoshuk's team split people who can taste a bitter test chemical into medium and intense groups. Women are more likely to be among them.

Which other sense plays the biggest role in a food's flavour, which is why a head cold makes meals bland?

Smell plays the biggest role in flavour by its retronasal route, which psychologist Paul Rozin summed up as smelling while breathing out rather than in.

Which compound gives chillies their burn in mammals but goes unfelt by the birds that spread the seeds?

Capsaicin fails to trigger the TRPV1 receptor in birds, so they eat the fruit and pass the seeds intact, whereas the molar teeth of mammals would destroy them.

Which American pharmacist gave his name to the scale that rates the heat of chillies, devised in 1912?

Wilbur Scoville had a panel of tasters sip chilli extract in sugar water at ever weaker strengths until most of them could no longer detect the heat.

Which compound from mint plants feels cool in the mouth because it triggers the body's cold-sensing receptors?

Menthol chemically triggers TRPM8, the receptor that normally responds to cold, so mint seems to chill the mouth without lowering its temperature.

Which green Japanese paste stings the nasal passages more than the tongue and is often faked with dyed horseradish?

Wasabi is so hard to cultivate in bulk that most of the paste served outside Japan is a mixture of horseradish, mustard and green colouring.

Which artificial sweetener was discovered in 1879 when chemist Constantin Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste on his hand?

Saccharin came out of coal tar research in Ira Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Fahlberg patented it on his own and grew wealthy, and Remsen called him a scoundrel.

Which fish-eating seabirds have lost the genes for tasting sweet, bitter and savoury foods, a 2015 study found?

Penguins lost three of the five basic tastes more than 20 million years ago and never regained them, the University of Michigan-led genetic study concluded.

Which bathroom product usually contains sodium lauryl sulfate, a foaming agent reported to dull sweetness for a while?

Toothpaste gets its foam from this low-cost detergent, whose muting of sweet taste is often blamed for making oranges taste harsh just after brushing.

Which Chinese spice makes the mouth tingle and go numb, an effect likened to touching a battery to the tongue?

Sichuan pepper owes its buzz to a compound called hydroxy-alpha sanshool, and paired with chilli it creates the numb-and-spicy flavour known as málà.

Which sweetener was found in the 1970s when a researcher, told to test a compound, reportedly tasted it by mistake?

Sucralose turned out to be exceptionally sweet when Shashikant Phadnis, by one account, misheard his supervisor at a London college and put the chlorinated sugar in his mouth.

Which sweetener comes from the leaves of a plant the Guaraní people of South America called sweet herb?

Stevia is about 50 to 300 times sweeter than sugar. The Swiss botanist Moisés Bertoni first described the plant in detail in 1899 while working in eastern Paraguay.

Which animal's genome revealed a broken receptor for savoury, meaty taste, a loss linked to its shift to plants?

Giant panda DNA carries two frameshift mutations in the T1R1 gene, though the loss was probably a result of the move to bamboo and not the reason for it.

Which nectar-feeding birds were shown in 2014 to taste sugar with the receptor other animals use for savoury taste?

Hummingbirds diverged from insect-eating swifts, and because birds lack the usual sweet receptor gene, their savoury receptor was adapted to detect the sugar in nectar.

Which fluid must dissolve the chemicals in food before they can reach the receptors inside a taste bud?

Saliva carries dissolved food through small openings in the surface of the tongue, called taste pores, to the receptors waiting beneath.

The red, club-shaped bumps holding taste buds on the tongue's tip and sides are named for looking like what?

Mushrooms, fungi in Latin, gave the fungiform papillae their name. The thread-like filiform papillae around them are far more numerous but hold no taste buds.

Which class of chemicals, including those in lemons and vinegar, do taste buds register as sourness?

Acids release hydrogen ions, which flow into sour-sensing taste cells through a channel called OTOP1. The same cells help the tongue to register carbonated water.

The discredited tongue map, giving each taste its own zone, grew from a 1901 paper written in which language?

German was the language of David Hänig's paper on taste thresholds. After a 1942 Harvard book replotted his graphs, tiny differences in sensitivity were misread as separate zones.

What is the medical term for a complete loss of the sense of taste, built from Greek words meaning no taste?

Ageusia in its true, total form is relatively rare. Far more patients have hypogeusia, a partial loss, or dysgeusia, in which tastes are distorted.

Which pesto ingredient can leave a bitter, metallic taste in the mouth that lingers for up to two weeks?

Pine nuts can bring on the disturbance known as pine mouth, which typically appears one to three days after they are eaten and is at its worst on the second day.

A shortage of which dietary mineral, needed for taste buds to grow and develop, can cause a loss of taste?

Zinc is bound by proteins that help taste buds to grow and develop, so a deficiency can leave a person with a weakened sense of taste and a dry mouth as well.

In which organs did researchers find bitter taste receptors in 2010 that widen the passages when triggered?

Lungs carry the same kind of bitter receptors as the tongue, and a bitter substance makes the airways relax, a response researchers believe helps to clear infections.

Which nutrient did researchers propose in 2015 as a further basic taste, suggesting the name oleogustus for it?

Fat was put forward as a sixth basic taste, but neither oleogustus nor the rival term pinguis has been widely accepted.

Which element replaces some of the sodium in most low-salt substitutes, though it can leave a bitter aftertaste?

Potassium chloride tastes salty because its ions are close in size to those of sodium, but used in higher proportions it has an aftertaste that many people find unpalatable.

Which Italian cheese is among the foods with the strongest savoury fifth taste?

Parmesan appears beside anchovies, kimchi and yeast extracts such as Marmite on lists of strongly savoury foods, which may explain why Italians grate it over so many dishes.

Which brand of crisps did Charles Spence use to show that a louder, sharper crunch makes food seem fresher?

Pringles seemed fresher or staler to volunteers as Spence changed the pitch and volume of the biting noise, research that won him an Ig Nobel Prize in 2008.

Which plant compounds in red wine, tea and unripe fruit cause the dry, puckering mouthfeel called astringency?

Tannins bind to proteins and precipitate them, and tea ranks among the main sources of them in the human diet.

Which 1985 soft drink flop followed blind taste tests in which sippers preferred a sweeter cola formula?

New Coke won the taste tests it was designed for, but market researchers later blamed its failure on them, since a sip test and a home-use test can give opposite results.

Which compound from cinchona bark flavours tonic water and serves as the reference standard for rating bitterness?

Quinine is given a bitterness index of 1, and other bitter substances are rated against it. Brucine, for example, scores 11.

Which utensils did researchers electrify to change the taste of food, winning an Ig Nobel Prize in 2023?

Chopsticks and drinking straws, both electrified, earned Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura the Ig Nobel award for nutrition.

Which drink did Gennaro Pelliccia taste for a living when his tongue was insured for £10 million in 2009?

Coffee taster Pelliccia worked for the Costa chain, and the policy on his tongue was taken out with Lloyd's of London.

Which British chef began serving a seafood dish in 2007 with an iPod playing waves and seagulls to diners?

Heston Blumenthal's Sound of the Sea arrives on a glass-topped box of real sand, with earphones wired to a small iPod tucked inside a conch shell.

Which French lawyer published The Physiology of Taste in 1825, two months before his death, after years of revisions?

Brillat-Savarin rose to the top of the French judiciary, and his book of culinary reflections has stayed in print in France ever since it first appeared.

Which cranial nerve, the seventh, carries taste signals from the front two-thirds of the tongue to the brain?

Facial nerve fibres for taste run in a branch called the chorda tympani, which passes through the middle ear on its way from the tongue.

Which Indian herb, whose Hindi name means sugar destroyer, temporarily blocks the ability to taste sweetness?

Gymnema leaves suppress the sweetness of sugar and of artificial sweeteners such as aspartame alike, and lozenges made from them reduce how much sweet food people eat.

At which American chemical company did a 1931 lab accident reveal that some people cannot taste the bitter powder PTC?

DuPont chemist Arthur Fox released a cloud of the crystals and tasted nothing, while a nearby colleague complained of the bitterness, a puzzle that set genetic studies in motion.

Which region of the brain produces taste sensations when stimulated electrically and houses the primary taste area?

Insula damage has left patients struggling to recognise tastes or judge their intensity. Its front part and the neighbouring frontal operculum make up the primary gustatory cortex.

What is the scientific term for the sense of taste, just as audition is the term for hearing?

Gustation was borrowed by scholars from the Latin gustatio, and its sibling adjective gustatory names the brain's taste cortex.