Slimy Pink Blob
It can take years to perfect a new taste. A successful flavor—a tangy citrus for gum, a zesty spice for chips—can earn millions of dollars. No wonder flavor companies guard their formulas with such care.
But what makes a flavor “good”? Why do we love some tastes and not others?
Check out your tongue in a mirror. That slimy pink blob is a great flavor-detecting tool. You have 10,000 taste buds on the insides of your cheeks and on your tongue. They can sense five different flavors. These flavors are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, which is a rich flavor, like meat or cheese.
Our power to sense flavors is a survival tool. Thousands of years ago, when people hunted and gathered food in the wild, a quick taste could tell them whether a food was edible or deadly. A bitter berry? It will kill you! That sour hunk of buffalo meat? Bleh, it’s rotten!
Yet our tongues play only a small role in how we sense flavor. Ever wonder why food tastes bland when your nose is stuffed up? It’s because your tongue is pretty lost without your nose. The tongue knows whether a food is sweet or bitter. But it takes both taste and smell to tell your brain whether that ice cream you’re eating is chocolate or vanilla.
Burst of Flavor
Flavorists know how taste works. And food companies know which tastes will sell best. How do they know? They spend big bucks to study us. They research our diets. They ask us questions. They chart our buying habits. They have found that the best-selling products “pop” in the mouth, with a burst of flavor that quickly fades, leaving the brain wanting more. Food companies know how we like most foods. They know how crunchy we like our chips. They know how thick we want our doughnut glaze. They know how to make food taste great—maybe too great.
Many of the foods we love most are the least healthy. We love chips that are full of fat and salt. We love cookies, yogurts, and drinks packed with sugar. Some experts believe food companies deliberately make foods that are almost impossible to resist. Studies show that certain textures matched with just the right flavor confuse our body’s system for knowing when we’re full. So we just keep eating. This means more money for food companies. And it means more health problems for us—like obesity or illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
Most food companies say they’re just doing their job. They make foods that taste great. Isn’t it up to us to know when we’ve had enough?
Of course it is.
Those chips we’ve been munching on? We know we need to stop. We’ve had way too many.
But they taste so good. Maybe we’ll have just a few more.