Quick & Dirty Research

Taste vs. Flavor

Today’s Tidbit

Taste vs. Flavor

In October’s post, a discussion of aroma and smell filled the air with andouille sausage and farm animal scents. An obvious followup is to dig around in tasting food, especially since, in writing, characters tend to share meals, nibble on mac and cheese for comfort, or feed one another strawberries in an attempt to woo a love interest. 🍓

Here’s how it all works. Your taste receptors or taste buds send information to the gustatory cortex in your brain. Specific areas are stimulated when you eat, those associated with the particular taste. We have five basic categories of taste: Salty, sweet, sour, umami (or savory), and bitter. Experiments show that if the corresponding areas of the brain are activated in surgery, you will still taste the flavors even with no food in sight. Wow!

If taste is the sense that sends sour notes through your millions of receptor cells to the gustatory cortex, where does flavor come in? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that right next door to the taste area of the brain sits the olfactory (smell) receptors. When your sense of smell combines with your sense of taste, flavor results. But wait! There’s more. Blended with that flavor is the texture of the food itself, the way it appears, how it feels in your mouth, plus what sensations and memories are evoked. Once everything involved is activated, taste and flavor become a whole experience. Taste is the sense and flavor owns the event. So we detect salt and bitter notes from our food as tastes but the way they mix and interact with each other and our bodies and memories produces their flavor.

My favorite restaurant, even after extensive travel and sampling numerous cuisines, has remained the same one for years. Le Bernardin in Manhattan. It’s not the atmosphere, though it is certainly elegant. It’s not the prices (which have their own form of elegantly high numbers). Instead, it’s the flavor of the food. When I eat there on my rare visits, I leave sated, all my taste receptors pinging, and I think about the food for weeks to come. (Does that sound weird?)

One lunchtime, I convinced my husband to go to their bar for a “snack.” After his petite portion of scallop, he could not eat the rest of the day, not because of the amount of food, but the quality, texture, flavor, and more kept his appetite satisfied (not his usual state). This can be measured by something called The Satiety Index, which identifies foods high in their ability to satisfy.

The portions at LB are small but varied. One is sated because of all the taste receptors that are activated. It’s not a big pot of beef stew, instead it’s a finely tuned mixture of goodness tucked into a tight and delightful package.

What is it about flavor that results in this feeling of satiation? When our senses engage, we can easily imagine ourselves back in our mother’s kitchen savoring a bowl of homemade soup or on our great-aunt’s farm where we sipped on fresh milk as a kid. Our brains are triggered and, though food is a necessity to keep our engine going, we derive pleasure from particular tastes and memories once they are jostled by flavor. And, of course, the same thing happens to characters in a book.

In my latest manuscript, Paige Cunningham’s Remarkable Life, Paige is injured in a crime. As she heals, her split lip stings when she eats salty foods and the memory of the crime is evoked. Her character is driven to visit a certain deli to buy a unique whitefish salad and she ends up in danger because of her craving. And her friends, the PEEPS, toast to their missing group member with a glass of her favorite vodka, in a tribute to her life.

Food, smell, aroma, taste, flavor and all the other senses combine to enrich all sorts of things in our lives. It’s natural for them to all show up in a novel too.