Science Behind Taste: How the Brain Creates Flavor

So, pretty much what this article said was how the brain works while eating food, along with your other senses. I found it to be very interesting. Did you know that the sense of smell has a huge impact on the sense of taste? I didn't, until I read this article. Smell is for sensing the flavor of food. People don't know that because majority of people think your taste of food comes entirely from your mouth. That's wrong. Actually, "the sense of smell was the dominant sense in flavor." (Tepper, quoting Gordon M. Shepherd). Now I know that when someone asks me which sense I'd give up out of all of them, to not say smell. Because without smell you don't have taste. Also, there are really two different ways of smelling. Orthonasal (sniffing in) and retronasal (the way we smell with food in our mouths). Texture and color also have a big impact on what you eat as well. You can really be fooled by what you're eating based on the color it is. It gives us the expectation of the flavor of what we're about to eat. Also mentioned in the article is how you can fool experienced wine tasters by dying white wine red.
The article, actually it was more of an interview with Gordon M. Shepherd about his new book, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters. The author, Hannah Tepper, set up the article as more of a question and answer session, with the question in bold and Shepherd's answer following. I found that it made the article easier to read and you knew exactly what you were going to read about based on the question. The article was filled with lots of unknown fun facts. At least that's why I found it interesting. I feel like the author didn't really have a thesis; she was mainly writing this article to inform readers about things they may not have known about smell and taste and how the brain works with all of this.






Article: The Science of Taste by Hannah Tepper