Talking of Taste

Most people agree that there are a handful of basic tastes—four or five, depending on whether you count umami, the most recent and still-contested addition, while a proposed sixth taste, kokumi, hovers on the culinary cutting edge. But the identification of fundamental tastes dates all the way back to ancient Greece, when philosophers like Plato mapped out six —bitter, sweet, salty, sour, astringent, and pungent.

With our contemporary, scientific understanding of taste perception, Plato's idea of what qualified as "fundamental" may be disputed today, but the fact that he felt inclined to distinguish the types of taste in words raises a more deep-seated question: Why bother naming tastes at all? After all, the taste bud had not yet been discovered, so there was no anatomical basis for the differentiation or identification of flavors.

The desire to lexicalize taste is universal, spanning ancient and modern tongues, although how language and taste are married varies among cultures. In most languages, words distinguish the four tastes that, since Plato's time, have been accepted as basic: salty, sweet, sour, and bitter.

"They must have important functions to be so prevalent," says Robert Erickson, a professor emeritus of psychology at Duke University who studies taste. "We love sugar, and thus need to talk about it," he points out. "Wars have been fought over salt."

The instinct to develop a means of communicating what we taste may be even more primal than our love of the ingredients responsible. Taste allowed our ancestors to identify the safety of sustenance. Pleasant tastes—salty or sweet—generally indicated safe foods, while bitter flavors signaled potential danger. However beneficial the mechanism of identifying threats was to an individual, it was even better to be able to communicate that information to preserve one's family and community.

As humans evolved, conquering their environment and domesticating their food sources, they domesticated their taste preferences in tandem, learning to enjoy flavors—bitter coffee and chocolate among them—that were once threatening. And though articulating tastes no longer serves the same primal purpose, we still communicate what we taste and even develop new words to describe taste sensations that were once indescribable.

Given our efforts to recount—often in excessive detail—what we eat, it might be reasonable to surmise that there is some secret psychophysical link between language and taste. If there is, it has not yet emerged.

A difficulty arises, in part, from the ironic impossibility of studying taste in the absence of language: How do you remove language from a subject who lives in a verbal world? And if it were possible, how could the subject then, without language, effectively communicate how the experience of taste is different without it?

Even if language provides no understanding of the nature of taste—merely the words to describe what we experience—a glossary of flavors is inevitable. "To discuss taste we necessarily have to invent a few basic words," says Erickson. "They are accepted because our language demands them, not because they are reality."

But there is evidence that by creating words for discrete tastes, we may be influencing taste itself. We boost our powers of discrimination: The tastes we define become more recognizable to us and more salient, as is the case with other sensory systems, observes Asifa Majid, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. "Not all languages have separate words for 'green' and 'blue,'" she points out, "but for speakers of languages that do make the distinction, green and blue appear more distinct. Perhaps speakers with terms for salty and sour are better able to distinguish these tastes as well."

The same line of reasoning also suggests that new tastes are inevitable—waiting to be given names as we become ever more discriminating. Once we do, we allow ourselves the ability to speak in depth and with clarity about what we taste, which is necessary in order to keep up with the constant evolution of the culinary world and our own skills of conceptualization. "We're creating new and abstract things that go beyond feeding or nourishing or even tasting," says chef and author Elizabeth Falkner. "It's a journey; there are emotions attached."

Umami, which has captivated chefs and consumers alike for the past century, was first identified in 1908, although the taste was not ascribed to glutamate until 1985. Umami embodies the evolution of taste beyond the taste buds. Often called the fifth
basic taste, its flavor is anything but basic. "It's funky," says Falkner. Think soy sauce, mushrooms, shrimp paste, true parmesan cheese.

"When you throw a new word like umami into the mix, it incorporates all of the abstract things that you can't quite put your finger on and allows you to communicate them," Falkner adds. "It's true—it's quite difficult to describe umami's brothy, sea-urchin, aged-steak flavor in a way that does it justice. But now we don't have to, it's just umami."

And what to make of kokumi, a proposed sixth taste? "Rich taste" is the exact translation from the Japanese. Some describe it as an amplifier of all tastes, some as "heartiness." Majid suggests that the growing gustatory lexicon might next spotlight fatty taste, named in many cultures. As if on cue, Purdue University scientists recently declared that it exists—and call it "oleogustus." Researchers are still trying to carve it out.

Taste as Spectator Sport

Although the culinary world is built on the ability of others to taste food, technology has given the larder a grand life in language. Blogs, books, television series, and entire cable channels are dedicated to describing the taste of stuff audiences will never savor. "The experience is not just about the moment in which you taste the food," says chef Elizabeth Falkner. "It transcends that to take you on a journey." Once communication of taste became as important as the sensory experience itself, taste moved beyond a private pleasure to become a fit subject for storytelling. Hence taste as a TV performance.

Images: Shutterstock