Show Notes
Taste Isn't What You Think It Is Most people believe taste happens on the tongue. That idea seems obvious because food enters the mouth, the tongue recognizes flavors, and the brain decides whether something tastes good or bad. However, modern science has revealed a much more fascinating story. Taste receptors are scattered throughout the body, including the stomach, intestines, airways, pancreas, and even tissues associated with the nervous system. Consequently, what we call taste is actually part of a much larger surveillance system that helps us detect nutrients, toxins, microbes, and potential threats before they become serious problems. Before we explore those hidden taste receptors, though, we need to separate taste from smell. Most people use the words interchangeably, yet they are remarkably different systems. In fact, if you've ever had a bad cold, you've already experienced the difference firsthand.
Why Expensive Wine Tastes Like Grape Juice With a Stuffy Nose Imagine spending a fortune on a bottle of Screaming Eagle wine. A sommelier describes notes of blackberry, cedar, tobacco, leather, and dark cherry while swirling the glass dramatically. Now pinch your nose shut and take a sip. Suddenly, those elegant descriptions become much harder to appreciate, and the wine starts tasting suspiciously like grape juice. The reason is simple. Your tongue detects only a handful of basic categories: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Meanwhile, your nose identifies the thousands of aromatic compounds that make strawberries taste different from cherries or Cabernet different from Merlot. Therefore, much of what we casually call taste is actually smell working behind the scenes. Without smell, a wine tasting becomes a costly visit to a Welch's grape juice stand. This distinction matters because it helps explain why taste receptors throughout the body are not there for pleasure. Instead, they exist to gather information.
Sweet Means Calories, and Your Body Pays Attention For most of human history, finding calories was difficult. As a result, sweet flavors became associated with survival. A ripe fruit, a handful of berries, or a cache of honey represented valuable energy in a world where starvation was a constant threat. Because of that evolutionary pressure, the body developed specialized receptors to detect sweetness and rapidly prepare for incoming fuel. The story becomes even more interesting once food reaches the intestine. Sweet receptors known as TAS1R receptors help stimulate the release of incretin hormones such as GLP-1 and GIP. Consequently, eating sugar creates a different physiologic response than receiving glucose through an IV. The tongue detects sweetness, the gut begins releasing hormones, the pancreas prepares insulin, and the brain activates reward pathways. In contrast, intravenous glucose raises blood sugar, but skips much of the sensory experience that evolution spent millions of years refining. Warm apple pie and an IV bag may deliver similar sugar molecules. Nevertheless, your body treats them as entirely different events.
Umami: The Taste the Japanese Taught the World While sweet and bitter flavors are easy to recognize, umami remained poorly understood until Japanese scientists formally described it in the early twentieth century. The term refers to a savory, rich taste associated with glutamate and certain amino acids. Soy sauce, mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, broths, and many fermented foods owe much of their appeal to umami. From an evolutionary standpoint, umami serves an important purpose. Protein is essential for growth, repair, reproduction, and survival, so recognizing protein-rich foods provided a significant advantage. Consequently, the body evolved receptors specifically designed to detect those compounds. Modern scientists call them TAS1R1 and TAS1R3 receptors. Our ancestors simply recognized them as signs that dinner was likely worth pursuing. Growing up in Ketchikan, Alaska, I ha
More from Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson
With all the spices we have access to, it is amazing how bland recipes have become. I have many cookbooks, some from great chefs, television personalities, and friends. What I am always surprised by is how bland the food has become. People seem to think a bit of salt, pepper, maybe onions, and garlic provide the spices one needs. Perhaps it is because some associate spice with heat. Mostly because many have never experimented with some of those great warm spices available. A pinch of coriander, some freshly ground cumin, a little cardamom, or a touch of cinnamon can turn an ordinary dish into something remarkable. And the most astonishing part is that these spices financed voyages around the world, built cities, created fortunes, and caused people to kill one another. Without the spice trade, it is safe to say that the United States, as we know it, would be vastly different from what it is now. The money loaned to the United States, when we were a fledgling country, came from the wealthy spice merchants from what was considered one of the great hyperempires of the world, based in Amsterdam. But before we go to the birth of the United States, let me take you to the meatball.
Tea: The Drink That Built an Empire—and Helped Break One China had the tea. Britain had the appetite. John Hancock had a business to protect.
MesoAmerica and Chocolate In our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate. Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology. I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog. And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.
I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed rivers, built monuments, and created art. We have glimpses of these civilizations through stories, archaeology, and the structures they left behind, but much of their history has been lost. Imagine, we don’t even know where Cleopatra or Alexander the Great are buried, yet we know their stories. As European powers conquered Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and oral traditions were suppressed. When a language disappears, so are the stories preserved within it. Our clues come from archaeology when we uncover a monument, a building, or an ancient settlement. In the Andes, the potatoes they cultivated were not the Russets, Yukon Golds, or fingerlings you find in the store today. Different colors, shapes, and textures. Adapted to survive the elevations, temperatures, and growing conditions. Biodiversity protected their food supply against frost, disease, and changing environmental conditions. If one variety failed, another might survive. The ancient wisdom of diversity that Andean farmers developed over thousands of years was lost when the potato eventually reached Ireland.
In our series about foods that built civilization, we talked a lot about grains, from wheat to corn to rice. Today, we are taking you to the ocean, with the civilizations that salmon built. From California to the interior of Alaska, salmon, a staple, allowed people to settle into villages, develop complex social networks, art, and trade routes. Those trade routes are as large as the ones in the Mediterranean. Some tribes built communal homes and developed complex art and language. Some were Seafaring tribes with canoes up to 60 feet long that traveled across oceans. All because there was a fish that would return in large numbers to streams and rivers, reliably, predictably. So predictable, the people could build their lives around salmon runs. So much so that some built a calendar not only with lunar cycles, but also with the return of the salmon. Civilizations have always gathered around food and water. The Mediterranean connected people who grew wheat and olives, giving people time to make wine, mine copper, build ships, trade with their neighbors, and occasionally go to war with them. Asia had rice and grain near the great river systems. The reliable calories from rice and grains allowed villages to become cities and to travel by water to trade. Today we are going to my home, from the Ventura River in California to my home state of Alaska.