Dr. Charles Zuker

accommodates all the dietary needs of the organism.

Sweet to ensure that we get the right amount of energy.

Umami to ensure that we get proteins, another essential nutrient.

Salt, the three appetitive ones, to ensure that we maintain our electrolyte balance.

Bitter to prevent the ingestion of toxic, nauseous chemicals.

Nearly all bitter tasting, you know, things out in the wild are bad for you.

And sour, most likely to prevent the ingestion of spoil, acid, fermented foods.

And that's it.

That is the palate that we deal with.

Now, of course, there's a difference between basic taste and flavor.

Flavor is the whole experience.

Flavor is the combination of multiple tastes coming together, together with smell, with texture, with temperature,

with the look of it that gives you what you and I would call the full sensory experience.

But we scientists need to reduce the problem into its basic elements so we can begin to break it apart before we put it back together.

So when we think about the sense of taste and we try to figure out how,

These lines of information go from your tongue to your brain and how they signal and how they get integrated and how they trigger all these different behaviors.

We look at them as individual qualities.

So we give the animal sweet or we give them a bitter, we give them sour.

We avoid mixes.

Think of it as lines of information, separate lines.