Democritus, the Greek philosopher (born 460 BCE - died 370 BCE) was the first to define the four tastes we know as sweet, sour, salty and bitter. He conjectured that the different tastes on our tongues were actually differently shaped “atoma” or “indivisible units”, creating the sensations of flavour. For example, he described sweet as round and robust atoms, sour as large and angular, salty as isosceles triangles engaging the tongue and bitter as “spherical, smooth, scalene and small” atoms. And he was pretty darn close to nailing it. Much later in the 19th century, taste buds were discovered by use of microscope, revealing their keyhole shapes by which food would fit in.
There is one more flavour, and one more taste, that wasn’t defined until glutamic acid was introduced to veal stock and dashi, a Japanese soup made from seaweed. It wasn’t sweet, sour, salty or bitter, but to the pallet it was delicious. The fifth flavour became known as “umami”, a word which means “yummy” in Japanese.
But what is the function of flavour, other than to encourage us to eat more rice pudding until we have to loosen up our superhero utility belts? Taste allows us to discern, at least in part, about the nutritional integrity on the foods we put in our mouth. Bitterness is interpreted by the brain as potentially being poisonous or otherwise bad for us. Sweetness, on the other hand, indicates a payload of calories, vitamins and minerals. Saltiness has a reassuring value, as it indicates the presence of sodium which maintains a balance of positive and negative ions and is good for the ticker.
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