What is flavor?

 

What is flavor?

Taste plus smell equals flavor. We can detect five tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, sour and umami), and we can smell as many as 40 billion molecules. When they mix together in food, that can translate to more than a trillion possible flavors.

What does flavor have to do with chemistry?

Everything! We experience flavor in our brains, but it depends on taste and smell, which are chemical senses. That means we’re using our tongue and nose to sense molecules. Everything you taste—all the flavors you’ve ever experienced—are molecules.   

Can you tell how a molecule is going to taste from its structure?

We don’t have a perfect roadmap for flavor perception based on chemistry the way we do for color and sound, which are based on physics. But we do have a pretty good idea about a lot of things. For example, if you have a carbohydrate that’s not very big, there’s a good chance it’s going to be sweet. If a molecule is an acid, it’s almost definitely sour. 

Why do some plants produce seeds, roots, and bark that taste so good to humans?

We still don’t have a great idea about how to predict how a molecule smells just from its structure. We know from genetics that humans have around 400 types of smell receptors, but we’re still figuring out how they all work. We can make an educated guess about what a molecule is going to smell like, but it’s still a mystery how the brain translates signals from the smell receptors into the psychological experience of a smell or a flavor. 

Some people are using AI to analyze very large data sets to understand it. Others are taking a biology route by growing receptors in Petri dishes and seeing what kind of molecules they bind to. Some people are doing X-ray crystallography and structural studies to better understand the molecules themselves. Pretty much every area of chemistry has something useful to tell us about how flavor and smell work.