All in Favor of Good Flavor!

Type: Presentation

Description:
We use the word “taste” to talk about the foods we eat: “that tastes amazing/gross/like salami.” But really, our experience of food flavor comes from much more than taste! Flavor perception is the combined detection of molecules by three sensory systems: taste, smell, and chemesthesis. Through a tasty demo, visitors will learn about “retronasal olfaction” – the smelling we do while chewing food – and how much it contributes to flavor. Next, visitors can go “flavor tripping” by eating berries that contain a molecule, miraculin, that binds very strongly to our sweet taste receptors, making sour foods eaten shortly afterward taste sweet.