the.com/sense of taste
Smell wearing a disguise, doing 80% of flavor's work for free.
means The sensory ability to detect basic qualities—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and savory—through receptors on the tongue, which then teams up with smell to produce what we call flavor.
from English 'taste' traces back through Old French 'taster' (to touch, test, sample) to Vulgar Latin 'taxitare,' an intensive form of Latin 'taxare' meaning to handle or assess — itself related to 'tangere,' to touch. So the word's deep root isn't about the tongue at all; it's about testing and evaluating by contact, the same root that gives us 'tax' (an assessment) and 'tactile.' Tasting, etymologically, is just another form of touching — which fits, since the tongue is doing double duty as a sensor long before 'flavor' as a concept existed.
- actual range
- only sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, maybe fat
- real culprit
- smell handles most of what you call flavor
- buds regrow
- taste cells replace themselves every week or two
- supertasters exist
- some people have double the average taste buds