Up: [[Savour]] Created: 2023-10-02 Updated: 2025-01-06 ## Factoids If you haven’t had a positive experience with a food by age 25, you probably won’t embrace it. (Rubin) Taste is the most social of the senses, we rarely dine alone. And if there’s an event of significance in any form, food is there. (Ackerman) Adults have about 10,000 taste buds grouped by theme — salt, sour, sweet, bitter, each with its own location on the tongue. (Ackerman) Our taste buds for bitter are at the back of the tongue. Poisonous things taste bitter, so having the bitter taste buds at the back of the tongue gives us the added defence of a gag reflex. (Ackerman) Taste buds wear out and are replaced every 7-10 days. But they aren’t replaced as frequently after age 45, when it takes a more intense taste to give us the same level of sensation. (Ackerman) [[Smell]] has a major impact on taste. We very often smell something before we taste it, and when something lingers in the mouth, we can smell it. (Ackerman) ## Try - Write a taste timeline of your life. What flavours do you most associate with different periods? What did you taste most often? What were your favourite or least favourite tastes? (Rubin) - Revisit a family recipe, restaurant, or ingredient that holds memories. (Rubin) - Identify something you eat or drink often and compare different varieties to sharpen your perception. (Rubin) - Try eating with your non-dominant hand. See if there’s a difference in flavour because you’ve, of necessity, slowed down and maybe savoured a bit more. (Rubin) > [!user] Sources > Gretchen Rubin, *Life in Five Senses* > Norman Farb and Zindel Segal, *Better in Every Sense* > Diane Ackerman, *A Natural History of the Senses*