What Makes Food Taste So Good?

Deliciousness is the happy result of a surprising blend of factors, some of which have nothing to do with your taste buds

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Research into why we love some foods more than others points to a combination of factors that include, among other things, looks, smells, sounds and even past experiences.

Taste is not what you think. every schoolchild learns that it is one of the five senses, a partner of smell and sight and touch, a consequence of food flitting over taste buds that send important signals—sweet or bitter, nutrient or poison?—to the brain. Were it so simple. In the past decade our understanding of taste and flavor has exploded with revelations of the myriad and complex ways that food messes with our consciousness—and of all the ways that our biases filter the taste experience. Deliciousness is both ingrained and learned, both personal and universal. It is a product of all five senses (hearing included) interacting in unexpected ways, those sensory signals subject to gross revision as they are integrated by the brain into one complex, sometimes wonderful perception.

Let's start at the beginning: Food enters your mouth, meets your teeth and begins to be broken down by enzymes in your saliva. The morsel soon moves over your papillae, the few thousand bumps that line your tongue.

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