Budding Questions About Taste

Everybody talks about the taste of great food.

But hardly anyone talks about the tongue and the nose that make the tasting possible.

That's a shame. Without them, the wonderful world of cooking and eating would be flavorless, devoid of personality.

Luckily, food can be memorable and desirable, even rise to the level of celebration and sensuality.

Thanks, of course, to your tongue and your nose.

But that brings up a small mountain of questions. For instance:

What exactly are taste buds, how do they work with the nose and why do they work so differently in one person compared to another? Why do our tastes sometimes change? What do taste buds look like? If dogs have taste buds, how come they'll eat old shoes, cat litter and garbage? And while we all understand sweet, salty, sour and bitter, what is this new "umami" (or savory) taste that scientists discovered earlier this decade?

We turned to two experts at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, an independent, nonprofit research institute in Philadelphia. Leslie Stein is a science communications officer who has a doctorate in physiological psychology, and Danielle Reed is an expert in the genetics of bitter taste perception.