Five basics, plus your nose
How Does Taste Work?
Your tongue detects only about five things. Everything else in flavour comes from smell.
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Step 1 of 5
Taste buds detect dissolved chemicals.
Food must dissolve in saliva to be tasted at all. Receptor cells in each bud respond to particular dissolved substances.
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Step 2 of 5
There are about five basic tastes.
Hold your nose and a raw onion and an apple are hard to tell apart. Sweet, salty, sour, bitter and savoury. Everything else you think you taste is your nose contributing.
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Step 3 of 5
Each one is a survival judgement.
You are born disliking two of them, and it is not an accident Sweet means energy. Salty means needed minerals. Sour and bitter warn of spoilage and poison — which is why they are unpleasant by default.
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Step 4 of 5
The tongue map is a myth.
There is no zone for each taste. All five receptor types are spread across the whole tongue — the textbook diagram was simply wrong.
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Step 5 of 5
Flavour is mostly smell.
Chewing pushes odour up into your nose from behind. That is where the difference between strawberry and raspberry actually comes from.
Children have more taste buds than adults, which is part of why strong flavours can be overwhelming for them.
The short version
The tongue detects about five basic tastes, each with a survival purpose, and smell supplies the rest of flavour.
Try it yourself
Taste a strawberry and a raspberry with your nose held. Almost indistinguishable — both are just sweet and slightly sour.