Food that is appealing to the eyes and nose

How many of you would consider yourselves “picky eaters”? Your food can’t touch, or your choices of foods don’t have much variation… have you ever thought about why? I, personally, am a picky eater and I know that a major determining factor in whether I like a food or not is its smell and appearance. Now, when growing up we are taught that we shouldn’t judge how something tastes based on how it looks, but now, after doing research, I’ve learned that there is scientific reasoning behind why people let sight and smell affect taste.

To begin with, food is identifiable by sight. You can look at an orange and tell that is an orange without eating it. Although, when a particular food is unfamiliar to you, one becomes quite the skeptic. One can also identify food with smell, in most cases. As far as the other senses, neuroscientist Dana Small, explains how other sensory qualities affect taste in her article, “How Does the Way Good Looks or Its Smell Influence Taste?” What Small explains is that to our brains, taste is a combination of the taste of the food, smell, and touch in one single sensation. The cells that we have in our mouth that sense flavors such as bitter and sweet are located next to our sensory cells. These are activated when chewing or sipping and they give us the ability to identify temperature creaminess, etc. There is also a way of perceiving smell through the back of the mouth called, retronasal olfaction. In the article, Small says “Once an odor is experienced along with flavor, the two become associated; thus, smell influences taste and taste influences smell.”

Maggie Koerth-Baker also explains why smell influences taste in her article, “The Surprising Impact of Smell and Taste“. In the article, Baker mentions that while we chew we force air through our nasal passages, carrying the smell of the food along with it. Tom Finger, a professor at the University of Colorado-Denver Medical School, says “Without that interplay of taste and smell, you wouldn’t be able grasp complex flavors.” So now we can see that not only does smell and sight influence taste but smell and taste work together so we experience true sensational flavors. So value your sense of smell ladies and gentlemen, because food won’t be the same without it.