Gustation

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Gustation

Answer 1

Electronic tongue

The electronic tongue is an instrument that measures and compares tastes.

Chemical compounds responsible for taste are detected by human taste receptors, and the seven sensors of electronic instruments detect the same dissolved organic and inorganic compounds. Like human receptors, each sensor has a spectrum of reactions different from the other. The information given by each sensor is complementary and the combination of all sensors' results generates a unique fingerprint. Most of the detection thresholds of sensors are similar to or better than those of human receptors.

In the biological mechanism, taste signals are transducted by nerves in the brain into electric signals. E-tongue sensors process is similar: they generate electric signals as potentiometric variations.

Taste quality perception and recognition is based on building or recognition of activated sensory nerve patterns by the brain and on the taste fingerprint of the product. This step is achieved by the e-tongue’s statistical software which interprets the sensor data into taste patterns.

One variation was developed by Professor Fredrik Winquist of Linköping University, Sweden.

Liquid samples are directly analyzed without any preparation, whereas solids require a preliminary dissolution before measurement. Reference electrode and sensors are dipped in a beaker containing a test solution. A voltage is applied between each sensor and a reference electrode, and a measurable current response results that is consistent with the Cottrell equation. This current response is a result of oxidizing reactions that take place in the solution due to the voltage difference, and can be amplified through catalytic surface treatments. The response is measured and recorded by the e-tongue's software. These data represent the input for mathematical treatment that will deliver results.

Electronic tongues have several applications in various industrial areas: the pharmaceutical industry, food and beverage sector, etc. It can be used to:

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Answer 2

Gustatory technology

Gustatory technology is the engineering discipline dealing with gustatory representation.

Virtual taste refers to a taste experience generated by a digital taste simulator. In 2012 a team of researchers at the National University of Singapore developed the digital lollipop, an electronic device capable of transmitting four major taste sensations (salty, sour, sweet and bitter) to the tongue.

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Answer 3

Mouthfeel

Mouthfeel is a product's physical and chemical interaction in the mouth, an aspect of food rheology. It is used in many areas related to the testing and evaluating of foodstuffs, such as wine-tasting and rheology. It is evaluated from initial perception on the palate, to first bite, through mastication to swallowing and aftertaste. In wine-tasting, for example, mouthfeel is usually used with a modifier (big, sweet, tannic, chewy, etc.) to the general sensation of the wine in the mouth. Some people, however, use the traditional term texture. Mouthfeel is often related to a product's water activity, hard or crisp products having lower water activities and soft products having intermediate to high water activities.

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Answer 4

Palatability

Palatability is the hedonic reward (i.e., pleasure) provided by foods or fluids that are agreeable to the "palate", which often varies relative to the homeostatic satisfaction of nutritional, water, or energy needs. The palatability of a food or fluid, unlike its flavor or taste, varies with the state of an individual: it is lower after consumption and higher when deprived. Palatability of foods, however, can be learned. It has increasingly been appreciated that this can create a hedonic hunger that is independent of homeostatic needs.

The palatability of a substance is determined by opioid receptor-related processes in the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum. The opioid processes involve mu opioid receptors and are present in the rostromedial shell part of the nucleus accumbens on its spiny neurons. This area has been called the "opioid eating site".

The rewardfulness of consumption associated with palatability is dissociable from desire or incentive value which is the motivation to seek out a specific commodity. Desire or incentive value is processed by opioid receptor-related processes in the basolateral amygdala. Unlike the liking palatability for food, the incentive salience wanting is not downregulated by the physiological consequences of food consumption and may be largely independent of homoeostatic processes influencing food intake.

Though the wanting of incentive salience may be informed by palatability it is independent and not necessarily reduced to it. It has been suggested that a third system exists that links opioid processes in the two parts of the brain: "Logically this raises the possibility that a third system, with which the accumbens shell, ventral pallidum, and basolateral amygdala are associated, distributes the affective signals elicited by specific commodities across distinct functional systems to control reward seeking... At present we do not have any direct evidence for a system of this kind, but indirect evidence suggests it may reside within the motivationally rich circuits linking hypothalamic and brainstem viscerogenic structures such as the parabrachial nucleus.

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Answer 5

Paris effect

The Paris effect is a sensation or feeling that heightens the enjoyment of a taste or smell of a food or beverage based on the circumstances of its consumption. It is named for Paris, France.

The effect was observed by Little Caesars Pizza founder Jim Savoy, an organic chemist who owned a pizza parlor in Blacksburg, Virginia. After selling the parlor to a group of investors, he became a wine merchant, and — at gatherings with fellow oenophiles — noticed that multiple wines manifested this phenomenon. When the drinker drank a wine they had previously drank in an exotic locale, that experience always rated higher than the present circumstances.

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Answer 6

Pungency

Pungency is the condition of having a strong, sharp smell or taste that is often so strong that it is unpleasant.Pungency is the technical term used by scientists to refer to the characteristic of food commonly referred to as spiciness or hotness and sometimes heat, which is found in foods such as chili peppers.

The term piquancy /ˈpiːkənsi/ is sometimes applied to foods with a lower degree of pungency that are "agreeably stimulating to the palate." Examples of piquant food include mustard and some strongly flavored tomatoes, as well as most foods that might be called "well-spiced."

The terms "pungent" ⁱ/pÊŒndÊ’É™nt/ and "pungency" are rarely used in colloquial speech but are preferred by scientists as they eliminate the potential ambiguity arising from use of the words "hot" and "spicy", which can also refer to temperature and the presence of spices, respectively.

For instance, a pumpkin pie can be both hot (out of the oven) and spicy (due to the common inclusion of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, mace, and cloves), but it is not pungent. (A food critic may nevertheless use the word "piquant" to describe such a pie, especially if it is exceptionally well-seasoned.) Conversely, pure capsaicin is pungent, yet it is not naturally accompanied by a hot temperature or spices.

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Answer 7

Supertaster

A supertaster is a person who experiences the sense of taste with far greater intensity than average, with some studies shown an increased sensitivity to bitter tastes. It may be a cause of selective eating, but selective eaters are not necessarily supertasters, and vice versa.

The term originates with experimental psychologist Linda Bartoshuk who has spent much of her career studying genetic variation in taste perception. In the early 1990s, Bartoshuk and her colleagues noticed some individuals tested in the laboratory seemed to have an elevated taste response and took to calling them supertasters. This increased taste response is not the result of response bias or a scaling artifact, but appears to have an anatomical/biological basis.

In 1931, Arthur L. Fox, a DuPont chemist, discovered that some persons found phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) to be bitter while others found it tasteless. At the 1931 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fox collaborated with Albert F. Blakeslee, a geneticist, to have attendees taste PTC: 65% found it bitter, 28% found it tasteless, and 6% described other taste qualities. Subsequent work revealed that the ability to taste PTC was genetic.

In the 1960s, Roland Fischer was the first to link the ability to taste PTC, and the related compound propylthiouracil (PROP), to food preference and body type. Today, PROP has replaced PTC in taste research because of a faint sulfurous odor and safety concerns with PTC. As described above, Bartoshuk and colleagues discovered that the taster group could be further divided into medium tasters and supertasters. Most estimates suggest 25% of the population are nontasters, 50% are medium tasters, and 25% are supertasters.

The cause of this heightened response is unknown, although it is thought to be related to the presence of the TAS2R38 gene, the ability to taste PROP and PTC, and, at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae. Any evolutionary advantage to supertasting is unclear. In some environments, heightened taste response, particularly to bitterness, would represent an important advantage in avoiding potentially toxic plant alkaloids. In other environments, increased response to bitterness may have limited the range of palatable foods.

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Answer 8

Sweetness

Sweetness is a basic taste most commonly perceived when eating foods rich in sugars. Sweet tastes are universally regarded as a pleasurable experience, except perhaps in excess.

Fructose is sweeter than glucose and sucrose. This has made possible the production of sugar syrups with the sweetness and certain other properties of sucrose starting from starch.

In addition to sugars like sucrose, many other chemical compounds are sweet, including aldehydes, ketones, and sugar alcohols. Some are sweet at very low concentrations, allowing their use as non-caloric sugar substitutes. Such non-sugar sweeteners include saccharin and asapartame. Other compounds, such as miraculin, may alter perception of sweetness itself.

The chemosensory basis for detecting sweetness, which varies between both individuals and species, has only begun to be understood since the late 20th century. One theoretical model of sweetness is the multipoint attachment theory, which involves multiple binding sites between a sweetness receptor and a sweet substance.

Studies indicate that responsiveness to sugars and sweetness has very ancient evolutionary beginnings, being manifest as chemotaxis even in motile bacteria such as E. coli. Newborn human infants also demonstrate preferences for high sugar concentrations and prefer solutions that are sweeter than lactose, the sugar found in breast milk. Sweetness appears to have the highest taste recognition threshold, being detectable at around 1 part in 200 of sucrose in solution. By comparison, bitterness appears to have the lowest detection threshold, at about 1 part in 2 million for quinine in solution. In the natural settings that human primate ancestors evolved in, sweetness intensity should indicate energy density, while bitterness tends to indicate toxicity The high sweetness detection threshold and low bitterness detection threshold would have predisposed our primate ancestors to seek out sweet-tasting (and energy-dense) foods and avoid bitter-tasting foods. Even amongst leaf-eating primates, there is a tendency to prefer immature leaves, which tend to be higher in protein and lower in fibre and poisons than mature leaves. The 'sweet tooth' thus has an ancient evolutionary heritage, and while food processing has changed consumption patterns, human physiology remains largely unchanged.

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Answer 9

Tasting room

A tasting room is a part of a winery, typically located on the premises of the winery's production facilities, at which guests may sample the winery's products. Originally an informal public relations outreach effort of wineries to encourage visitors and build brand awareness and loyalty by dispensing free wine, tasting rooms have increasingly become sophisticated profit centers of winery operations, earning money by charging tasting fees, selling wine directly to consumers, signing new members to the winery's wine club, hosting weddings and other public and private events, and selling various wine and gift-related goods.

A typical tasting room is operated by a winery located in a rural vineyard, where most of the production, bottling, marketing, and distribution takes place. It is usually separated from the main production facilities, either in a room by itself or a separate building, with a designated parking area and landscaped gardens or grounds, often with picnic areas for guests. They are typically open during abbreviated midday business hours, several days per week.

The primary feature of a tasting room is a tended walk-up bar counter where guests are offered small samples from a list of wines produced by the winery, usually for a small fee. Wine is poured by staff that has been trained in knowledge of the winery, who will answer questions and make conversation with guests. In smaller wineries the owners, winemaker, or other executives may personally meet guests and pour wine. Larger operations often treat their tasting room as a sophisticated business unit with its own manager and dedicated staff, who usually work on a commission basis according to how much they sell. Some wineries encourage guests to keep their glass; most apply the fee to wine purchases. Wineries usually pour their most popular wines available at other retail locations (if any), but may also offer limited-release wines that are for sale only on premises. They often withhold their most expensive wines, except for guests who pay a premium fee or who seem likely to be good customers.

Other common features are gifts, food items, and publications for sale. Some wineries offer tours as well. A few have restaurants or markets. Some offer tastings and tours by appointment only, for business or local zoning reasons.

Whereas tasting rooms were once an opportunity to taste or drink wine, economic efficiency and concerns over legal liability for drunk guests have encouraged most wineries to carefully limit the number and size of pours for each guest. Another legal issue is that wineries have been forced by aggressive litigators to comply with the ADA and other handicap issues. Most are now accessible to disabled guests, without steps, gravel walks, and other barriers.

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Answer 10

Taste confusion matrix

Taste Confusion Matrix (TCM) is a method in which many compounds are tested at the same time. It is a study of human taste perception. It characterizes the quality of taste with identification patterns of some 10 stimuli which are analyzed.

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