In this respect, choices are highly subjective: even the number of basic tastes varies over time and across cultures. Today we recognise four – bitter, sweet, salty, sour – but for Aristotle there were two, according to the eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus there were nine, while for the Japanese there are five (the four "western" ones plus the savoury). Some people inherit the inability to perceive certain nuances of taste; others, by contrast – according to research carried out by American scholar Linda Bartoshuk of Yale University – have around twice as many taste buds as the average human being: for them, any food with a slightly bitter aftertaste (broccoli, but also chocolate) is intolerable. A skilled gourmet is usually described as having a "refined palate", yet in reality it is above all the tongue that enables us to analyse the stimuli coming from different flavours. It is here, in fact, that most of the taste cells (buds) are found, grouped into papillae, although there are others in the palate, the pharynx and the larynx: in total, we have around half a million receptors, gathered into 7,000–8,000 buds. As a general rule, the tip of the tongue detects sweet flavours most accurately, the lateral areas detect salty ones, and the base detects bitter. It is the taste cells that transmit, via the nerves, flavour impulses to the brain, where they are processed and interpreted according to their position on the tongue. The perceptions we derive from them, however, are at least partly subjective, and can vary not only as the years go by – children's tastes are very different from those of adults – but also with experience.

Abigaille Barneschi