A Changing Perception of Taste Perception

Previous Ingredients sections have discussed individual basic tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. But when you try to write about all of them in one article, your view of them—or to put it more precisely, your perception of taste perception—changes rather dramatically.

For starters, when I first conceived of this article several months ago, I visualized four quadrants, one for each basic taste, and off to the side, like a satellite, one for umami. Since then, I realized that my view was…