The Experience of Flavor

By -
I found Dr. Herz's lecture to be fascinating from start to finish. I was particularly intrigued by the experience of smell and taste, as demonstrated by the jelly bean experiment. I was shocked by my inability to label the flavor of the jelly bean without smell. Now, I have experienced this phenomena before with head colds, but the instant wave of a named flavor that hit me when I released my nose was much more powerful than I expected. This got me thinking about the experience of flavor as a whole, and I started thinking about when people stop and appreciate the complexity of it. And I thought of wine tastings. According to 'A Sensory Users Manual', there are four elements to flavor, two more than Dr. Herz addressed. These are smell and taste, but also texture and sight. I agree that smell and taste are the most essential pieces, but there is some truth that the texture and appearance of the food/wine affects our experience. The feeling of a wine, like the temperature and the viscosity, plays a huge role in our detection of the different elements in it. Sight sets up an expectation of flavor, what we expect to experience with our other senses. The act of tasting wine isolates each of these. First, the taster notes the appearance of the wine. Then, they pour it into the glass and swirl it, to release the smell so the taster can take a deep inhale of it. The taster follows by holding the wine in his or her mouth, noting the body of the wine, until they swallow to taste it fully. Each aspect of flavor is given its attention, so the whole experience of the smells and the tastes is given complete attention. While this process is a little excessive for day to day life, I think we should all pause and take some time to appreciate the flavor of food and drink through these four elements.


http://www.winepros.org/wine101/sensory_guide.htm

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more