The Importance of Taste (Nick Ramirez)

Taste is an incredibly important sense that we often take for granted. All humans navigate the world with so much reliance on vision, hearing, smell, and touch, but taste is not deemed as useful. It is easy to comprehend this sense as being expendable compared to the other senses, however, the sensation of gustation is incredible. It is impossible to detect the safety of ingesting some substances without taste. A few tastes set off alarms in our body and feel dangerous to consume such as soap, rotten foods, or poisonous objects (animals and plants). 

Despite the foundation of the sense of taste, different people's tastes are unique. In The Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, the uniqueness of taste's is compared to fingerprints. Multiple people could live in a very similar situation and still "no two of us taste the same plum...everyone's saliva is different distinctive, flavored by diet, whether or not they smoke, heredity, perhaps even mood," (141). A perfect illustration of taste being so different is that some people love the taste of cilantro while others taste soap when they eat the vegetable. The taste of some ingredients can be explained genetically and can be used to explain part of a unique perception of reality. Personally, I strongly dislike the taste of olives, pickles, bleu cheese, and buffalo sauce. All of those tastes are tastes that literally taste horrible to me instead of me just not preferring that taste.

In addition to taste's uniqueness, taste is a very social sense. Most events are accompanied with food for a reason. Of course, people like food so the events with food are enjoyed more, but there is a feeling of camaraderie when people share food together. Examples of camaraderie through food include: Friends and family eat together, most weddings end with a feast, some business deals take place during a meal, and people returning home after a long time are usually welcomed with food. Eating together brings people together because one is offering nourishment to another. I love eating Korean Barbecue with my friends because we cook the food together and the table being compact employs a comfortable and intimate ambiance. It is interesting that taste is a social sense like this because taste is also so unique. The numerous practices of social gatherings pairing with eating together can explain why large groups of people are identified by their taste. Personally, I value exploration of the senses, including taste, but others use groups' tastes to stereotype people and put them into a box.